Browsing by Subject "Worship"

How did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.

This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.

Since the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.

Since the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.

Background

Purpose and methods

Results

Conclusions and implications

As many theologians and pastors have pointed out, there is much fertile ground to be discovered in combining worship with intentional pastoral care and vice versa. This concept of pastoral care being integrated into worship is rooted in the theology of an incarnational God who is intimately involved with our daily lives. When we worship God, we encounter God’s presence, which is inherently full of grace, mercy, and love. There are times in our lives when this encounter is desperately needed for what we refer to as “healing.” Unlike physical healing, spiritual and mental healing often requires that which goes beyond the body, yet involves the body. Worship services can offer this.

As a pastor, I have taken vows to walk with people through life, to care for and nurture them spiritually. A large part of this responsibility is leading them in worship and helping them make sense of their lives, as well as helping them find words to express their life experiences as they commune with God.

This thesis will explore how the Protestant Church has ministered to congregants (or failed to minister to them) through two specific life experiences: miscarriage and sexual abuse. Through surveys and interviews, I will share real stories and examples of how these individuals felt cared for (or uncared for). Finally, I will offer new liturgy for worship services that might offer pastoral care to people in similar situations. Each service will include liturgy, suggested music, Scripture passages recommended for a sermon, and ideas for interactive elements that will allow people to acknowledge their feelings and stand together in community while turning to God for hope and healing.

Fundamentalist Christians loosely affiliated with Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) teach that music influences listeners’ faith and moral characters for both good and evil, expounding their views since the evangelical Worship Wars began in the 1960s over the use of popular music styles in church services. In their dichotomous moral view, good music reveals God’s nature, allowing born-again listeners to draw closer to God and witness their salvation to unbelievers, and bad music pulls listeners away from God by promoting immorality and false worship. Fundamentalists also prioritize mental engagement with music over emotional and physical responses to it because they believe that people more directly relate to God through their conscious minds and only indirectly with their bodies, as when fundamentalist musicians make music with their bodies, an activity that they believe glorifies God. Considering their discourse and practices from ethnographic and theological perspectives, I argue that these reveal a view that all musical sound is dangerous in its insistent entrance into listeners’ bodies: music is like fire—useful under control but devastating if unrestrained.

I examine the outworkings of their beliefs in three primary areas: recorded music, congregational singing (both aloud and silent as congregants practice inner singing while listening to instrumental hymn arrangements), and solo and soloistic vocal music. Musicians’ invisibility on recordings underscores how fundamentalists’ beliefs are primarily about musical sound, not performers’ movements or appearances. Robust congregational singing reflects believers’ “joy of salvation,” but their collective emotional affects are limited, and they are physically constrained to small movements that almost never bloom into something fuller. Finally, although fundamentalist leaders consider classical music and its associated performance practice to be “excellent,” even this musical style must be restrained for classically trained vocalists to minister in their churches. These arguments are based on my fieldwork and my analyses of fundamentalists’ extensive written and recorded discourse on music.

This dissertation investigates three areas where religious leaders have confronted changes in the modern world. In Chapter 2, I investigate trends in congregational worship towards more enthusiastic and contemporary styles to determine the extent to which this trend is driven by congregations adapting or congregations dying and being replaced. I find that, in contrast with the expectations of the strongest versions of population ecology theories, the overwhelming majority of change is the result of congregations themselves changing, though this varies by religious tradition. In Chapter 3, I examine which congregations were prepared to shift their worship to an online format on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that, in addition to technological know-how and financial resources, contemporary worship practices and religious tradition were strong, independent predictors of streaming and recording capabilities. This suggests that cultural factors, and not just financial or technological resources, were important in enabling an effective response to the pandemic. In Chapter 4, I study the rhetoric of evangelical opinion leaders on immigration and Islam before and after Donald Trump rose to political prominence. I find that evangelical leaders were already discussing immigration and especially Islam with frames of foreign threat even before Trump became politically relevant, and this did not meaningfully shift in the Trump era. Taken together, these studies advance knowledge of how religious leaders and institutions are continuing to interact with an ever-changing modern world.

Since the 1990s, the Pentecostal theological guild has emerged with the aim of re-envisioning all the theological subdisciplines through the distinctive Pentecostal experience. Alongside this increase in Pentecostal theological scholarship, there has been a corollary increase in Pentecostal liturgical scholarship. Reflecting the aims and ethos of its broader context in Pentecostal theology, Pentecostal liturgical scholarship has re-envisioned Pentecostal worship by retrieving the distinctive practices and theologies of the first five-ten years of Pentecostalism (ressourcement) and reconceptualizing that history through dialogue with systematic theology and other liturgical traditions (aggiornamento). However, this approach has left a critical lacuna in the scholarship: consideration of the lived reality of Pentecostal worship either in the intervening century since early Pentecostalism or in its current expression. Little of the scholarship has tried to understand the relationship between the pentecostal-charismatic rule of belief (lex credendi) and their rule of prayer (lex orandi) as actually lived by Pentecostals across time. This lacuna constitutes a grave absence of liturgical history for Pentecostalism.In response to this lacuna, the dissertation presents two historical case studies on the worship of pentecostal-charismatic organizations that emerged after the early Pentecostal period. Both organizations—the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (IHOPKC) and 24-7 Prayer—are prominent leaders in the 24/7 worship movement that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. In both case studies, the history starts by describing the theology of worship that each organization has held and how this theology shaped their respective practice of worship. Despite emerging in a similar timeframe and from a similar historical tradition, not only have both organizations appealed to different biblical motifs in understanding Christian worship but they have also approached the task of theologizing about worship in different ways. The dissertation, therefore, proceeds to uncover the deeper theological influences that placed these organizations’ worship upon different trajectories. IHOPKC’s theology of worship was built on an early Pentecostal theological method that has also incorporated later biblical ideas that arose within the 1948 Latter Rain revival. By contrast, 24-7 Prayer’s theology of worship reflected the biblical and methodological consensus that emerged in the wake of the Third Wave movement of the 1980s and its transformation of British Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity. Together, the case studies demonstrate both the diversity of pentecostal-charismatic worship and the explicit and implicit ways in which distinct theological and historical ecosystems have given shape to pentecostal-charismatic worship. The dissertation concludes that such liturgical history as was outlined in the case studies is indispensable for the work of Pentecostal liturgical theology. With particular reference to Pentecostal theologian Simon Chan, the dissertation argues how liturgical history should shape and inform Pentecostal liturgical scholarship. Ultimately, liturgical history describes the actual lived context this scholarship should serve. Thus, to theologize for this ecclesial context should necessitate its consideration as a methodological starting place.