Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-296) and index.
Contents:
Introduction : the significance of evangelical worship. Part I : constancy versus change. "My worship has been hijacked" : forty years of worship wars -- "Stately and set apart" : upholding tradition in Boston -- "Suddenly we're in a different era" : navigating transition in Chicago -- "Something better has come along" : championing innovation in Atlanta -- Part II : consensus versus contestation. "How can we catch fire?" : prophecy and activism in the Vineyard -- "You can't make me sing" : resisting authority in Portland -- "Not to sing is to disobey" : submitting to paradox in Nashville -- Part III : sameness versus difference -- "One voice in many languages" : Pentecostal praises in the American Southwest -- "Navigating the beautiful tension" : Evangelical worship as eschatological culture.
Summary:
"Almost invariably, media stories with the word evangelical in their headlines are accompanied by a familiar stock photo: a mass of middle-class worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet, despite the fact that worship has become symbolic of evangelicalism's identity in the twenty-first century, it remains an understudied locus of academic inquiry. Historians of American evangelicalism tend to define the movement by its political entanglements (the "rise of the religious Right"), and academic trajectories (the formation of the "evangelical mind"), not its ecclesial practices. Theological scholars frequently dismiss evangelical worship as a reiteration of nineteenth-century revivalism or a derivative imitation of secular entertainment (three Christian rock songs and a spiritual TED talk). But by failing to engage this worship seriously, we miss vital insights into a form of Protestantism that exerts widespread influence in the United States and around the world. Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic models a new way forward. Drawing together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies, and putting both in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork in seven congregations, this book argues that corporate worship is not a peripheral "extra" tacked on to a fully-formed spiritual/political/cultural movement, but rather the crucible through which congregations forge and negotiate the contours of evangelicalism's contested theological identity"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.