Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age by Nekola, Anna E.; Wagner, Tom;

Short description:

This multidisciplinary anthology approaches congregational music as media in the widest sense - as a multivalent communication action with technological, commercial, political, ideological and theological implications, where processes of mediated communication produce shared worlds and beliefs. The authors break important new ground in understanding the ways that music, media and religious belief and praxis become ’lived theology’ in our media age, revealing the rich and diverse ways that people are living, experiencing, and negotiating faith and community through music.

Long description:

Congregational music can be an act of praise, a vehicle for theology, an action of embodied community, as well as a means to a divine encounter. This multidisciplinary anthology approaches congregational music as media in the widest sense - as a multivalent communication action with technological, commercial, political, ideological and theological implications, where processes of mediated communication produce shared worlds and beliefs. Bringing together a range of voices, promoting dialogue across a range of disciplines, each author approaches the topic of congregational music from his or her own perspective, facilitating cross-disciplinary connections while also showcasing a diversity of outlooks on the roles that music and media play in Christian experience. The authors break important new ground in understanding the ways that music, media and religious belief and praxis become ’lived theology’ in our media age, revealing the rich and diverse ways that people are living, experiencing and negotiating faith and community through music.

’A valuable collection that throws new light on how new media technologies are interacting with the practices of Christian music-making, music-leadership and music-participation in congregational settings. It provides significant insights also into how these wider processes of cultural mediation taken up in congregational music are provoking a wider re-thinking and re-formation of Christian communities, beliefs and identity.’ Peter Horsfield, RMIT University, Australia ’Huge changes have occurred in Christian worship in the last fifty years. In the study of new and contemporary forms of worship, where would we be without the musicologists? Offering penetrating studies of contemporary changes, this volume is another welcome addition contributing to the study of Christian worship.’ Lester Ruth, Duke University, USA

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Worship Music as Media Form and Mediated Practice: Theorizing the Intersections of Media, Music and Lived Religion

Part 1. Technology, Place and Practice

1. Music as a Mediated Object, Music as a Medium: Towards a Media Ecological View of Congregational Music

2. Music, Ritual and Media in Charismatic Religious Experience in Ghana

3. Panoptic or Pastoral Gaze? The Worship Leader in the New Media Environment

4. Who Gets to Sing in the Kingdom?

Part 2. Community Creation

5. ‘This is a Chance to Come Together’: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival

6. ‘Through Every Land, By Every Tongue’: Diasporic and National Consciousness Among a Transnational Community of Sacred Harp Singers

7. YouTube: The New Mediator of Christian Community

8. Belonging, Integration and Tradition: Mediating Romani Identity Through Pentecostal Praise & Worship Music

Part 3. Embodied Sonic Theologies

9. On the Inherent Contradiction in Worship Music

10. ‘Yet to Come’ or ‘Still to Be Done’?: Evangelical Worship and the Power of ‘Prophetic’ Songs

11. Happiness and Music: Salvific Practice in a Feelgood Age

12. The Dance + Pray Worship Experience in Finland: Negotiating the Transcendent and Transgressive in Search of Alternative Sensational Forms and Affective Space

Afterword: Of Animatrons and Eschatology: Congregational Music, Mediation and World-Making