Worship and Performance

My friend David Taylor recently introduced me to some blogs about contemporary worship issues. Even though the worship in my churches would be considered traditional, the ethnodoxologist in me likes to know what other pastors and worship leaders are doing. Recently some writers who ply their trade in pop-rock song styles have been addressing the issue of "performancism" in worship. Jamie Brown apparently exploded his blog's hit count by calling out worship leaders who get in the way of the congregation's encounters with God. David Santistevan responded that the problems with modern worship practices are not the forms (like dimly lit rooms, over-amplified sounds, and projection systems) but rather the heart of the worshippers: the church isn't as hungry for God as we should be. Zac Hicks contributed his own theological insights, claiming that the church lacks a true understanding of the respective roles of law and gospel.

I agree with all these bloggers that there are big holes in our understanding of true worship. The concern that many worship leaders have for creating a tight performance set is not so much a problem in itself. It's more of a symptom of a bigger disease. We seem to lack good images for even talking about and conceptualizing proper worship. Specifically, the church of the 21st century needs to name and address the performer-vs-audience separation that exists in our congregations. Let me bring in two other writers who can help us identify this problem: one is a famous philosopher and the other is an obscure social scientist.

Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher, wrote about worship as performance. He pointed to the obvious comparison of the front of a church (the chancel, actually) to a stage, with the congregation in the pews (an area known as the nave) making up the audience. This metaphor is even more obvious today when many congregations gather in worship spaces that don't look at all like churches. Instead of a chancel, many worship leaders and pastors preside from an actual stage. Kierkegaard may have died before he had the opportunity to worship in a gymnatorium, but he nonetheless identified the age-old temptation to make the worship leader into a performer and the congregation into an audience. He wrote in an essay called Purity of Heart that these roles are mixed up from what they should be. The congregation wasn't meant to passively watch the priest/pastor perform a service. Rather, the pastor/priest is called to prompt the congregation to perform together with him or her: not as an audience, but rather acting as part of a large cast in the drama of God's saving work in creation. Worship leader and congregation are both on the same side of the curtain. Kierkegaard said that God alone is the audience of our worship. Said another way, worship is an offering of participatory celebration to (and I would add, with) God.

Less well-known than our Danish friend is Andriy Nahachewsky, a folklorist who teaches at the University of Alberta. He wrote an article in 2001 that described how the meaning of a performance changes when its presentation context is altered. For example, a folk dance from the rural Philippines probably started as a way for everyone in the village to participate in a celebration. There was no difference between performer and audience, because everyone danced together in the circle. When Bayanihan, the country's national dance company, creates a version of that dance for the stage, then they are also making a clear division between performers and audience. The stage is a physical barrier that also creates a virtual wall: those on one side may participate, and those on the other side can only watch. Nahachewsky says that the dance form may look the same on stage as it did in the village, but the meaning is completely different when performer and audience are clearly divided.

Here is my take-away from both Kierkegaard and Nahachewsky: Meaningful worship in the church should break down the wall of performer-versus-audience. These walls are everywhere in our societies: stages of theaters, fronts of classrooms, screens of cinemas (and TV sets). Our culture trains us to be passive consumers, to sit and watch what others create. Worship services ought to be counter-cultural experiences that break down this division and bring the worship leader and congregation onto the same team. The bloggers mentioned above have some good tips for moving our congregations in the right directions. (Getting more people singing is a very good suggestion.) But we also need better models for talking about and describing what we do on Sunday mornings (or Sunday evenings, or Saturday evenings, or Friday evenings...) Changing church architecture or song styles will not break down this barrier unless we start talking about worship in a different way.

This video has been around for a while, but it never gets old. Worship as performance, indeed...

What is "Heart Music"?

What's the one kind of music that you enjoy best? Do you have a style, or even a particular performer, who always seems to get to you? Maybe there is a special song that always makes you cry, no matter when or where you hear it.

The term "heart music" grew out of missionary efforts to find a style of music that connected best with a particular group of people. It was borrowed from the phrase "heart language", which is meant to identify the one language that a person speaks best and can use to communicate deep truths. The assumption is that people who grow up speaking several different languages still have one that is a first language or "mother tongue."

Some of the first music missionaries and ethnodoxologists worked in areas where identifying the mother tongue and heart music was not difficult. For example, when Tom Avery worked with the Canela people in Brazil, they mostly spoke one language to each other and had their own indigenous style of singing. Because he worked for a mission organization (Wycliffe Bible Translators) that emphasized the mother tongue, Tom used the same approach to understanding this group's music. He studied the local melodies and rhythms and then showed the people how they could create worship songs in that indigenous style.

This idea of identifying a culture group's heart music continued in the development of the ethnodoxology movement. The vision statement of the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (ICE) states:

The ICE network exists to encourage and equip Christ-followers in every culture to express their faith through their own heart music and other arts.

Over the past couple of decades entire organizations have grown up around this idea of helping churches worship with music from the heart. Indeed, the organization Heart Sounds International even wove the concept into its name.

"Heart music" is more of a motivational term than a technical description. Like any word picture, it eventually reaches a point where it breaks down. For instance, during my time in the Philippines in the 2000s, it was difficult to find a people group who knew just one traditional way of making music. Even the culture groups with the strongest traditions of local music-making still had access to other music styles from around the world. The Mangali Kalinga pictured in the photo above still actively make music with gongs and bamboo instruments. But when they composed new worship songs in their language, most of the tunes sounded more like country and western songs that they hear on the radio. (Yes, American country music is widespread in the mountains of the northern Philippines.)

Even identifying a person's one "mother tongue" can be difficult. People who grow up in a multi-lingual town often have different places where they use a different languages: one for the market, one for the church, one for the school. And those may not be the "mother tongues" that they speak in the home. (That's assuming that parents and grandparents all speak the same language. In many cases there are two or three languages spoken in the home, and a child grows up learning all of them.)

Even if finding one "mother tongue" or "heart music" in all situations can be difficult, we still carry on in the effort to create locally meaningful worship songs. Today's ethnodoxologist just needs to recognize that there are many styles that can connect with a particular congregation. Blogger Bobby Gilles recently wrote about how to make new congregational songs easier to sing. Besides making the melodies in a better range and key for the amateur singer, the songs have to be arranged and set in a style that is locally meaningful. In the US, that means that songs should take the shape of regional styles. (Rock from Seattle is different from rock in Atlanta.) My hat is off to Gilles and others who are working to make contemporary/popular/rock music easier to sing and play in our churches. Even in multi-cultural, inter-generational, uber-globalized situations, there are songs that can speak to the heart.

A Journal for Ethnodoxology: Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith

A key component of any movement is a journal that can serve as a forum for sharing ideas and connecting its members. For the field of ethnodoxology, we have the Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith. This new free, online journal has now published its second volume.

Volume One contains a review by Douglas Bachorik on Irving's Colonial Counterpoint, a book about music in Manila during the early 20th century. Volume Two has two full-length articles by some pillars of the ethnodoxology movement: Dan Fitzgerald and Brian Schrag on evaluating new compositions, and James Krabill on the hymns of the Dida Harrist community in Côte d’Ivoire. There is also a working paper by Jacob Joseph about the on-the-ground work he is doing in India regarding contextualization of traditional music for the church.

My friend, Neil Coulter, serves as the journal's Editor. (I assist him with the reviews.) We hope that the online format will allow contributions from a variety of global voices. Unfortunately, journal publishing is often restricted to those who have resources and access to elite (and often Western) schools and universities. Our goal is to see many authors published in GFACF that would otherwise not be read in an academic journal.

We are always looking for new submissions. If you are reading this blog post, you probably have a personal interest in ethnodoxology. You may have done some research or have life experience that can be worked into a paper. If you have some ideas, please write to Neil about any ideas you have for an article, working paper, or review.

Music is not a Universal Language

Music does NOT communicate in the same way to all people, especially across cultures. Music is indeed like a language -- songs are meaningful because we learn associations from the context in which we are raised. But those meanings are bound up in a culture, just like the words and grammar of a group's particular way of speaking. For instance, many of us assume that songs in a minor key imply sadness. In reality, there is nothing built into the notes of a minor scale that automatically makes the listener sad. Rather, such "sadness" is learned because minor keys are often played at times of disappointment, longing, or fear. Many of us grew up watching movies in which the soundtrack went to minor in order to portray something sad: the hero suffers a setback, or the lovers quarrel. If you took a minor-key song to someone not raised on sad-song movies (which is getting harder to do in the 21st century), she would not necessarily feel sad.

In fact, the opposite thing can happen. Happy and joyful music from some cultures sounds miserable to others. In an earlier post I mentioned a missionary colleague in the Philippines who was helping churches to make recordings of their translated hymns. The church members told her that many of the long-time standards sounded more like funeral music to them. "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" was one of those sad-sounding songs! What a previous missionary assumed was a joyous and triumphant melody did not fit the associations with those emotions in this particular culture.

That's the main danger that ethnodoxologists are trying to avoid. If church leaders assume that music is a universal language, then they may unknowingly introduce songs that miscommunicate. Those who cross cultures need to learn the meanings of a culture's music, just like they have to work at understanding the communication patterns of a new language.

My friend Robin Harris wrote that Longfellow was the first to call music a "universal language" in 1833. (See her article on page 82 in Worship and Mission for the Global Church.) Unfortunately, this assumption has done a lot of unintended damage over the past two hundred years. But the results of this misunderstanding of how music works are not limited to the church. It's all over popular music, too.

Which leads us to ask: What exactly is "perfect" harmony? Is harmony even a universal concept? And, if so, which of the cultures represented in this video sings harmony in a way that should replace the harmonic singing styles of everyone else?

What is Ethnodoxology?

I belong to the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (ICE). When explaining why this group exists, we have to define the world ethnodoxology.

Trying out a new song in an indigenous church
in the northern Philippines

On the ICE website we define ethnodoxology as: "the theological and anthropological study, and practical application, of how every cultural group might use its unique and diverse artistic expressions appropriately to worship the God of the Bible."

Dave Hall, the man who coined the term, describes it is a combination of Greek words for culture (ethne) and praise (doxo). You might have encountered these root words in English. Ethnography is what anthropologists do to describe cultural practices. The Doxology is a song of praise used in many churches, often following the offering.

Perhaps a formula represents the idea best:

Ethnodoxology = Peoples + Praise

As an ethnomusicologist, I am mostly interested in how music is used for worship. But music is just one of many art forms that Christians use to enhance their experiences with God. Consider how church architecture and stained glass add beauty to a building. Human creativity is also expressed through dance, drama, poetry, painting, and sculpture. Many cultures around the world do not divide up their arts into separate concepts like that. Ethnodoxologists are trained to look for locally meaningful ways to include these indigenous expressions into the life of the church. 

Here is a video clip from a friend's church in the northern Philippines. They use traditional instruments and dance to make their Sunday worship services more meaningful. Like many people throughout history and around the world, this pastor was doing ethnodoxology before he ever heard of the word.