Congregational Music, Conflict and Community

The study of tradition and change in North American Christian congregational worship could produce numerous kinds of ethnography. One of the most important ways of understanding Christian worship is through the musical choices enacted each week in church services. Over the past several decades, North American congregations have engaged in a discussion of music that is sometimes referred to as the “worship wars.” In Congregational Music, Conflict and Community, Jonathan Dueck proposes and elucidates three lenses for understanding the central issues animating the worship wars. The first lens considers the style of music used during weekly church gatherings. Over the years, the musical possibilities have been more strictly assigned to the general categories of “traditional” (typically hymns, choirs, and instrumentation of piano and organ) and “contemporary” (songs based on pop styles and often accompanied by electrified instruments). In planning weekly worship gatherings, congregations tend to choose one of three options: one service, with a focus on either traditional or contemporary music; separate traditional and contemporary services each week; or a third model, “blended worship,” which seeks an accommodation of multiple musical styles within one worship service. Dueck's research indicates that the categories of worship music exercise significant influence on the identity of a worshiping community.A second lens to understand the worship wars, Dueck suggests, is theology. In this perspective, musical style is secondary to the ways musical choices enact theological understandings of God and the action of worship. But after observing social relationships during his fieldwork at three Canadian Mennonite churches, Dueck proposes a third lens as the most apt: the aesthetics of encounter. In the introductory chapter, he situates this concept within existing frames of aesthetics. “I began to think of the most basic stakes of ‘the worship wars,’” he writes, “in terms of aesthetics—an experiential, embodied, practiced feelingful way of encountering the world—rooted in individuals’ contingent and particular life experiences with other people through music” (4). In his analysis of the three congregations, Dueck prioritizes the experiences and memories of individuals within the community. The central issue for these individuals, he argues, is not musical style or theological belief but “the ways music becomes beautiful to each of us because it is embedded in our enduring and changing relationships with others” (6). The book thus takes on much wider relevance than a study of specific religious or musical practices; it touches on issues central to musicking in any context.The heat of the worship wars has abated in recent years, allowing us to look back and consider the issues and directions pursued with a broader perspective. Recent work by Monique Ingalls, Lester Ruth, Lim Swee Hong, and others has contributed to our understanding of the choices worshiping communities make for their gatherings, and Dueck's book is an important entry into this discussion. Supported by research from his fieldwork in the early 2000s, his book includes one chapter on each congregation, with a final chapter that revisits the same three communities in 2009 and 2012. A distinctive strength of Dueck's research is not only that each congregation he observed represents a specific response to the worship wars—traditional (First Mennonite Church), contemporary (River West Christian Church), and blended (Holyrood Mennonite Church) musical styles—but that all three congregations are within the Mennonite tradition and near enough to interact with one another in occasional combined gatherings. His engagement with each church is interesting in itself, but by considering all three, Dueck builds a compellingly comprehensive picture of individual and communal choices in Christian congregational worship.Dueck doesn't see “the church” as a monolithic, impersonal, institutional entity, but rather as a gathering of families and individuals in all their diversity and different perspectives. Music in Christian worship is therefore interesting to Dueck as it plays a “constructive role in the social fabric of a (Mennonite) church” and relates to “the negotiation of identity between diverse and overlapping groups” (20). Church communities draw on tradition but also actively modify and reconstruct tradition in response to “whatever social and cultural referents are important” to them (46). A tension always exists between the exclusivity of maintaining a continuity of tradition and the desire to welcome all people into the living process of tradition-making. The three congregations Dueck observes provide intriguing glimpses into different ways of navigating that tension.Along with its primary focus on aesthetics and social relationships, the book touches on issues of decision-making in community, tradition, cultural memory, ethnicity, identity, inward and outward focuses among Christian congregations, the history of and current trends in Mennonite worship, and reflexivity in ethnography. Like Dueck, I grew up attending a Mennonite church—in Illinois, but with many similarities to the Canadian congregations Dueck describes—and observed the worship wars firsthand in changes that my congregation navigated from the 1970s through the 1990s. I appreciated Dueck's careful, reflexive ethnographic work, which allowed me to see my own experience afresh. His insider status throughout his fieldwork, which sometimes included participation in the music group leading from the platform, brings unique insights. In sharing excerpts of his fieldnotes, he is also honest about moments when his status proved complicated in interactions with church members.I valued the clarity of Dueck's writing throughout the book, and especially in the introduction. His research question, fieldwork methods, and terminology are always clear, and the introduction presents a map for the rest of the book so that the reader proceeds with confident assurance. I have already recommended this book to my students as a model ethnography. Dueck's thoughtful engagement with numerous theoretical approaches, along with his example of ethnography close to home, will be valuable to many other ethnographers of music in community.

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