Easter Sunday, 2009, was the Sunday heard ‘;round the evangelical internet: New Spring Church, the second-largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention and among the top one hundred largest churches in the US, had begun their service with the song ‘;Highway to Hell’ by hard rock band AC/DC. They had brazenly crossed the sacred/secular musical divide on the most important Sunday of the year, and commentary abounded on the value of such a step. Many were offended at the ‘;desecration’ of such a holy day, deriding Newspring as the ‘;theater of the absurd.’ Others cheered New Spring’s engagement with ‘;the culture’ and suggested that music could be used to convert non-Christians. No mere debate over stylistic preferences, many expressed that foundational aspects of evangelical identity were at stake.While many books have been written about religious music that utilizes popular music styles (a.k.a. ‘;contemporary Christian music’), there has yet to be a scholarly treatment of how and why popular, secular music is utilized by churches. This book addresses that lacuna by examining this emerging trend in evangelical and ‘;emerging’ churches in America. What is the motivation behind using music that seemingly has no connection to Christian theology, values, or themessuch as music by Katy Perry, AC/DC, or Van Halenand what can we learn about post-denominational evangelical churches in America by uncovering these motives? In this book, April Stace uncovers several themes from an ethnographic study of these churches: the increasingly-porous boundary between the sacred and the secular, the importance placed on ‘;authenticity’ in contemporary American culture, how evangelicals are responding to what they perceive is an increasingly-secular society, the ‘;turn to the subject’ of contemporary culture, the desire to leave a space for expression of doubt in the worship service without fully authorizing that doubt, and the individualization of the construction of religious identity in the modern era.
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