Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T08:58:34.131Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bigger, Better, Louder: The Prosperity Gospel's Impact on Contemporary Christian Worship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Kate Bowler  and
Wen Reagan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article makes several claims about the relationship between praise and worship music and prosperity megachurches. First, it argues that the prosperity gospel has had a significant impact on contemporary worship music in America owing to its leadership in the twin rise of the megachurch and televangelism. Second, beginning in the 1990s, prosperity megachurches pioneered forms of worship music mimicking “arena rock” that capitalized on both the scale of their sanctuaries and the sophistication of their audio/visual production. The result was a progression toward music that would be a liturgy of timing, lighting, volume and performance designed for large venues. Finally, prosperity megachurches were ideally situated to benefit from this new music, both in the music industry and in their theology. Prosperity megachurches partnered with the expanding worship industry in the creation of new worship music, while the prosperity gospel theologically undergirded the affective power and performative pageantry of Christian arena rock, narrating worship music as a tool for releasing spiritual forces of prosperity. The result was a Sunday experience for the blessed that reinforced the celebration of God’s abundant blessings through music that was bigger, better, and louder.

Keywords

ProsperitymegachurchworshipmusicHillsong
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 186 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Congregational visit, FaithWorld Church, Orlando, Florida, May 18, 2011.

2. “Gospel music,” as a term, has a long and contentious history. Musicologist Stephen Shearon argues that, over its 150-year history, gospel music has developed into four separate traditions: northern urban gospel, sung in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century revivals of Dwight Moody, R. A. Torrey, and Billy Sunday; southern gospel, which usually featured small ensembles (often quartets) and developed and carried the American shape-note tradition through the twentieth century; black gospel, which emerged from black Baptist churches in the 1930s and fused slave spirituals, jubilee songs, blues, and jazz with Anglo-American hymnody; and country and bluegrass gospel, which developed in tandem with country and bluegrass music mid-twentieth century. In this article, we use this term interchangeably between these different traditions. For more on the development of and distinctions in gospel music, see Stephen Shearon et al., “Gospel Music,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388, accessed May 16, 2014.

3. In the late 1980s, Rod Parsley preached and Clint Brown sang, making Ohio's World Harvest a showpiece of prosperity gospel televangelism. Founded in 1977, World Harvest Church (formerly Word of Life Church) grew to megachurch stature in the 1980s and to televangelism fame in the 1990s. See “About World Harvest Church,” World Harvest Church website, http://whclife.com/AboutWhc.aspx, accessed June 1, 2013.

4. “Multicultural,” in this congregation as in the American religious landscape as a whole, is difficult to document with precision. The congregation is advertised as multicultural, and, though the membership is mostly black, this could also mean multiple nationalities are represented. For more on the history, significance, and construction of a multicultural megachurch identity, see Marti, Gerardo, Worship across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Clint Brown's album Release was also the centerpiece of the church's sustained theological focus for several months. On my visit, there were screens kept on stage with the word “release” that also served as a reminder to “release” tithes to the ministry. Congregational visit, FaithWorld Church, Orlando, Florida, May 18, 2011; Clint Brown, Release, Habakkuk Music, 2012.

6. The language of “claiming victory” is common parlance inside the prosperity gospel. It is used to indicate that a future conflict has already been successfully resolved (victory) through the proper declaration of words (claiming).

7. In these years of prolific scholarship on American evangelicalism, definition has become an especially tricky task. David Bebbington famously defined it by its shared biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism, and others, such as Douglas Sweeney and Mark Noll, offer similar doctrinal shorthands. See Bebbington, David W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sweeney, Douglas A., The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005)Google Scholar; and Noll, Mark A., The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2010)Google Scholar. Others, such as Timothy Smith and Randall Balmer, have characterized it by its diversity, either as an “evangelical mosaic” or a “patchwork quilt,” respectively. See Timothy L. Smith, “The Evangelical Kaleidoscope and the Call to Christian Unity,” Christian Scholar's Review, January 1, 1986; Balmer, Randall, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Molly Worthen argued that American evangelicalism is better defined by its shared questions: how to reconcile faith and reason, how to know Jesus, and how to act on this faith (Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013]).

8. George Marsden provides the most helpful and widely used definition of fundamentalists as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicals” (Fundamentalism and American Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1980], 4) or, as Jerry Falwell put it, an evangelical who is angry about something. While fundamentalism earned its reputation for repudiating culture, those willing to operate on a national scale (like Jerry Falwell and now his son Jonathan) were as willing as any evangelical to play with cultural tools of engagement, albeit on their own terms. See Harding, Susan, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. The prosperity movement, as an offshoot of pentecostalism, was most willing of all religious conservatives to adapt to trends, seeing accommodation with modernity as a theologically desirable outcome. For pentecostalism’s gradual entry into popular culture, see Robins, R. G., Pentecostalism in America (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010)Google Scholar.

9. For an extended treatment of the role of market research, seeker sensitive churches, and church growth strategies in evangelicalism, see Worthen, , Apostles of Reason, 124–76Google Scholar.

10. We use the term “contemporary worship music” in this article in a technical sense to mean congregational music built around pop music forms and driven by the piano or guitar. Since the 1970s, contemporary worship music has evolved into a subgenre of contemporary Christian music (CCM) as well as into a music industry, replete with its own record labels, music stars, and distribution companies. It is important to note that the terms used to describe this type of music are contested and changing. “Praise and worship” and “modern worship” are other common monikers used to describe the same genre, while this music has also been placed under the even more problematic term “gospel.” For more on the naming conventions of contemporary worship music, see Ruth, Lester, “A Rose by Any Other Name: Attempts at Classifying North American Protestant Worship,” in The Conviction of Things Not Seen: Worship and Ministry in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Johnson, Todd (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002), 33–52 Google Scholar. For a detailed consideration of the history of contemporary worship music, see Ingalls, Monique Marie, “Awesome in This Place: Sound, Space, and Identity in Contemporary North American Evangelical Worship” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008)Google Scholar, or Nekola, Anna E., “Between This World and the Next: The Musical ‘Worship Wars’ and Evangelical Ideology in the United States, 1960–2005” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009)Google Scholar. For the historical roots of Christian rock, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, see Stowe, David, No Sympathy for the Devil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar, and Eskridge, Larry, God's Forever Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other scholarly work on contemporary worship music, see Nekola, Anna, “‘More Than Just a Music’: Evangelical Christian Anti-Rock Discourse and the Origins of the Culture Wars,” Popular Music 32 (October 2013): 407–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deborah Justice, “Public, Private; Contemporary, Traditional: Intersecting Dichotomies and Contested Agency in Mainline Protestant Worship Music,” Folklore Forum 40 (2010), at http://folkloreforum.net/2010/04/19/public-private-contemporary-traditional-intersecting-dichotomies-and-contestedagency-in-mainline-protestant-worship-music/; Webber, Robert E., “Praise and Worship Music: From Its Origins to Contemporary Use,” Pastoral Music 27 (February 2003): 21–23 Google Scholar; and Gormly, Eric, “Evangelizing through Appropriation: Toward a Cultural Theory on the Growth of Contemporary Christian Music,” Journal of Media and Religion 2 (2003): 251–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. We use the term “arena rock” here as shorthand for extravagant rock shows hosted at large entertainment or sports venues. The musical/performative genre of “arena rock” emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the introduction of new amplification technologies that allowed rock bands to present louder and cleaner performances at large venues and was pioneered by bands such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and the Who. In the 1970s and 1980s, these shows also incorporated light shows and pyrotechnics as part of the rock spectacle. Because the genre often defined a type of performance rather than a sound, multiple rock subgenres were associated with arena rock, including hard rock, heavy metal, glam rock, and modern rock. In the early twenty-first century, modern rock bands such as U2 and Coldplay continued to develop the arena rock concept with global tours that incorporated large stage structures and digital video projections. For our purposes, prosperity megachurches pioneered the importation of performative elements of spectacle featured in arena rock and translated them for use in the cavernous spaces of megachurch sanctuaries, creating what we call “arena rock worship.” Like the term arena rock, arena rock worship describes the setting and practices involved in a performance rather than the music itself.

12. See Miller, Steven P., Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 141 Google Scholar.

13. Bowler, Kate, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. chap. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Early American pentecostalism has been largely defined by its emphasis on speaking in tongues and, as Grant Wacker detailed, its primitivist and pragmatist impulses. See Wacker, Grant, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Stephens, Randall J., The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. The prosperity gospel represents both a minority position inside of denominational and independent pentecostalism and a movement that has outgrown its bounds.

15. For more on evangelicalism's reengagement with American culture in the postwar years, see Noll, Mark A., The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995);Google Scholar Balmer, Randall, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (New York: Basic Books, 2014);Google Scholar and Miller, Steven P., The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Hayden, Perry, “The Lord's Work … Henry Ford and I,” Voice of Healing, June 1954, 4 Google Scholar.

17. Hamblen, Stuart, “God Is a Good God,” Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1956 Google Scholar.

18. Bowler, Blessed. See chap. 2 for “faith,” chap. 3 for “wealth,” chap. 4 for “health,” and chap. 5 for “victory.”

19. Ibid., 77–107.

20. Sisters, Clark, “Name It, Claim It,” Sincerely, New Birth Records, 1982 Google Scholar.

21. Donald Lawrence, “The Law of Confession,” The Law of Confession, Part I, Verity Records, 2009.

22. Shirley Caesar, “He's Working It Out for You,” He's Working It Out for You, Sony Records, 1991.

23. For the distinction between “hard” and “soft” prosperity, see Bowler, Blessed, 97–98, 125–27.

24. John Kee, “I Believe,” The Essential John P. Kee, Verity Records, 2007.

25. William Murphy III, “Overflow,” The Sound, Murphy 3 Ministries, 2007. Murphy served as the worship leader at Bishop Eddie Long's New Birth Missionary Baptist for a number of years before starting the dReam Center in 2006.

26. Coleman, Simon, The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

27. Hillsong Music, “All Things Are Possible,” All Things Are Possible, Hillsong, 1997.

28. World Changers Church International (Atlanta, Georgia) and Winners Church (West Palm Beach, Florida). For examples of triumphant logos, see Lakewood Church's golden globe and Winner's Church in Queens, New York, for its gleaming trophies. Lakewood Church website, http://www.lakewoodchurch.com/Pages/Home.aspx, accessed May 1, 2014; Winners Church website, http://www.winnerschurch.com/, accessed May 1, 2014.

29. Lawrence, Donald, “Back II Eden,” The Law of Confession, Part I, Verity Records, 2009 Google Scholar.

30. Free Chapel, “Very Same Power,” Jentezen Franklin Presents Power of the Cross at Free Chapel with Ricardo Sanchez, 2009.

31. For more on the history of the megachurch, see Loveland, Anne C. and Wheeler, Otis B., From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and Thumma, Scott, Travis, Dave, Warren, Rick, et al., Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America's Largest Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007)Google Scholar.

32. Chaves, Mark, “All Creatures Great and Small: Megachurches in Context,” Review of Religious Research 47 (2006): 329–46Google Scholar. For more on the liturgical change involved in “seeker sensitive” services, see Ruth, Lester, “Lex Agendi, Lex Orandi: Toward an Understanding of Seeker Services as a New Kind of Liturgy,” Worship 70 (1996): 386–405 Google Scholar.

33. For more on American revivalism, see Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Richey, Russell E., “From Quarterly to Camp Meeting,” Methodist History 23 (July 1985): 199–213 Google Scholar; Richey, Russell E., Early American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Long, Kathryn Teresa, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Kidd, Thomas S., The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Robins, Roger, “Vernacular American Landscape: Methodists, Camp Meetings, and Social Responsibility,” Religion and American Culture 4 (Summer 1994): 165–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Taves, Ann, “Methodist Enthusiasm,” in her Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

34. For more on the significance of revivalists and rhetoric, see Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, and Stout, Harry S., The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

35. See Loveland and Wheeler, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch, 127.

36. National megachurch data used for comparison is drawn from Thumma and Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths, 8 (table 1.2).

37. Sheri Winesett, “Pentecostal Preacher to Prosperity Powerhouse: A Case Study,” unpublished paper in the author’s possession.

38. Some famous prosperity megachurch preachers simply did it all: William Murphy III, the gospel music artist behind the praise anthems “Let It Rise” and “Praise Is What I Do”; Paul Morton, overseeing bishop of the Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship who released hits like “Chasing after You,” “Wonderful God,” and “Show Us Your Glory”; and Marvin Winans, of the Winans family gospel dynasty, who founded his own thriving megachurch, The Perfecting Church, in Detroit, Michigan.

39. For the summary table of megachurches dubbed “prosperity” and a theological, educational, associational, and rhetorical rationale for these methods, see Bowler, Blessed, appendices A and B.

40. See ibid., 184. America's largest megachurches should not be imagined only as Sunday worship houses but rather as ministerial empires, frequently complete with their own Bible schools, secondary schools, publishing house, television program, and roster of allied speakers and supporters. Their electronic mouthpiece carried the voice of the senior pastor so clearly that the average American was far more likely to know their local megachurch pastor's latest book than that of even the most popular theologian, denominational or otherwise.

41. Religious television had originally been a vehicle for the Protestant mainstream until the 1960s, when a landmark federal decision made religious broadcasting into a for-profit market. See Hangen, Tona J., Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), esp. chap. 6 Google Scholar.

42. Jimmy Swaggart would retract his support for the prosperity gospel the following year and engage in an ongoing feud with prosperity preacher Marvin Gorman, a sparring match that only ended after each man had exposed the other's sexual misconduct.

43. As the historian Edith Blumhofer argued, “In a sense deliverance evangelism never died; rather, it remade itself into the electronic church” (Edith Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993], 217).

44. The heart language at the pietistic core of revivalist preaching has a vast literature. See especially Lieburg, Fred van and Lindmark, Daniel, Pietism, Revivalism, and Modernity, 1650–1850 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)Google Scholar.

45. As Douglas Harrison argues, Tammy Faye's infamy as a heavily costumed “gospel diva” and evangelical nonconformist reflects a desire on the part of white evangelicals to be recognized and yet not “succumb to the blandishments of the secular celebrity's worldly elegance” (Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012], 147).

46. Russell E. Richey, “Revivalism: Definition in the Spirit of the Camp Meeting,” unpublished paper in author's possession. Richey argues that revivalism has always struggled with the conflation of the revivalist with the revival, as seen in the First Great Awakening (James Davenport) and the Second Great Awakening (Lorenzo Dow).

47. For more on these revival duos, see Kee, Kevin, “Marketing the Gospel: Music in English-Canadian Protestant Revivalism, 1884–1957,” in Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology, ed. Mouw, Richard J. and Noll, Mark A. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 96–122 Google Scholar.

48. For more on the innovative techniques of Aimee Semple McPherson, see Sutton, Matthew Avery, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

49. Humbard, Rex, Your Key to God's Bank (Akron, Ohio: Rex Humbard Ministries, 1977)Google Scholar.

50. Harrell, David Edwin, Jr., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 266–72Google Scholar.

51. For more on evangelicalism's history of media innovation, see Lee, Shayne and Sinitiere, Phil, Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (New York: New York University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Lambert, Frank, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

52. There is a much longer history of rock, pop, and folk music making their way into Christian worship services. For white American evangelicals, this trend picked up steam in the Jesus movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where Christian folk and rock music emerged from churches like Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and was popularized at large Christian festivals and revivals such as Explo ‘72, a large conference hosted by Campus Crusade and headlined by Billy Graham in Dallas, Texas. For African American Christians, the trend began much earlier in the 1920s and 1930s, when black musicians and composers such as Thomas Dorsey, Rosetta Tharpe, and Mahalia Jackson combined blues, jazz, and ragtime with nineteenth-century gospel music and black spirituals to create black gospel music. For more on the music of the Jesus People, see Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil, and Eskridge, God's Forever Family. For more on the birth and development of black gospel, see Harris, Michael W., The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Darden, Bob, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum, 2004)Google Scholar.

53. The transformation from adult contemporary to arena rock in worship music also occurred outside of churches. The hard rock style that had been common at Christian music festivals since the 1970s invaded worship music in two ways in the mid-1990s. First, British songwriter Martin Smith and his band Delirious? brought the delayed guitar rock of U2 in a “British invasion” of American churches with hit songs like “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?” and “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever” (see Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place,” chap. 4). Second, evangelist Louie Giglio jumpstarted the “Passion Conferences” in Austin, Texas, developing the outdoor festivities into the launching pad for future evangelical worship stars Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, and Matt Redman. Steeped in the evangelical revival tradition, Passion created the first Christian music festival focused entirely on worship instead of evangelism or subcultural entertainment. However, it was prosperity megachurches that first imagined what the production and consumption of arena rock could look like within the walls of a sanctuary. When it came to the influence of megachurches in shifting the worship soundscape toward a large rock production, prosperity megachurches were at the forefront.

54. Like arena rock, “adult contemporary” is not a pure musical genre marked by specific musical styles, conventions, or instrumentation. Instead, it is generally conceived as a consortium of popular music genres, from easy listening jazz to soft rock to pop, with broad radio appeal. For our purposes, however, the adult contemporary sound of contemporary worship music from the late 1970s to the late 1990s was marked by a broad though definable musical style. More often than not, songs were led from the piano or synthesizer instead of from the acoustic guitar or even from a drum and bass foundation. The music also frequently featured jazz elements (often a saxophone or brass section interlude); a highly compressed, even quiet, electric guitar; and a focus on a small ensemble of singers, usually singing the melody in unison. For many churches, the adult contemporary sound was a compromise between hard rock and no rock music. For others, like Willow Creek Community Church and Saddleback Church, it was precisely because of its broad radio appeal that adult contemporary became the dominant mode for contemporary worship music.

55. For Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, operating the technical production of weekly services required a media director, an audio director, and a full-time staff of a dozen specialists. See Mark Martof, “Technologies for Worship Reach New Heights at Lakewood Church,” Technologies for Worship Magazine, March 2005, http://www.tfwm.com/Lakewoodfeature.

56. For more on rock music's grounding in youth rebellion and its subsequent marketing, see Altschuler, Glenn C., All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Friedlander, Paul, Rock and Roll: A Social History (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Lipsitz, George, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), chap. 13 Google Scholar; and Grossberg, Lawrence, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), chaps. 5-8Google Scholar.

57. Since the import of its popular worship anthem “Shout to the Lord” in the mid-1990s, Hillsong music has been a major influence on contemporary worship music in America. In this globalized movement, Hillsong music's style, performative culture, and commercial structure looked and sounded no different than any American counterpart. Hillsong regularly distributed its music through the American worship label Integrity, its artists often shared the concert stage with American counterparts, and its leaders regularly rubbed shoulders with their American colleagues at conferences on both continents. Hillsong music, then, did not represent the indigenization of contemporary worship music but its globalization, mirroring American musical culture, practices, and sensibilities a world away. For an introductory consideration of Hillsong's music, see E. H. McIntyre, “Brand of Choice: Why Hillsong Music Is Winning Sales and Souls,” Australian Religion Studies Review 20 (2007): 175–94, and John Connell, “Hillsong: A Megachurch in the Sydney Suburbs,” Australian Geographer 36 (2005): 315–32. For an introductory consideration of Hillsong's lyrical and liturgical theology, see Riches, Tanya, “The Evolving Theological Emphasis of Hillsong Worship (1996– 2007),” Australasian Pentecostal Studies 13 (2010): 87–133 Google Scholar.

58. For a live recording of worship at Hillsong Church in 1993, see “Hillsong—Let Your Presence Fall—Stone's Been Rolled Away 1993,” Youtube video, 3:11, posted by “psrman1,” February 19, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼kezvYAbXyL8.

59. Darlene Zschech replaced Geoff Bullock as worship leader at Hillsong Church in 1996. Zschech would go on to become the first female worship leader featured on an Integrity Music live worship album. Even in 2013, she remained one of the most visible female worship leaders in the world—a famous songwriter, author of several books, and a seasoned singer who performed for the Pope at the Vatican and for the President of the United States. See Camerin Courtney, “The Power of Praising God,” Today's Christian Woman, March 2001, http://www.todayschristianwoman.com/articles/2001/march/3.36.html.

60. See the 1998 Hillsong Conference DVD for examples of the various musical styles and stage productions that Hillsong utilized in the late 1990s. DVD playback is available at “Hillsong Shout to the Lord (1998) DVD,” Youtube video, 1:12:20, posted by “janejarh,” March 21, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼YGe3L4Yc9yE.

61. Hillsong, though a brand and force of its own, had roots in the Assemblies of God denomination. Brian and Bobbie Houston founded the Hills Christian Life Centre in 1983 within the Australian Christian Churches, the Australian branch of the Assemblies of God. Brian Houston would go on to serve as the president of the denomination in Australia for twelve years, from 1997 to 2009.

62. For an example of Sampson's spot-on Cobain vocal timbre, see his performance at a 1996 Youth Alive NSW event at “Marty Sampson—Chosen One Youth Alive NSW 1996,” Youtube video, 4:52, posted by “Racheljda,” December 15, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼MZDX-Wx1ZHk.

63. Thomas Bergler makes a similar argument for the cult of youth that emerged in American evangelical churches in the late twentieth century, where musical changes played a significant role in growing younger congregations and developing robust youth ministries. In the twenty-first century, Hillsong has played a central role in further developing and popularizing what Bergler saw as the “juvenilization” of American worship music via its wide distribution of albums in the American market. For more on the development of the cult of youth in American churches, see Bergler, Thomas E., The Juvenilization of American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012)Google Scholar.

64. Hillsong United's youthful vibe was on full display in a “behind-the-scenes” documentary featured on Hillsong United's 2008 DVD, The I Heart Revolution. Mimicking the common FBI warning label at the beginning of DVD movies, the documentary began with a warning that “the following footage contains tomfoolery, shenanigans and horseplay of every nature.” See Hillsong Music Australia, The I Heart Revolution: With Hearts as One, Castle Hill, NSW, Australia, Hillsong Music Australia, 2008.

65. See the live recording of the song “Made Me Glad,” in Hillsong Music Australia, Blessed: Hillsong Live Worship, Castle Hill, NSW, Australia, Hillsong Music Australia, 2001. Also available at “Made Me Glad & Through It All—Hillsong Music Australia—DVD Blessed,” Youtube video, 13:32, posted by “Renam Pablo,” April 5, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼hiZr3p0IQEU. For an example of the adoption of professional stage lighting in a contemporary worship service at a megachurch, see Justice, Deborah, “Sonic Change, Sacred Change, Social Change: Music and the Reconfiguration of American Christianity” (Ph.D diss., Indiana University, 2012), chap. 6 Google Scholar.

66. See the beginning of the 2006 Hillsong Conference DVD— Hillsong Music Australia, Mighty to Save: The Sound of Worshipping Generations, Castle Hill, NSW, Australia, Hillsong Music Australia, 2006, or the beginning of the 2007 Hillsong Conference DVD— Hillsong Music Australia, Saviour King: Hillsong Live, Castle Hill, NSW, Australia, Hillsong Music Australia, 2007. The opening session of both conferences integrated film and live musical accompaniment that built the emotional energy of the audience before the Hillsong band exploded on stage.

67. It is hard to overestimate Hillsong's influence on contemporary worship music. With global assets worth $150 million, the Hillsong brand has become a global empire. Hillsong's churches operating in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States all serve as ambassadors of the Hillsong brand and experience. However, more potent than any Hillsong church is its music label, which has now published more than one hundred albums—fifty of which have gone gold or platinum—and won several Dove awards and nominations over the last fifteen years. The main engine behind Hillsong's continuing brand expansion has been its contemporary worship music, now sung in thousands of congregations around the world every week. See Adele Ferguson, “Prophet-Minded: Pentecostal Churches Are Not Waiting to Inherit the Earth; They Are Taking It Now, Tax-Free,” Business Review Weekly, May 2005, 34–41.

68. Ethnographic visit, Wave Church, Virginia Beach, February 8, 2010.

69. Publishers and record labels such as Maranatha! Music, Vineyard Music, and Integrity Music joined with licensing companies such as CCLI and publications such as Worship Leader to form the core of the worship music industry. In the twenty-first century, the online portion of the industry has exploded with websites such as worshiptogether.com, worshipsong.com, and Paul Baloche's leadworship.com. The worship music industry in America, of course, is much older, dating back to psalter publishing in the eighteenth century and then a diversification in hymnal publishing in the late nineteenth century with the introduction of new hymns and gospel songs from authors such as William B. Bradbury, John R. Sweney, Fanny Crosby, and Ira Sankey. The twentieth century brought a shift from sheet music and songbooks to radio and recordings as the primary means of distribution and consumption, while gospel music diversified into different subgenres aimed at different markets. At the same time, American evangelicals, primarily through the convictions of the Christian fundamentalist subculture that emerged in the early twentieth century, began to distance themselves from popular cultural forms while at the same time building parallel cultural worlds that, paradoxically, rejected secular values while measuring success in terms of the secular market. Aimee Semple McPherson's simultaneous appropriation of Hollywood celebrity and rejection ofHollywood values was a fitting example. By the mid-twentieth century, religious record labels such as Word Records provided means for the professional recording of southern gospel music and eventually contemporary Christian music as well. Thus, when contemporary worship music finally industrialized in the 1990s, subgenres of black and white gospel music had been commercially marketed and distributed for decades. For more on the commercial history of worship music, see Cusic, Don, The Sound of Light (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2002)Google Scholar; Harrison, Then SingsMy Soul; MouwandNoll, Wonderful Words of Life; and McDannell, Colleen, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), chap. 8 Google Scholar. For more on American evangelicalism's strained relationship with popular culture, see Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

70. For a history of contemporary Christian music (CCM), see Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil; Howard, Jay R. and Streck, John M., Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Romanowski, William D., “Rock ‘n’ Religion: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of the Contemporary Christian Music Industry” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 1990)Google Scholar.

71. Though contemporary worship music emerged in the charismatic church network of Calvary Chapel and Vineyard churches in the 1970s and early 1980s, by the 1990s, it had made its way into most evangelical and some mainline denominations. By that time, the major worship record labels Maranatha! Music, Vineyard Music, and Hosanna! Music marketed new contemporary worship music to larger audiences while CCLI provided a licensing service to use the music in worship services.

72. Though Geoff Shearn's U.K. organization, Christian Music Association (CMA), developed a licensing program in the 1980s, Howard Rachinski's CCLI became the sole operator for licensing in the United States and, eventually, the dominant global operator by the 2000s. While serving as a music director at Bible Temple in Portland, Oregon, Rachinski began developing a licensing organization that would meet the needs of churches using what were, at the time, unconventional musical settings that involved leading music from overhead projectors instead of out of hymnals. Starpraise ministries, CCLI's predecessor, was born in 1985 and offered blanket licenses for specific copying activities in churches. Rachinski eventually secured access to hundreds of publishers and more than two hundred publisher catalogs, which then attracted more than 9,500 churches to sign up for licenses in CCLI's first year of operation. See “Who We Are > Company Profile,” CCLI website, http://www.ccli.com/WhoWeAre/CompanyProfile.aspx, accessed September 2, 2013.

73. Nielsen's Soundscan technology first appeared for mainstream genres in 1991 but adopted the Christian/gospel genre in 1995. Soundscan provided systematic tracking of album sales for stores with Internet access and a point-of-sale inventory system. Soundscan data was then offered as a subscription service for music industry executives and companies. Billboard eventually based its charts on Soundscan data. For contemporary worship, Soundscan provided industry executives with a means to track the growth of worship music sales around the country. Billboard then translated this data for consumers and other church leaders via its charts. For more on Soundscan's integration with CCM, see Deborah Evans Price, “Contemporary Christian Music: With Media Exposure and Chart Success, Contemporary Christian Artists Are Baptized into the Mainstream,” Billboard, April 27, 1996, 34, 36.

74. “Shout to the Lord” debuted on CCLI's top 25 list in August 1998 at number 19. By August 1999, it was at number 2. It remained at number 2 until August 2003, when it fell to number 3. A year later, it fell to number 4, where it remained until February 2006. Since then, it has seen a slow decline but was still on the list at number 25 as of February 2013. See “Top 25 Songs,” CCLI Website, http://www.ccli.com/Support/LicenseCoverage/Top25Lists.aspx, accessed August 15, 2013.

75. Prosperity megachurches were not the only organizations to take advantage of new market-research-based business models available for worship music. Bill Hybel's Willow Creek Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, were two of the first churches to pioneer marketresearch models for church growth. By the early 1990s, the market culture and logic that was integral to Willow Creek's success made its way to other megachurches and aspiring megachurches. This came, in part, through the Willow Creek Association, a “franchising” of the Willow Creek seeker strategy that provided consulting materials for other churches that desired to mimic Willow Creek's approach. But in other ways, Willow Creek's success and national visibility provided its own advertising. Rick Warren and Saddleback Church followed a similar franchising strategy in the late 1990s with the release of Warren's The Purpose Driven Life and its associated materials for churches. For more on Willow Creek's seeker service and its use of contemporary worship music, see Ruth, “Lex Agendi, Lex Orandi.” For more on Saddleback's seeker service and its use of contemporary worship music, see Wilford, Justin G., Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism (New York: New York University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. The church-growth movement emerged from the work of Donald McGavran, particularly from his development of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in the 1960s and 1970s. The movement has significantly shaped American megachurches’ development of “seeker sensitive” worship services, which almost always incorporate contemporary worship music. For a general overview of the movement, see Lucke, Glenn, “Church Growth Movement,” in Religion and American Cultures: An Encylopedia of Traditions, Diversity, and Popular Expressions, ed. Laderman, Gary and Léon, Luis D. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2003)Google Scholar. For a primary source consideration, see McGavran, Donald A., Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980)Google Scholar.

77. Bowler, Blessed, 102–3.

78. This was an argument as old as the rise of the first millionaires as Protestants tried to account for what made the business world tick. From New Thought's Napoleon Hill to “rags to riches” authors like Russell Conwell, many penned thick defenses of the righteous workings of the market. See Bowler, Blessed, 31–34.

79. Deborah Evans Price, “Praised Be!: Worship Music Jumps from the Church to the Charts,” Billboard, October 11, 2008, 28.

80. Two 1993 albums, We Are One and Rejoice Africa, were recorded at the prosperity megachurch Rhema Church in Johannesburg, South Africa. There were other Hosanna recording artists, such as Robert Gay, Ed Gungor, and Jack Hayford, who, though they did not sit firmly within the movement, were sympathizers within the larger prosperity orbit.

81. Still, Integrity Music's worship series in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a compromise between the faceless approach of the earlier era and the artist-dominated approach that would emerge in the late 1990s. While each album featured one worship leader, the album art highlighted clip-art instead of images of the artist or worship band.

82. Price, “Praised Be!” 28.

83. Ibid., 29.

84. Sanctus Real and Hillsong United came to Lakewood in 2007, Phil Wickam and Ricardo Rodriguez in 2011, and Matt Redman and Christy Nockels in 2012.

85. Price, “Praised Be!” 27–29.

86. T. D. Jake's Dexterity Sounds, Hillsong Music, Fellowship Church Grapevine's UOI Records (under Creality Publishing, Inc.), Creflo Dollar's Arrow Records, and Mars Hill Music are but a few of the many megachurch record labels that produce praise and worship music for a national market.

87. Prosperity megachurch websites were a great example, often featuring large portraits or headshots of their pastor(s) with advertisements for their most recent books or speaking tours and links to their personal websites.

88. Sinitiere, Phillip Luke, “Preaching the Good News Glad: Joel Osteen's Tel-e-evangelism” in Global and Local Televangelism, ed. Thomas, Pradip Ninan and Lee, Philip (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 87–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. Large churches that had vast musical resources, such as Lakewood, would buttress the piano and the choir with a variety of instrumentation, including drums, bass, horns, strings, and occasional electric guitar flourishes. The musical style at Lakewood represented a fusion of gospel subgenres, featuring an emotive, swaying choir influenced by black gospel, a small cadre of vocal leaders with microphones that played on the small ensembles found in southern gospel, and a song repertoire that featured classic hymn texts such as “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” and “Amazing Grace.”

90. For an example of this musical production on an average Sunday morning, see broadcast footage from a full service at Lakewood under John Osteen's tenure at “John Osteen—When you are discouraged. (Full Service),” online video clip, Youtube, July 3, 2011, http://youtu.be/IQT-N9GOmFo, accessed June 1, 2014.

91. Houghton's music proved to be an important attraction, as Lakewood boasted one of the largest multiracial churches in America. For more on music's critical role in marketing to different ethnic demographics, see Marti, Worship across the Racial Divide. For more on Houghton’s approach to multiethnic worship, see Reagan, Wen, “Blessed to Be a Blessing,” in The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, ed. Ingalls, Monique M. and Yong, Amos (University Park: Penn State University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

92. See Lakewood Church, “Beautiful Things Open,” online video clip, You Tube, September 24, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼0SVDB3h6d4w, accessed June 1, 2014.

93. See Charles Ward, “Praise Be the Music—Lakewood's Profile Is Rising on the Way to Compaq Center Move,” Houston Chronicle, December 7, 2003.

94. Lakewood was not alone in attracting top talent for permanent church positions. For the most talented or popular worship artists, the largest megachurches offered appealing employment. Big-name worship artists beyond Cindy Cruse-Ratcliff and Israel Houghton, such as Darlene Zschech, Martha Munizzi, and Ricardo Sanchez, all served as worship leaders at prosperity megachurches, bases from which they could record and produce new material and tour outside of Sunday morning services while still maintaining the stability of a salaried position.

95. See Stevenson, Jill C., Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), esp. chap. 6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stevenson argues that megachurches, particularly evangelical megachurches, intentionally create “affective atmospheres” around specific brands that allow believers to experience a customized spiritual experience.

96. Lakewood Live, We Speak to Nations, Hosanna! Music, 2002, CD insert.

97. Brown, Clint. Judah People: A People of Praise (Denver, Colo.: Legacy Publishers International, 2006)Google Scholar.

98. Cindy Cruse-Ratcliff, The Spoken Word, RPM Music, 2011.

99. Lakewood Live, We Speak to Nations, CD insert.

100. Brown, Judah People, 28.

101. See Robbie B. H. Goh, “Hillsong and ‘Megachurch’ Practice: Semiotics, Spatial Logic, and the Embodiment of Contemporary Evangelical Protestantism,” Material Religion 4 (2008): 284–304. The “performance of the mega” may also be drug-like. In a mixed-methods sociological study, Wellman, Corcoran, and Stockly-Meyerdirk found that many megachurch “attendees described an intense need or desire for the emotional and spiritual megachurch experience, some equating it to a type of drug or high, analogous to how some exercisers describe a ‘runner's high’ and being addicted to exercise.” They proposed that what they coded as “emotional energy” (EE) in their interviews “may primarily represent an oxytocin ‘cocktail’ … which generates feelings of being ‘high’ or elated.” “Megachurch services may be particularly conducive for increasing oxytocin,” Wellman et al. explained, “since they combine group singing with the display of other's emotional experiences [via live video recordings projected on large screens] in an aesthetic context that encourages emotional expression.” See James K. Wellman, Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate Stockley-Meyerdirk, “‘God Is like a Drug …’: Explaining Interaction Ritual Chains in American Megachurches,” unpublished manuscript, 2013.

102. See the youthful co-marketing of a church and its music on the homepage of Gateway Worship: “About Gateway Worship,” Gateway Worship website, http://gatewayworship.com/, accessed June 1, 2013.

103. Charles Capps Ministries, Inc., Facebook Page, https://www.facebook.com/CharlesCappsMinistries, posted January 31, 2013. The term “Word of Faith” comes from the publications and ministry of Kenneth Hagin, popularly (and incorrectly) assumed to be the originator of the prosperity gospel. For the multiple distinctions of prosperity terms, including Word of Faith, see Bowler, Blessed, appendix B.