Worship across the Racial Divide
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Many scholars and church leaders believe that music and worship style are essential in stimulating diversity in congregations. Gerardo Marti draws on interviews with more than 170 congregational leaders and parishioners, as well as his experiences participating in worship services in a wide variety of Protestant, multiracial Southern Californian churches, to present this insightful study of the role of music in creating congregational diversity.Worship across the Racial Divide offers a surprising conclusion: that there is no single style of worship or music that determines the likelihood of achieving a multiracial church. Far more important are the complex of practices of the worshipping community in the production and absorption of music. Multiracial churches successfully diversify by stimulating unobtrusive means of interracial and interethnic relations; in fact, preparation for music apart from worship gatherings proves to be just as important as its performance during services. Marti shows that aside from and even in spite of the varying beliefs of attendees and church leaders, diversity happens because music and worship create practical spaces where cross-racial bonds are formed.
This groundbreaking book sheds light on how race affects worship in multiracial churches. It will allow a new understanding of the dynamics of such churches, and provide crucial aid to church leaders for avoiding the pitfalls that inadvertently widen the racial divide.
Features
- Challenges commonsense assumptions about the relationship between race-ethnicity and music in churches
- Shows that practical activity, not mystical notions of worship, determines the successful cultivation of multiracial churches
Reviews
"This is a brave book that dares to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the intersections of race, worship and music. It is a model of engaged scholarship and will be essential reading for pastors, worship leaders, and students of congregations. Gerardo Marti is emerging as one of the leading sociologists of religion in the United States with a distinctive methodological approach in the field of Congregational Studies."
---William McKinney, President Emeritus, Pacific School of Religion
"Dr. Marti makes a unique and important contribution to our understanding of multi-racial churches as worshiping communities. His central focus on the worship ritual helps us to understand the meaning and lived experience of multiculturalism for participants. For social scientists and other scholars, he helps us to understand the social processes which forge commitment and identification across the most divisive of social barriers. A smart, interesting, and humane book."
---Penny Edgell, author of Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life
"Marti is a master at unpacking the culture of a congregation. Music, he shows us, is never just about sound. It's about who and how, feelings and bodies and ethnic identities. What he tells us about how music works is far more interesting and complicated than the how-to books would have us think."
---Nancy Ammerman, author of Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners
"Gerardo Marti adds another valuable volume to his works as an accomplished researcher and sociologist about multiethnic churches in America. What is most valuable about the book is the large collection of quotes sprinkled throughout from a plurality of voices that illustrates the diversity, complexity, and richness of worship in multiracial congregations."--DJ Chuang, Worship Leader Magazine
About the Author(s)
Gerardo Marti is L. Richardson King Associate Professor of Sociology at Davidson College. He is author of A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church (2005) and Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church (2008).
