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This week we continue working our down the eight-part list one church suggests people will encounter when they visit. The focus is the third item on the list, “loud singing.” What does this item tell us about the church? What does it tell us about how they understand worship? And why does it follow the first two items on the list (“smiling wives” and “obedient children”)? What does that mean? Dan explores these issues in this weeks episode.
Church bulletin photo
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Hello and, as always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be with you.
Recording these really is one of the high points of my week.
The only thing that would make it better is if I got to, like, kind of sit down with everybody individually and, like, have these conversations or something.
But short of that, this is one of my favorite things.
So thank you for joining me.
Thank you for supporting us in all the ways that you do.
As always, feel free to reach out.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I am also, as some of you will have noticed, trying to make a bit more forays into our Discord, so please look for me there.
I would love to see comments there as well.
I'm hoping to start some discussions in that venue.
And if you're not a subscriber and subscribing is something you would be willing or able to do, I'd ask you to consider doing that.
We're trying to put out content all the time, continually trying to expand what we do.
You help us to do that.
Enough with that.
Enough with the, you know, begging for support and so forth.
Let's get into what we're here for today, okay?
As you know, we've been kind of working our way through this card, I guess—a little information card kind of thing—that another listener sent.
It was from the bulletin in a church, and you can access a photo of it with the episode, and you can take a look at it.
And it lists eight features that one will presumably find at the church in question, right?
Now, there's no indication on the insert about the name of the church, what kind of church it is, and so forth.
I've been kind of intentionally going blind here.
But cheating this week.
Enterprising, straight, white, American Jesus listeners have identified the church from the symbol on the card.
I'm not going to name the church or anything like that, but it is a church in the Reformed tradition in Arizona and fits a lot of the profile features that I kind of thought it did from looking at the card.
Why did I need to cheat?
Why did I need to peek at the church?
Well, we'll talk about that here in a few minutes.
But we've been decoding this card, just kind of going line by line, and we looked at the first two on the list, which were smiling wives.
That one got a lot of comments, a lot of feedback, fired some people up.
The second one was obedient children.
And going down the list, this week gives us one that doesn't seem to flow with the others.
I tied those together with notions of gender and family, and especially the role of women in the family and so forth.
We'll get to the men eventually with the issue of firm handshakes.
That was another item on the list.
But just following down the list, the next item is loud singing.
So let's dive in and see what we can do with that, because on the surface, that one, it sort of doesn't fit.
It's not clear, you know, smiling wives and then children, and then loud singing, and then we'll get to the firm handshakes, and then later we'll get to being biblical.
In other words, it seems that this card touches on things like, you know, the kind of people you'll meet at this church.
And the kind of things you'll do at this church or experience at this church, but they're kind of split up and not grouped together.
So what I want to talk about today is loud singing.
I want to take a stab at this, and to do it, one of the first things I want to do Especially for those of you who might not be familiar with this or might not come from this background, is to give an idea of the role and practice of Christian worship within conservative Protestantism.
And the first thing to know is that when you're talking about church, when you're talking about, you know, church in America or church in most places, the main Sunday morning service, the service where you see all the cars in the parking lot, the service that if people say, do you go to church, they mean, do you go to like the main Sunday morning church service?
That's what they're asking from.
That main Sunday morning service at most churches is the primary focal point in all the things that they do.
They've got other programming during the week.
They'll have other things on Sunday morning.
But the sort of center of gravity, the primary focus, typically is that Sunday morning service.
And within Protestant circles, this is often referred to as the worship service.
The Protestants will be quick to tell you that doesn't mean it's the only time or place you're supposed to be worshiping God and your worship of God should not be limited to an hour on Sunday, all of that sort of stuff.
But it's typically referred to as the worship service.
And the idea is that it is the service, you know, the primary aim of which is to render to God the worship that God has owed together as a congregation, this kind of shared experience and practice of worship.
And when Protestants refer to worship, especially in the case of theologically conservative churches, they are primarily oftentimes thinking of the music used in the worship service.
So, two big parts of the worship service often are, like, the music stuff and then the sermon.
And a pastor or somebody will tell you, that's all worship.
Everything we do in our life should be about the worship of God and so forth.
But in practice, when people say worship, they often are referring to the music and the singing in the worship service.
And this can be a really contentious issue, especially in the past.
I was thinking about this, you know, as I was prepping the notes here, and, you know, listeners of a certain age, listeners of a certain background, might be familiar with the worship wars that took place within theologically conservative churches.
I mean, they're still there, but this was a huge thing back when, like, When I was in seminary in the 2000s, 2010s, and on up.
I think it's cooled considerably since then, but this was a big deal at the time.
And within theologically conservative churches, especially those that aimed to appeal to a younger, more youthful audience, There was what we might call the worship wars.
And what are the worship wars?
Well, it refers to a set of debates that took place about whether church worship singing should involve traditional music coming from a hymn book—maybe the image lots of people have of a church, you know, sitting in a pew and opening a hymn book and maybe a piano and an organ and that sort of thing—or if the worship was going to be more quote-unquote contemporary.
Think pop or light rock if you've never been to a service that features this.
led by often a worship team, not just an individual, and often accompanied by a band.
You're going to have a guitar, maybe drums and bass in some cases, you know, maybe other instruments as well.
And there was a lot of debate about how should we worship?
What's the proper form of worship?
And some churches, you know, about, you know, are we going to be more traditional?
Are we going to be more contemporary?
And some churches sort of sought to solve the worship war by offering a blend of contemporary, more traditional music.
Sometimes you'd have contemporary songs, which, by the way, were usually not in hymnals or in a book.
They were projected up onto a screen or something like that, and they would alternate that with more traditional hymns, or maybe they would sing some of those newer songs, but they would just use the traditional piano and vice versa.
Other churches might have multiple services.
This is a thing you can still find, where large churches that have a big enough congregation, that they have to have multiple worship services on a Sunday morning, will have maybe the first service will be listed as the traditional service, and then what they're talking about is the worship music, and the other service will be the contemporary service, meaning contemporary worship music.
So there were different ways of solving this.
Some churches just went the contemporary music route.
The church that I pastored was in that camp.
We, you know, had songs on it.
They were projected up.
It was led by a worship team.
It had some different drums, you know, so on and so forth.
And that was the model, okay?
But others had these kind of blended models.
Lots of different kinds of things.
But I would say that overall, the shift to contemporary music styles won within American evangelicalism.
And part of that just makes sense.
Back in my seminary days, back in my college days, I was the young, youthful generation of evangelicals, and we were typically pretty into the contemporary music and all of that sort of stuff.
We're all middle-aged now, so that became kind of the norm in lots of evangelical churches.
But All of this is sort of there, and this really changed the feel of these churches.
It reflected a lot about the culture of conservative American Protestantism, okay?
So, if you go to a church like this, all the music in the churches is participatory, in the sense that the congregation is supposed to sing as an expression of their worship.
But the praise and worship model tended to be a little bit more of a spectator model.
The bulk of the singing came from the praise team.
They're mic'd up so that they're louder than everybody else, and there's a sense in which they really are sort of performing for the congregation, and the congregation sort of fades into the background some.
So they were the real focus of attention in really big churches.
They might well be professionals.
It could be a professional praise team.
It could be, you know, the production value on this could be really, really high.
So the line between participation and, you know, sort of entertainment or consumption was really thin, right?
So a strong element of entertainment or kind of Audience engagement, in the way that a performer might think of it, became really central.
And you get this focus on good production and technology and so forth.
The other thing about that contemporary music, or what was known as praise and worship music, was that the songs were also simplified.
If you pull out an old church hymn, it's going to have all the musical notes.
If you know how to read music, you could play it off of the page in the hymn book.
It's also going to have traditional verses and choruses, and they're going to be numbered.
That's not how the praise and worship music worked.
It was much more simplified.
It was usually just a series of, you know, a chorus that was repeated a bunch of times, a sort of minimal material in between.
And the theology of it was really simple.
When I was in seminary, we had to do an exercise—and it was really insightful—to sort of pick out some hymns and, like, compare them to some praise and worship songs and just look at sort of The theological depth, let's say, of those—and there was no comparison.
The traditional hymns were much more sort of rigorous and theologically weighty and so forth, okay?
So, that changed the feel of a lot of conservative Protestantism in America.
And to bring all this back, when I hear this notion of loud singing, it makes me wonder, okay, like, how did the worship wars work out?
Like, what does it mean when it talks about loud singing?
Well, that brings us to the next point, okay, which is that there was also—and there has been—there was at the time, but there has been, I think, since the height of what I'm calling the Worship Wars, kind of a backlash within conservative and Protestant circles.
There was a reaction against that consumer-driven model.
There was a reaction against the oversimplified theology of the Psalms.
There was a reaction against the reduction of the congregation to observers instead of active participants.
And this backlash, I think, also corresponded with other things going on within evangelicalism.
Like, you had what were called seeker-sensitive churches—the church with the model that was really focused on being inviting to non-Christians, getting them to come in the door, introducing them to Christianity.
And you had a backlash against that, a backlash that kind of said, Church isn't for the seekers, it's for the committed, and we're not going to be seeker-sensitive.
You even had churches that were like, we're going to be seeker-insensitive, and so forth.
I think some of this backlash about music sort of corresponded with that.
So, in a move sometimes to be more authentic, to have greater theological depth, to better communicate to committed Christians, there was sometimes a reaction against this more contemporary style of music, okay?
Why do I say all of this?
Why do I tell this whole story about the worship war landscape?
It's because looking at that card, you've got Smiling Wives, number one.
Number two, you've got obedient children.
Number three, you've got loud singing.
But it's not obvious from that card where a church like this might land in the worship wars.
Again, though, to the rescue come straight white American Jesus listeners who track down what church this is, and I could not resist myself.
I went to the website, and I poked around a little bit because I was trying to get a better sense of what worship might be to them as it relates to church music, and it's really, really clear when I do that that they occupy a space in that backlash Territory.
That's where they live.
Their website has a list.
I guess this church is, like, super into lists.
Their website has a list that they call the Ten Commitments of, in the name of their church, and they've got these ten sort of principles or commitments that they and the church elders have developed.
They've got this card in the bulletin with, like, eight points, so I guess they're into lists.
But so they highlight these ten commitments that orient the church, and number four on the list is a commitment to, quote, nurturing congregational singing.
And here's what it says.
I took this straight from their website.
It says the worship leader is—notice worship leader—a single leader that already, if you kind of understand how different worship models work in different churches, that already sort of situates this in some ways.
The worship leader is responsible for enhancing the vocal abilities of the congregation rather than relying on instruments or amplified vocals that can overpower their voices.
Although we do not prohibit the use of instruments, we strongly advocate for their modest use, elevating the voices of the congregation to the glory of God." If you read that and listen to that for a minute, think about that.
You can hear those central themes of that backlash in that statement.
Instruments are secondary to the congregation singing.
I think you can hear the implicit critique of a more instrument-driven, band-driven, professional musician-centered kind of approach.
You get this clear sense that the congregation should be active participants rather than observers and consumers.
They are the ones singing.
It is their voices that should be heard in worship.
And then we get back to the theme from the card when it says in their principle, elevating the voices of the congregation to the glory of God.
Elevating the voices of the congregation.
So, when we go back to the card, when it says loud music—or, excuse me, loud singing, I should say, not loud music—it refers, in the first instance, I think, to this focus on congregational singing as a sign of a more committed, authentic form of Christian worship.
So, if I'm situating this church within the worship wars, we have this background, we run across this phrase, loud singing.
For me, what it's talking about, it sounds like, is the actual congregation—a congregational singing and a more traditional approach to worship music.
Usually, as I say, aimed at being sort of more authentic, theologically deep, and so forth.
So, I think that's the aim of this church, okay?
Regardless of a church or denomination's landing place in the worship wars, though, the place and role of worship singing in the Sunday morning service, it's basically the same within conservative Protestant churches.
The service typically starts with And, you know, often extended period of singing and music.
Like most Protestant churches, if you go into them, there may be some welcome and some things like that, maybe an opening prayer, but then there's going to be a period of time where you do a lot of singing.
And there's a sense in which the singing is kind of the warm-up act for the main event of the Sunday morning, which ever since the Protestant Reformation in Protestant churches has been the sermon given by the pastor.
And we're going to get to that later, because that figures in this card, in the eight points, and it sure figures on the website of this church.
The sermon, where the pastor offers some teaching and reflections, typically from the Bible, that's the center point of the Protestant worship service.
But the singing is like the warm-up act for that.
Okay.
The singing is there to get the congregation into the right frame of mind, to, in Christian terms, kind of open the congregation to spiritual insights.
Songs are often chosen and selected to kind of anticipate and reinforce themes from the sermon and so forth.
Just like you go to a good metal show—I've been to going to some metal shows lately—or any other kind of concert, really, you'll have the opening acts.
And a good opening act really gets you in the mood and ready for the main event, for the main performer, and that's what the worship time does ahead of the sermon.
In Protestant churches—Catholic churches are different.
In Catholicism, the reception of the Eucharist, receiving the Eucharist, that is the kind of focal point of the service, the culmination, that to which it builds.
It's in contrast to most Protestant churches, okay?
So when I hear loud singing, There's a lot about this that, number one, it cues me to wonder about the worship wars.
I cheated, peeked, went to the website, saw where that is.
For this church, it is a focus on congregational singing and congregational worship, and it fits as a theme and an emphasis, I think, very much within, you know, a broadly Protestant conception of what the worship service is, okay?
So that's some general stuff.
is what is it doing here in this list?
Why Smiling Wives and then Obedient Children and then Loud Singing?
Why is it here?
And because there's this sort of shift, right, from the focus on the family.
Wait for it.
Everybody hear that?
The focus on the family.
You got what I did there?
This focus on Smiling Wives and Obedient Children To loud singing.
And I'm not entirely sure what this is doing there.
I'm not going to go back to the website and look.
It's possible.
I was talking about this with a friend, and like, maybe these eight items on this card are just randomly assigned.
And that could be.
It could be that they're in no particular order.
But what's the fun in thinking that?
What I'm doing is I'm assuming that there's some significance to the order, and here's the question.
What could it be?
What does it encode?
What does it mean that loud singing appears here at this point in this card?
And here's what it means for me.
Knowing all this stuff about the role of worship in Protestant churches, knowing all of this stuff about this particular church and what worship means for them, I think that it is there because it stands as a stamp of approval.
an endorsement of what has come before.
If loud singing captures the idea of enthusiasm, if it captures the idea of active engagement and participation by the congregation, I think its location on the list here—smiling wives, obedient children, and loud singing—communicates an enthusiastic endorsement on the other items on the list, and specifically those ones that have come before.
When I talked about smiling wives, I said that this communicates the idea of women who know and accept their roles within society, their roles within family, and their roles within the church.
When I talked about obedient children, I said that this communicates that the family and the church, and therefore society, they're in proper order.
The children are obedient.
They know their role and they carry it out.
I think loud singing following on these communicates the full-throated approval of this, the congregational affirmation of everything that is captured in those points.
The wives are smiling, and through its energetic participation in worship, the church is smiling right along with them.
It is affirming what it is that those first two points have to say and communicate.
And, of course, the focus on loud singing, on active worship, situates everything on this list within the will of God, right?
It's part of worship.
It's not just that the church happens to do these things.
It's not just that they are things that they do as part of a worshipful life.
They bear witness to God's approval, and they take place at God's command.
And I think that all of that is captured in what in a Christian church we would call the spirit of worship.
So when we go in this church, we're going to find smiling wives, we're going to find obedient children, and we're going to find a congregation that in its enthusiastic and its active worship affirms those things—affirms that it accepts those things as God's will and God's command, that it desires what God desires, that it moves with God.
I think that all of that is captured in this idea of loud singing.
So I think, as with the other items on the list, when we sort of unpack this, when we decode it, I think there's a lot going on.
I think that the meaning of loud singing, that the meaning is not as close to the surface as some of the other elements on the list, not as close as, say, smiling wives.
We're going to get to firm handshakes and biblical preaching later on.
I think those are going to be really pretty clear.
But I think when I look at this, when I see this, this is what I see.
I mean, more importantly, it's sort of what I feel.
And I don't know if that makes sense or not, but having grown up in a certain kind of conservative Protestant church, When you read this, when you think about this, when you imagine the loud singing, it's like you're in that context.
You are there.
You experience it.
That's what it sort of creates in me, is that feeling and that expression.
That's what I think is going.
Let me know what you think.
Feel free to reach out.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
I've had some significant events going on in my life and am not, you know, working on the emails, but behind, as always.
But please, I welcome your thoughts.
Jump on Discord.
As I say, I'm making an effort, a concerted effort, a commitment to be there more.
Let me know what you think.
I welcome any other thoughts, differences of opinion, information you might have, other sneaky knowledge you have about maybe this church or other churches like it.
Whatever you got, I'd love to hear from you.
And as always, always, always, always collecting ideas for this series.
You, the listeners, are the ones who keep the series going, so always welcome your insights, thoughts, possible topic ideas.
We're working through this card right now, but I've got other stuff, you know, sort of on deck for when that's finished.
Again, Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Email me.
Jump on Discord.
Do whatever you want to do.
Whatever works best for you.
And finally, again, if you would consider subscribing, if you're not already a subscriber, please do so.
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I say this often.
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