Review Essay: “Seeking and Singing: Exploring Popular Music's Role in Christian Worship Practices”

Book Review| December 01 2019 Review Essay: “Seeking and Singing: Exploring Popular Music's Role in Christian Worship Practices” Mark Porter. Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives. Routledge, 2016. 198 pp.Ari Y. Kelman. Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America. New York University Press, 2018. 224 pp.Monique M. Ingalls. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. Oxford University Press, 2018. 272 pp. Anna E. Nekola Anna E. Nekola Canadian Mennonite University Email: anekola@cmu.ca Anna Nekola is an assistant professor of music at Canadian Mennonite University. Previously she taught at Denison University in the departments of Music and Communication, as well as the Queer Studies Program. Her work appears in Popular Music, The Journal of the Society for American Music, The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities. She co-edited Congregational Music Making and Community in a Mediated Age (Ashgate, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2019) 31 (4): 161–166. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.31.4.161 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Anna E. Nekola; Review Essay: “Seeking and Singing: Exploring Popular Music's Role in Christian Worship Practices”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 December 2019; 31 (4): 161–166. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.31.4.161 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Scholarship on popular Christian music has come a long way in the past ten years. Until the publication of the 2013 edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, the major reference works in Western music contained no coverage of Christian rock or any of the various interconnected genres of Christian pop music. Entries on “Gospel” in the 2001 New Grove and 1997 Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music concluded their coverage of popular and vernacular Christian musics in English-speaking North America in the 1950s. In 2019 the landscape shows change. Within the U.S., churches across the spectrum of Christianity appear to be shifting away from services based around choirs and pipe organs, to worship that employs guitars and drum sets.1 Commercial Christian popular music is a globalized repertory, with contemporary worship songs dominating the playlists of Christian radio and streaming services around the world. From the academic side,... You do not currently have access to this content.