Singing the Congregation

Monique Ingalls's Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community is a landmark publication, inviting vitally diverse readings. * Evanthia Patsiaoura, European Journal of Musicology *
This study has wide-ranging implications for how to study religious mobilization and posturing beyond the strict, traditional institutional borders. * Ryan David Shelton, New Books Network *
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 message—a challenge that can extend beyond music to many other aspects of the church. * Niklaas W. Schalm, Didaskalia *
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. * Matthew C. Bagger, Northport, Alabama, 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. * Maria S. Guarino, University of Virginia, Reading Religion *
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. * John MacInnis, Dordt University, In All Things *
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. * Lester Ruth, Research Professor of Christian Worship, Duke Divinity School *
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 - through the lenses of ethnomusicology. All theologically oriented readers, meanwhile, will be given a range of scholarly and analytical perspectives on what many may experience on Sunday mornings, certainly also at their workstations or on their iPods. * Amos Yong, Professor of Theology & Mission, Fuller Seminary *
Singing the Congregation is the much-anticipated monograph from one of the leading voices in the study of congregational music. Reading Ingalls' book, one understands that congregating, wherever and however it happens, is fundamentally musical and, critically, that music studies has much to say about twenty-first-century evangelical Christianity. * Jeffers Engelhardt, Associate Professor of Music, Amherst College *
In this finely-wrought ethnomusicology of Christianity, Monique M. Ingalls sensitively captures the voices, intimate and global, that today fill the sacred soundscape of evangelicalism. * Philip V. Bohlman, Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, The University of Chicago *
In her ground-breaking exploration of music in evangelical worship, Ingalls expands our understanding of contemporary Christian religious expression - a vivid and richly detailed examination of music, community and spiritual experience in the twenty-first century. * Jeffrey A. Summit, Research Professor, Tufts University and author of Singing God's Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism (OUP) *