Singing Heaven Down to Earth: Spiritual Journeys, Eschatological Sounds, and Community Formation in Evangelical Conference Worship

Communitas, Worship, and Music: Using Music to Revitalize the Post-Modern Church

“…The songs of their journey become an expansion of their individual pilgrimage stories that impact both the temporary community of their pilgrimage and their communities back home. Whereas ethnomusicologists have historically focused on the role of music as mediator between sacred space and physical space (Ingalls 2011), this limited focus fails to recognize the role of music and ritual in the overall pilgrimage experience (Bohlman 2001). Anthropologist Simon Coleman and sociologist Martyn Percy expanded the understanding of pilgrimage beyond its original physical nature to include the possibility of a metaphorical journey.…”

“…Music's role on pilgrimage may be understood as a practice that informs the pilgrims' outlook throughout the journey and at the conclusion of their pilgrimage. Monique Ingalls suggested that "the 'sacred center' of post-modern pilgrimage comprises not specific places or physical objects, but rather portable practices and discourses intended to be 'transferable' back into more localized ecclesial contexts" (Ingalls 2011). The portable practices of post-modern pilgrimage, combined with the disconnection of pilgrimage from its spiritual moorings, has opened the discipline to individuals identifying as "spiritual but not religious" which could suggest the benefit of its reclamation by the 21st-century church (Lipka and Gecewicz 2017;Taylor 2022).…”

“…As more pilgrims have traveled, more stories, practices, and experiences of their journeys have impacted their home communities. This has led to a greater focus on the ways in which pilgrimage might engage entire religious communities, reaching beyond the early focus on pilgrimage sites alone and the later attention to the motivations of individual pilgrims (Ingalls 2011). Whereas rituals along the pilgrimage journey might, at times, mimic or preserve the values of a pilgrim's home community, it is the liminal moments shared together on the journey that are full of creative and inventive possibilities (Kubicki 1999).…”

From Hipster to Hillbilly: Death, Bluegrass, and Gospel According to David Crowder

“…Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls has noted the ways that music at the Passion Conference invokes two interrelated communities that expand beyond the boundaries of the events themselves. 36 She uses Benedict Anderson's notion of an imagined community to describe the ways in which the Passion crowd can be expanded to include geographically disparate believers connected through the power of Passion's media network. 37 But in addition to this imagined community, there is also an "imaginary" community of all believers: past, present, and future.…”

Music, Branding and the Hegemonic Prosumption of Values of an Evangelical Growth Church

“…In both cases, the brand becomes cultural material with which participants shape, generate, express, and understand "personal" values. This hegemonic branding effect is important to growth churches, especially those transnational organizations that operate in myriad local contexts, because churches within the larger "Body of Christ" -that is, the mediated global Christian community posited by evangelical Christianity -hold a wide range of idiosyncratic and sometimes competing values (see Ingalls 2011). …”