Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 14
“Many practices of Christian music are no longer confined to worship, but occur in the context of concerts and cultural projects.
This ‘transfer’ of Christian music practices to the ‘extra-ecclesial’ domain is part of a broader development: in liquid societies, where change and flexibility have taken the place of continuity and stability, religion as a whole has become more flexible and fluid.”
Ecclesioscapes: interpreting gatherings around Christian music in and outside the church through the Dutch case of the “Sing Along Matthäuspassion”
By Mirella Klomp
Abstract
One of the big challenges for the study of 21st century practices of Christian music is to account for the Liquid Church. Church has more and more become fluid: besides the traditional gathering in one place at one time, it has also come to take the shape of ad hoc events, or series of relationships and communications. Church membership is determined or even replaced by participation, choice and involvement. Christian understandings of church and community have always been marked by aspects of permanence and continuity. In European late-modern society, however, practices of Christian music prove to have become fluid. Large forms of Christian music (e.g. Masses, Passions and Requiems) that have sprung from the liturgy of the church over the last decades have increasingly moved to the wider domain of the culture. When it comes to these large musical forms, fluidity seems to dominate. Christian music travels through a “sacro-soundscape” and people instantaneously congregate around its “temporal dwellings,” whether they define themselves as Christians or not, participating in practices of collective musicking in concerts, in sing-along projects, in music festivals, or elsewhere in the cultural domain.
The question arises whether a group of participants/an audience that does not identify itself as a Christian community, yet gathers around Christian music, can be named “congregation.” How should we reflect on those musicking communities from a theological perspective? Does the divine enter the musicking, and if so, where? How do those who congregate around music relate to (self-identified) Christian congregations? What notion could help us understand the broad field of communal gatherings where sacred meaning making occurs?
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a sing-along project of J.S. Bach’s Matthauspassion, and combining sociological analyses of a changing contemporary church by Marti and Ganiel with the ecclesiologies of Pete Ward and Ulrich Schmiedel, this chapter theologically rethinks 21st century practices of Christian music by non-Christian communities from an ecclesiological viewpoint. It offers a practical-ecclesiological reflection on lived and liquid practices of Christian music.