Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship

How Can I Keep from Singing – But not the Lord’s Prayer: A Cognitive Perspective on Congregational Singing and an Examination of Why the Lord’s Prayer Is Not Part of It

Kate Covington, University of Kentucky

Congregational singing has been an important component of North American worship for several hundred years. It enables people who would never think of singing outside of the shower to join their voices corporately with others as part of the gathered community in worship services. Hymns have long been a component of Christian worship and writers such as Stephen Marini have recognized how popular hymns have conveyed and even shaped religious beliefs in the United States in the last several hundred years. Congregational singing takes individuals to deeper levels of emotional expression and becomes a mechanism for expression of feeling and belief that people are not able to state with mere words. One of the best-known texts in the Christian tradition is the Lord’s Prayer, which has been a part of the Christian worship service since at least the fourth century. As a hymn, the text is found with a number of tunes but its best-known musical association in the United States is not with a hymn but a solo by Albert Malotte.

This paper will examine the enduring importance of congregational singing from a cognitive perspective. I will include factors such as the power of group singing to affect us socially, emotionally, physically and spiritually, memory and the longevity in memory for texted music, and how music and text are learned. The discussion of these factors will be supported by empirical research studies in psychological and biological sciences. I will then briefly review the place of the Lord’s Prayer in Western worship traditions and the text’s presence in North American hymnody. Finally, I will present selected examples of congregational songs with the prayer’s text, and offer reasons as to why this important text does not have a more prominent place as a musical component of corporate worship.

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Dorotea Kerr (Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil): “Music in Presbyterian churches in Brazil: renovation, innovation and conflict”

abstract pending

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Clashing Aesthetics: Understanding African-derived Sensibilities in Contemporary Christian Music in America

Johann S. Buis, Wheaton College

After the Reformation and the Enlightenment, musical practice in the Protestant church became more participatory for congregations, though the erect body remained static and the mind processed the text while singing verse by verse. Western missionaries to non-Western countries brought this mindset to places where they labored. Pentecostalism and the post folk revival of the 20th century set the body in motion in many American churches. This American church phenomenon broke with centuries-old Protestant practice as youth culture, filtered through African-American sensibilities, produced what became known as Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). Foundational elements such as spontaneous gesture, agogic expression, the circularity of repetition, and others, became embedded in the CCM worship practice without scholars examining the origin of such performance matters. This presentation is an attempt to examine the foundational wellspring in Africa of much Contemporary Christian Music in America.