Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age [Hardcover]

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.

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

Anna E. Nekola

Part 1. Technology, Place and Practice

1. Music as a Mediated Object, Music as a Medium:

Towards a Media Ecological View of Congregational Music

Tom Wagner

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

Florian Carl

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

Tanya Riches

4. Who Gets to Sing in the Kingdom?

Ruth King Goddard

Part 2. Community Creation

5. This is lSC