Worship leaders pick most of the music, often with no input from the church’s pastor. Only 1 in 10 sang mostly modern songs, while the same percentage sang mostly hymns. Four in 10 sang more modern songs than hymns. He asked details, like who picked songs, whether churches sang contemporary songs or hymns, whether some songs were banned, as well as asking for a church’s favorite hymns.Ībout 1 in 5 churches sang more hymns than modern songs, while a third sang as many hymns as modern tunes. He eventually collected data from 127 congregations - not a representative national sample, but enough, he said, to give a snapshot of the worship life of local churches.
Will Bishop.(Photo courtesy Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) He sent surveys to more than 900 congregations in five different parts of the country: Louisville, Memphis, Oklahoma City and New York, along with rural Colorado and Louisiana. You may not know what’s going on in the bigger world.”īishop said he started working on his survey to help his students know what to expect when they start working in churches. “If you’re in a small church, you may not have any connections. “They’re all going to the same conferences they’re all kind of hanging out with the same people, he said.
Music at big churches is often put together by full-time staffers who have time to track down all the latest songs and follow the latest trends. That’s true in big churches, he said, but not everywhere. The charts also can leave the impression that the only songs being sung in worship are hits from Hillsong, Bethel and other megachurches. (Photo by Nathan Mullet/Unsplash/Creative Commons) Give a gift of $30 or more to The Roys Report this month, and you will receive a copy of “Nervous Breakthrough: Finding Freedom from Fear and Anxiety in a World That Feeds It” by Christy Boulware. They also miss when churches sing out of hymnals or other songbooks, rather than projecting songs on a screen. But they often miss out on some of the details of worship in local congregations - such as who is picking songs or who plays them.
He said companies like Christian Copyright Licensing International - better known as CCLI - do a good job tracking the most popular songs used in churches. “Anything goes.”īishop has been working on a recent survey project to better understand the worship music used in local churches, especially smaller congregations, in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. “Smaller churches are like the Wild West,” said Will Bishop, associate professor of church music and worship at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Step into a big Baptist church on Sunday morning and chances are you’ll hear the same popular worship songs played at other big churches around the country.īut show up in a small church, and you never know what you’ll find - anything from “How Great Thou Art” to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
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