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The Sunday Soundtrack

If you had to make a list of approximately 40 songs that best characterize your church, which songs would you choose?

Here’s the catch: I’m not just referring to your local congregation. Spring and summer tend to mark the season of national “conventions,” “assemblies,” “conferences,” and “synods” for churches of all denominations. It is a time when representatives of local congregations come together to make decisions as a wider community of faith. It is an opportunity to celebrate what we share with other congregations and to remind us that we can still diverge on matters like music even if we belong to the same denomination. How do we sing together at these national events when the Sunday morning soundtrack varies so much from one congregation to the next?

I have been asking these questions for months in relation to my own denomination. A few weeks ago, I served as one of the worship leaders at Mennonite Church Canada’s national “gathering” (because “synod” or “convention” would sound a little too formal for us) in Kitchener, Ontario. My role included curating approximately 40 songs for 400 people of various theological perspectives and social locations to sing together in a high school gymnasium. This year, to further increase the stakes, we also recognized the 500^th anniversary of the birth of the Anabaptist movement in Europe (from which the Mennonite tradition emerged) while we simultaneously attempted to deconstruct Western narratives that have dominated our church’s landscape and undermined intercultural expressions of faith. Although we are a predominantly white denomination with a strong (and rather ethnocentric) attachment to strophic hymns with four-part harmonies (McCabe Juhnke 2017; Johnson and Loepp Thiessen 2023, 221–22), our demographics are shifting, so our denominational leaders made a point of inviting BIPOC speakers and encouraging ways of worship that would be representative of our predominantly BIPOC congregations.

The Stats

It is no small task to discern what to sing at an event that keeps returning to the theme of an “intercultural church in the womb,” to quote one of the event speakers. In fact, it was the most emotionally demanding gig that I have encountered in my church music career thus far. Together with my fellow committee members, I saw it as a delicate balance of choosing songs that would reinforce, expand, and challenge our identity as Mennonite Church Canada. In the end, our “Billboard Top 40” (which we narrowed to 35 songs) took the following statistical form:

26 (74%) songs were sourced from our denominational hymnal, Voices Together
13 (37%) songs included vocal harmonies
9 (26%) songs were connected to a BIPOC individual or community and/or were sung in a language other than English
8 (23%) songs would qualify as contemporary worship music

As a committee, we suspected that the songs falling into the latter categories (connections to a BIPOC individual or community, language other than English, and/or contemporary worship music), which together constituted 49% of our music, would be most familiar or accessible to our BIPOC constituents. Conversely, they would be unfamiliar or challenging for many of our white constituents—although I was grateful to receive lots of positive feedback on my musical leadership from them!

The Stories

Based on several of my conversations at the gathering, our assumptions were correct. Here is what I recall in a series of vignettes:

On the first night of the gathering, we begin worship with a set of three songs appearing on recent CCLI Top 100 lists: Crowder’s “Come as You Are,” Bethel’s “Goodness of God,” and Sinach’s “Way Maker.” A friend with an evangelical background speaks to me afterward about how she was expecting to hear hymns with four-part harmonies and strong ties to Anabaptist history. The contemporary songs raised complex feelings for her because some of them originate in communities with beliefs that do not align with her own theological convictions. At the same time, she appreciates how they diversify our repertoire at this gathering in ways that reflect our increasingly intercultural church. Later, I’m driving with someone whose family has been connected to a predominantly white Mennonite church for multiple generations. She tells me that she was shocked by the sound of this music when she entered the room, although she likewise expresses appreciation for how it challenges a musical norm.
On the second day of the gathering, I am sharing a meal with a Hmong woman who expresses appreciation for my musical leadership and the variety of songs at this event. Later, I am chatting with a former classmate who was raised in evangelical circles, and he describes how he felt brave enough to raise his hands while we were singing “Way Maker” because there was an Asian woman behind him whose hands were already in the air. As he describes his interaction with her, it sounds like the woman who shared breakfast with me.
I am returning to my accommodations with a carload of young adults on the second night of the gathering. One of them is pastoring a predominantly white Mennonite congregation. He explains how, when it comes to his own spiritual life, songs with four-part harmonies are more “valuable” than modern worship songs (e.g., “Oceans,” “My Lighthouse,” etc.). At the same time, he acknowledges that songs in the latter category can be very meaningful for other people, even if he doesn’t experience them in that way.
On the third day of the gathering, a woman with a last name that links her to the Euroamerican Mennonite demographic confesses that, even though it is important to sing the songs of diverse communities and cultures, she hates “Way Maker.” Some of the lyrics feel impossible to sing because they construct an image of God exercising control over us, which can reinforce oppressive church structures that perpetuate harm against women and other marginalized folks. Is it her comment or the fact that I didn’t sleep enough last night that sends me into a wooded area for the last ten minutes of our lunch break to take some deep breaths and blink away tears before returning to the gymnasium to lead another song?
Later on that day, I ask a few young adults if they can describe the kind of music that they sing in their congregations. One of them is part of a Mennonite church in Vancouver’s Chinatown. He speaks of “contemporary” music rather than songs from a hymnal. There are also two Congolese men who describe their congregation’s music as a progression from energetic “praise” music to slower songs of “adoration.” They cite Elevation’s “Praise” and Bethel’s “Goodness of God” as examples of songs falling into each of the two categories.

In Summary…

Although the “worship wars” of the 1990s and 2000s have ostensibly concluded (Ruth 2017, 4–5), these anecdotal conversations suggest that contemporary worship music still appears to foster a musical division between predominantly white and predominantly BIPOC congregations within Mennonite Church Canada. Perhaps this is true for other denominations as well. (Note: I am generalizing here. For instance, there are plenty of predominantly white congregations that sing contemporary worship music—I was raised in one of them!) If so, how should it shape our approach to curating and leading music at denominational events each spring or summer? Without providing a clear-cut answer by any means, I offer several points of reflection on this question based on what I experienced in Kitchener earlier this summer:

As a committee, we knew that the majority of the people who would be joining us in Kitchener and singing the songs on our list would be white retirees with a preference for four-part harmonies, but the majority of our repertoire was notated in unison. This discrepancy was not an oversight; it was an intentional effort to decentre a dominant musical expression and show that our denomination affirms other ways of singing and worshipping together—especially those ways of worship that are beloved by people who do not fall within the ethnic majority.
If contemporary worship music is the preferred genre of many predominantly BIPOC congregations, we must be wary of contemporary worship music functioning as tokenism when it is sung in predominantly white spaces. In other words, inserting a single Elevation or Bethel song into an order of worship that is still structurally white (e.g., a series of discrete readings, songs, and prayers that can appear on a piece of paper in linear order like a to-do list) would not be enough to affirm contemporary worship music as a valid expression of faith within our denomination. Our committee therefore made the structural change of using a worship “set,” featuring several contemporary worship songs in a row with a smooth musical progression and extemporaneous words or prayer between them (Lim and Ruth 2017, 32).
It is an unfortunate reality that much of the theological critique that people level against contemporary worship music can also be directed at “traditional” hymnody. While a line like “Lay down your shame” combined with “Oh, sinner, come kneel” in Crowder’s “Come as You Are” could reinforce a false sense of shame or wrongdoing for survivors of abuse, we might also critique the highly submissive plea to “melt me, mold me, fill me, use me” in a four-part song like “Spirit of the Living God,” which appears in most denominational hymnals of the last century. Both songs carry the potential to heal or harm, and we must exercise care when leading either of them.

Finally, on a concluding note, it is impossible to meet the needs of every individual or community at a single event, which is why I would not necessarily adhere to the same statistical framework if I were choosing songs for Mennonite Church Canada’s next gathering in 2028. We chose songs that we hoped would bring our intercultural commitment to life by privileging the voices and/or experiences of BIPOC communities. If a future gathering engaged with the theme of undoing harm against women or queer folks, for instance, I imagine that I would take a very different approach to curating songs. While I don’t know if such an opportunity will come to me again, nor do I feel confident that I nailed this one, I pray that Mennonite Church Canada’s “Billboard Top 40” list will continue to evolve in ways that bring us into richer relationship with God and each other.

Mykayla Turner holds a Master of Sacred Music with a Liturgical Musicology concentration and a Master of Theological Studies. She obtained her A.C.C.M. in Piano Performance from Conservatory Canada. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, ON. Apart from her academic work, she is an active church musician and liturgist. She also co-directs Ontario Mennonite Music Camp and chairs the team of volunteers who maintain Together in Worship, a curated collection of free worship resources from Anabaptist sources.

Blogger Anneli Loepp Thiessen is an active song leader, researcher, classical musician, and music educator. She is pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Ottawa where she received her Masters of Music in Piano Performance.

Blogger David Bjorlin is a worship pastor at Resurrection Covenant Church (Chicago), a lecturer in worship at North Park Theological Seminary (Chicago), and a published hymnwriter.

(This is an abridged version of an article that appears in

The Hymn: A Journal of Congregational Song 72, no. 3 [Summer 2021].)

INTRODUCTION

If you scan the repertoire of a mainstream White evangelical congregation on a Sunday morning, you will notice a range of images used to represent God and one’s own spirituality. Some of these are based in scripture, others in popular culture, and yet others are commonly used poetic phrases. For the most part, these are meaningful, appropriate images. But last year we noticed a trend in imagery that didn’t sit right. In song after song written mostly by and for White evangelicals, there seemed to be an inordinate number of references to enslavement: chains, freedom, captivity, slaves. While not absent from the biblical narrative, the references seemed strange for a population that not only had not experienced enslavement in their history, but largely argued against recognizing the lasting harmful effects of slavery that continue in the the ongoing injustices faced by the African American community. Further to this, we noticed that it wasn’t just in the words of the songs that mentioned enslavement; the music too appropriated the rhythms and sounds of African American culture and experience. So, we decided to study this phenomenon to see how and why this might be the case.

Our first step was to analyze the words of the songs themselves in a more systematic manner. When we analyzed the June 2020 CCLI Top 100 list, we found that 28 of the 100 songs included one or more of the words with the following breakdown:

Term	Number of Mention
free/freedom	22
chain(s)	12
captive(s)	5
slave(s)	4*

*Several songs mention more than one of the terms, the total number of mentions is greater than 28.

Clearly, the images of enslavement and freedom have sparked the imaginations of White evangelical songwriters and congregations, but why? And how is this language being employed in songs? How is it both contextualized and embodied in particular congregations and performance practices?

BUT WHY?

To answer the first question, we begin where most evangelicals start their theological inquiry: the Bible. Enslavement and freedom are indeed used as images of salvation, especially in the letters of Paul (e.g., Rom. 6:20-22). Yet, Paul employs a number of metaphors for salvation, including redemption through sacrifice (Romans 3:21-30); justification (Gal. 2:15-16); adoption (Romans 8-9); reconciliation to God (2 Cor. 5:18-20) and each other (Eph. 2:11-22), and clothing oneself in newness of life (Col. 3:10-14). So, why do CWM songwriters seem to be drawn particularly to the language of enslavement and freedom?

In addition to the Bible, another major tenet of evangelical theology is the centrality of Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross for humanity’s salvation. Yet, it is a subset of substitutionary atonement—ransom theory—that perhaps best helps to explain the prominence of enslavement and freedom metaphors in CWM. In this atonement theory, sinners are enslaved to sin, death, and evil (or Satan himself) until Christ ransoms us by taking our place and our rightful punishment and freeing us. So, when White evangelicals look at the Bible through the theological lens of the ransom theory of atonement, it is quite understandable why the enslavement/freedom motif of salvation with its language of chains, bondage, captivity and freedom would gain prominence over the other salvation metaphors that Paul employs. Like looking at the back of a cereal box with the 3D glasses uncovered at the bottom of the bag, these particular theological metaphors jump out while the others recede to the background.

MUSICAL ANALYSIS

Beyond just being represented textually, some songs even embody images of enslavement and chains musically. Take, for example, the song “Sing It From the Shackles” by Irish folk band Rend Collective. If you listen to the video below, you will hear musical characteristics that embody the sonic quality of sounds associated with oppression, through a percussive beat that is reminiscent of chains being thrown or a whip being cracked. In each verse, the singer poses a question: “Can you hear that freedom sound?” The premise of freedom having a sound draws us to the underground railroad, where spirituals contained coded language that instructed enslaved people on how to escape to freedom.

The ensemble’s introduction of darkness in opposition to praises in the bridge contributes to the problematic use of language: “Let the darkness hear our praises.” The equation of darkness with sin or an absence of God is problematic in all contexts, but is particularly concerning in a song that is so clearly situated within narratives of enslavement and imprisonment.

A second example to consider is “Slave to Nothing” by Zach Williams. In a YouTube video describing the song, Williams describes the writing process: “This obviously is a song that we had a lot of fun with… There’s been a lot of things in my past that I’ve been a slave to, from addictions to fear, and I’m sure there’s a lot of things that everybody else struggles with, that they’ve been a slave to.”

If you listen to the song, you will notice that “Slave to Nothing” pervasively uses enslavement imagery and draws on clear musical influences of blues and gospel, influences that draw on experiences and histories that are not those of the songwriters. White artists have a history of appropriating the blues music of Black artists through imitative and adaptive “covers.” Both blues and gospel have their roots in the experiences of enslavement and life after slavery, and White artists must be responsible for how these genres and their histories influence their music. When White North Americans appropriate other cultures, it contributes to exploitations of dominance.

Textually, Williams presents the perspective of a prisoner on trial, offering cries of innocence and defiance over guilt. The use of slavery language to describe imprisonment is problematic particularly when considering the American history of enslavement and the high rates of incarceration of Black people in US prisons. Williams’s preference for language of enslavement and imprisonment exemplifies the way White evangelicals adopt the experiences of Black people as if they are their own.

SINGING, BUT NOT TALKING, ABOUT ENSLAVEMENT

All of this textual and musical analyses raises a particularly pertinent question for White evangelical communities singing about enslavement and freedom in the United States: What does it mean for mostly White congregations to sing songs about enslavement and freedom in the context of a nation with a long and bloody 400-year-history of subjugating Black people through the literal chains of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery, through the terror and abuse of lynchings during the Reconstruction era, through the segregation and suppression of the Jim Crow, to the present-day era of the “war on drugs” and mass incarceration? Certainly, singing about spiritual slavery and freedom should call us to contend with physical slavery and freedom with its long and deleterious effects.

Yet, just as the evangelical theological imagination is formed to emphasize images of enslavement and freedom as primary metaphors of salvation, it is also formed to ignore the systemic nature of injustice or the lasting effects of historic oppression. In Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s seminal Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, they note that White evangelicals are much less likely to view racism as a pressing problem that needs to be addressed and are more likely to blame African American individual effort as the source of disparities rather than structural systems. While written almost twenty years ago, more recent studies have upheld the basic argument that White Christians generally, and White churchgoing evangelicals particularly, tend not simply to downplay racism, but support racist policies.

THE WHITE EVANGELICAL TOOL KIT

To explain this phenomenon, Emerson and Smith argue that White evangelicals have a limited “tool kit” that tends to focus on individual free will (“accountable freewill individualism”) and personal relationship (“relationalism”) while being suspicious of structural influences on society (“antistructuralism”) and the lasting impact of historical injustices on the present (“ahistorical”). So, when White evangelicals sing CWM songs about chains or slavery or freedom, this tool kit leads them to ahistoricize and decontextualize slavery and instead individualize and spiritualize captivity and freedom to refer to one’s own personal salvation story. Thus, chains may be interpreted as an alcohol or pornography addiction—because these can be viewed as an individual struggle outside of a larger historical narrative—but not actual slavery or the ongoing legacy of White supremacy—because that is both corporate and systemic with historical antecedents and influences. This is perhaps the central irony of White evangelicalism’s continued use of these images: those whose theology leads them to sing the most of enslavement and freedom as the central metaphor of Christian salvation are simultaneously the group most likely to downplay the significance of slavery’s lasting impact on the people of the United States and promote (or at least not oppose) policies that do harm to African Americans—the one group that knows the ongoing injustice and traumatic effects of enslavement.

We believe this irony is inherently problematic and calls all churches to a more critical approach to writing, singing, and choosing songs for corporate worship. For all White churches—evangelical or not—this might ask us to approach these types of songs with a hermeneutic of suspicion, questioning why communities that have such little historical or contemporary experiences of oppression are drawn to language of oppression and freedom. It at the very least calls our White churches to engage in the work of naming, confessing, and dismantling the historic and contemporary forms of oppression in our churches and society if we are to sing these songs with any integrity.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

For White churches like our own that sing these songs, it perhaps challenges us to practices of disengagement and engagement. First, we must disengage from the practice of singing our songs like we too often read our Bibles: as if we sing without historical, cultural, political, or theological context. This might call us to stop singing these songs of enslavement and freedom—at least for a season—especially if our communities refuse to discuss or acknowledge the history of slavery and the ongoing injustices that continues to create. Positively, it asks songwriters and worship leaders to engage other biblical images of salvation—like reconciliation to God and one another in our songs—in our songs and other worship resources. Not only does this give us a more holistic and biblical account of salvation, but these more relational metaphors may help re-form the White evangelical imagination toward recognizing the powers and principalities of structural sins that have plagued our country for generations. The use of songs like these could then help expand the evangelical tool kit and give communities the theological vision and language to begin engaging in discussions around the many forms of historic and social oppressions that have too often been ignored. Maybe then we can sing, “My chains are gone, I’ve been set free,” and understand the true nature of freedom in all of its height and breadth and depth.

We’d like to welcome our latest guest blogger, David Bjorlin. David is a worship pastor at Resurrection Covenant Church in Chicago, seminary faculty member at North Park Theological Seminary, and a published hymn writer. David has found a wide range of outlets for his passion for worship and the church. His interests include hymnody, connections between liturgy and ethics, and children in worship. He loves being able to plan worship so that a congregation may enact and indwell the redemptive story of God in worship week after week. – Brian Hehn, Director of The Center for Congregational Song

A Key Question

Over the past few decades, one of the key questions that liturgists have been asking is how what we say and do in worship shapes our theology and ethics. Because we are liturgists and need to show just how out of touch we are with contemporary trends, we even use Latin shorthand to describe this connection—lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. Literally this saying means that “the law of prayer [is] the law of belief [is] the law of living.” That is, prayer/worship shapes theology shapes ethics. While debates rage over how the three are connected, most would agree that worship helps form our understanding of God and the way we live in God’s world with one another. If this is the case, it means the words we say and sing in worship are vital to Christian formation.

Atonement Theology

Because this is true, I have grown more and more concerned about how our songs, particularly contemporary worship songs, sing about the atonement—the way we are reconciled to God through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. In the vast majority of contemporary praise songs, Jesus’ death is almost always portrayed as substitutionary: we should have been punished for our sins, but God took our place and the punishment that was rightly ours and saved us. In its most extreme forms, Christ’s death satisfies the wrath of God that we incurred through our sin (penal substitutionary atonement). While examples abound, here are just a few of the most well-known from CCLI’s Top 100 list:

“This is unfailing love / that you would take my place, / that you would bear my cross” (“This Is Amazing Grace”); “Behold the man upon the cross, / my sin upon his shoulders… / It was my sin that held him there / until it was accomplished” (“How Deep the Father’s Love for Us”); and the granddaddy of them all, “till on the cross has Jesus died, / the wrath of God was satisfied” (“In Christ Alone”). Lest we think this trend is only found in contemporary praise songs, many classic hymns rely heavily on the substitutionary trope as well. Take the second stanza of Philip Bliss’s “Man of Sorrows!”: “Bearing shame and scoffing rude, / in my place condemned he stood; / sealed my pardon with his blood: / Hallelujah, what a Savior!”

That is, if our central atonement theology claims that God needs retribution for his (male pronoun used purposefully) wrath or justice to be satisfied, it’s no wonder that our justice system would also be built on the idea of retribution rather than restoration.

To be clear, there are differences between substitutionary atonement and penal substitution. In my estimation, there is some biblical warrant for the former (much of the book of Hebrews, for example), while I find the latter to be less biblical and more pagan in origin. However, in both modes, the clear message of the atonement is the need for retribution for the sins of humanity. I have long understood how this myopic focus on substitutionary atonement has led to theological distortions. God the Father becomes an angry God of justice who must be won over by the merciful Jesus (God the Son saves us from God the Father); wrath often becomes the motivating force of the cross rather than God’s unrelenting love; and Christ’s life and resurrection seem to become unimportant additions to Christ’s death. I believe this overemphasis on substitutionary atonement theories is part of the reason why many Christians find it so much easier to believe in an angry God just waiting to punish them than a loving God seeking to reconcile all things through Christ.

Ethics

However, I was struck anew by how this singular view of the atonement can warp our ethical lives in reading Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s excellent new book Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores.

The entire book is a must-read for those who wish to understand and challenge the racism endemic to our justice system that continues to disproportionately target and incarcerate people of color. However, what struck me was the connection Gilliard drew between penal substitutionary atonement and the punitive way we treat those who are arrested and incarcerated in our society. That is, if our central atonement theology claims that God needs retribution for his (male pronoun used purposefully) wrath or justice to be satisfied, it’s no wonder that our justice system would also be built on the idea of retribution rather than restoration. A crime has been committed, and satisfaction must be paid for that crime even if we desire to show mercy. What happens before and what happens after is of little consequence; punishment is the key. And if we lay this theological system onto a racially-biased criminal justice system, Christians too often find themselves “theologically justifying racism.” In the end, if we distort our worship, we not only distort how we understand God, but also distort how we treat one another.

A Challenge

I think this is offers a challenge to worship leaders and songwriters to offer congregations different ways of understanding Christ’s atonement. We desperately need more praise songs that sing of Christ’s saving way of living in the world that challenged oppression and injustice and continue to challenge us to new ways of living in right relationship to God, others, and creation. We need more songs that celebrate Christ’s resurrection as an integral part of Christ’s victory over death, not just to save me from my sins, but to reconcile the cosmos. We need more songs that remind us that God’s death was motivated not by an angry God who scares us into obedience, but a God whose “love so amazing, so divine, / demands our souls, our lives, our all.”

David Bjorlin – Blog Author

The “Billboard Top 40” of Church Music