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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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Monique Ingalls’ essay, on the “British invasion” of U.K. contemporary evangelical congregational worship songs into the U.S. market, points to how a transnational musical network provides ways for powerful individuals within the music industry to locate “authentic” religious faith. The U.K. worship music industry imagined different uses and, consequently, formats for its music than that of the American-based Christian music industry: the American-based industry modeled its songs on pop, focusing on radio-friendly short song formats; but U.K. industry modeled its music and performances on charismatic worship services that had a long and powerful emotional trajectory. As a set of U.S. Christian music industry elites traveled to the U.K. and experienced U.K. performances, they began to locate “authentic” worship in the developing U.K. style—largely through their own embodied experiences of worship. These mobile individuals laid the groundwork for the “British invasion” of the U.S. Christian music market, which led to a new genre term: “modern worship.” While Ingalls sees these industry executives as real agents, she also interprets their experiences and choices as part of an emergent discourse in which, as she aptly puts it, “religious rationales [exist] side by side, and in many ways justify, the capitalist logic within the evangelical media industry.”