Congregational Music in a Pentecostal Church

In James Clifford’s influential text, Routes (1997), he makes the point that, contrary to the entrenched belief that only the ethnographer is a traveller to faraway places, the local people and communities are also travellers. This article takes his notion as its point of departure and investigates the implications of travel within the context of my research among the members of three church congregations of coloured people in Kroonvale, South Africa, where I undertook fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. Historically, the international journeys of colonial officials, European missionaries and slaves from the Cape, along with large-scale migration of the indigenous peoples across the country’s frontiers, resulted in the encounters which gave rise to this congregational music. More recently, while the community appears static and fixed in a certain place, there is an ongoing occurrence of small journeys: mobile ministers, church members travelling between denominations, moving from place to place in and around Kroonvale and, perhaps most poignantly, the congregations’ move from the main town of Graaff-Reinet to Kroonvale as part of the implementation of the apartheid-era Group Areas Act (1950). In this article, I examine Clifford’s theories in conjunction with notions of music and place in order to argue that these short journeys have made an important contribution to the sound and style of congregational music in Kroonvale.

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Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age

10.4324/9781315573434 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Anna E. Nekola

Keyword(s):

Music Making ◽

Congregational Music

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A British Look at The Worshipbook

Theology Today ◽

10.1177/004057367403100306 ◽

1974 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 214-219

Author(s):

Erik Routley

Keyword(s):

Congregational Music ◽

Hymn Singing ◽

The Church

“Hymn-singing is more than just leaning back and shouting something you have known all your life. … Allied with that is the principle that the church should no longer be something a decent musician holds in contempt. Chorally, it isn't. … But congregational music is still largely a matter of singing ‘the old favorites.’ I'm afraid that being an ‘old favorite’ is not a theologically honorable condition.”

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Finding the Church’s Voice

10.1093/oso/9780190499631.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Monique M. Ingalls

Keyword(s):

Performance Practice ◽

Local Church ◽

Church Leaders ◽

Church Leader ◽

Worship Music ◽

Contemporary Worship ◽

Congregation Members ◽

Congregational Music ◽

And Performance

Chapter 3 provides a detailed ethnographic portrait of music in a local church congregation in which contemporary worship music serves an important—and often strategic—means of positioning. Examining the choices of congregational music repertory, style, and performance practice at St. Bartholomew’s Church, an “evangelical Episcopal” church in Nashville, Tennessee, reveals how church leaders and congregation members use music to navigate the church’s relationship with other area churches, denominational traditions, and church networks. The church’s choice of worship songs and styles constitutes what one church leader referred to as the church’s unique “voice,” in other words, its identity and position relative to other congregations and within networks. Though the church’s voice is constructed in part from broadly circulating discourses and practices within contemporary worship music, the case study of St. Bartholomew’s shows that this song repertory is also subject to imaginative reinterpretation within local church contexts.

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Singing the Congregation

10.1093/oso/9780190499631.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Monique M. Ingalls

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Theoretical Models ◽

Religious Community ◽

Religious Authority ◽

Local Churches ◽

Congregational Studies ◽

Worship Music ◽

Contemporary Worship ◽

Music Making ◽

Congregational Music

Singing the Congregation examines how contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship and argues that participatory worship-music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations (“modes of congregating”). Through ethnographic investigation of five of these modes—concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations—this book seeks to reinvigorate the analytic categories of “congregation” and “congregational music.” Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology, congregational studies, and ecclesiology, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice—in this case, the musically structured participatory activity known as “worship.” By extension, “congregational music-making” is recast as a participatory religious musical practice capable of weaving together a religious community inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a potent way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that this global religious community comprises. The unique congregations examined in each chapter include but extend far beyond local churches, revealing widespread conflicts over religious authority and far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

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