LAUSR

In North American Protestantism’s so-called worship wars, the musical battle lines were drawn between traditional hymns and contemporary worship songs. Scholars and practitioners on both sides of the divide often made broad generalizations about the musical and lyrical characteristics of these two repertories, ignoring or downplaying the marked distinctions within the categories. Contemporary worship music (hereafter CWM) can be traced to the late 1960s, one might expect the differences within it to be less pronounced than in the hymn repertory of several hundred years, but important distinctions have emerged over CWM’s more than forty-year history. And while growing attention is being paid to worship song lyrics, musical style remains infrequently addressed. This article aims in part to illustrate the point—one that may seem obvious to its practitioners—that CWM is not a stylistically homogenous repertory. Further, the differences within CWM reflect both the changing contexts of its creation and differing concerns and convictions of its songwriters. To highlight some of these crucial differences and explore their meanings and effects, we will take a roughly chronological journey through three distinct CWM styles. Understanding the concerns and convictions out of which these different strands of CWM originated helps to clarify how these streams have converged and diverged to create the “splintered art world” of worship music today.