Singing the Congregation

Evanthia Patsiaoura, European Journal of Musicology Monique Ingalls's Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community is a landmark publication, inviting vitally diverse readings.

Ryan David Shelton, New Books Network This study has wide-ranging implications for how to study religious mobilization and posturing beyond the strict, traditional institutional borders.

Niklaas W. Schalm, Didaskalia In highlighting the role contemporary worship music plays in congregations, she delivers a timely challenge to North American evangelicalism to reflect on its own culture and to assess its effectiveness not solely on the basis of relevance or reach potential, but on how the methods used influence the messagea challenge that can extend beyond music to many other aspects of the church.

Matthew C. Bagger, Northport, Alabama, Religion This monograph is a highly dense and material-rich examination of what the author defines as 'contemporary worship music', partly following emic language, partly prudently discussing alternative wordings for this vast and transforming field of evangelical Christian music during and beyond religious services.

Maria S. Guarino, University of Virginia, Reading Religion [T]his sensitive, thorough study offers a much-needed extension of the discourses on congregational Christianity and opens up many opportunities for further discussions of contemporary evangelical congregations.

John MacInnis, Dordt University, In All Things Ingalls' descriptions of evangelical visual piety with regard to images in worship is fascinating, especially her interviews with the creators of amateur worship videos who explain their motivations and aesthetic values...Ingalls' contribution in this book is a substantive theoretical examination of how congregations, aided by CWM, arise in increasingly diverse spaces.

Lester Ruth, Research Professor of Christian Worship, Duke Divinity School In the growing field of Contemporary Praise & Worship studies, Monique Ingalls is a trailblazer. Singing the Congregation only makes more firm her scholarly leadership in the field. Read it for either a general introduction to the phenomenon or a detailed path into several of its most illustrative manifestations.

Amos Yong, Professor of Theology & Mission, Fuller Seminary Singing the Congregation is a profoundly theological book. Those working in congregational studies will see 'congregations' as political and digital performances; liturgists will grapple with how liturgical worship can unfold in the public square; ecclesiologists here glimpse into the evolving nature of the 21st-century church; missiologists will debate issues about contextualization and acculturation in light of the commodification of the Christian music and worship industry; and theologians will have opportunity to revisit familiar dogmatic loci - e.g., theological anthropology, soteriology, and even pneumatology - throug...

Monique M. Ingalls is Assistant Professor of Music at Baylor University. Her work on music in Christian communities has been published in the fields of ethnomusicology, media studies, hymnology, and religious studies. She is Series Editor for Routledge's Congregational Music Studies book series and is co-founder and program chair of the biennial international conference "Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives."

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations and Credits Introduction Contemporary Worship Music and Modes of Congregating within North American Evangelical Christianity Chapter 1 Making Jesus Famous: The Quest for an Authentic Worship Experience in the Concert Congregation Chapter 2 Singing Heaven Down to Earth: The Conference Congregation as Pilgrim Gathering and Eschatological Community Chapter 3 Finding the Church's Voice: Contemporary Worship as Musical Positioning in a Nashville Church Congregation Chapter 4 Bringing Worship to the Streets: The Praise March as Public Congregation Chapter 5 Worship on Screen: Building Networked Congregations Online and Offline through Audiovisual Worship Media Conclusion Worship Music on the Global Stage: The Mainstream Model and Its Alternatives Bibliography