Presentational and Participatory Worship

Maren Haynes Marchesini

Expanding upon Jennifer Lord’s “Liturgy: The World Being Done”

In her article for this issue, the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Lord interrogates the question of whether a church congregant is the proverbial spectator or participant in the Sunday morning worship event (see pp. 2, 5). Lord argues compellingly for valuing congregational participation in our practices of worship. Indeed, Lord interrogates the very word worship, a term that conveys “obedience, service, and bodily performances related to them; God or gods are the sole referent.”¹ She advocates instead for the term liturgy, etymologically derived from a Latin term meant to describe civic works done by and for the people, to describe our humanly organized gatherings of sacred reverence.² 

It’s hard to argue that modern church gatherings are lacking in opportunities for participation. Compared to the passive experience of watching cable news, TikTok videos, or most live music events, in-person church is a place where we commit our bodies and voices to the collective acts of singing, prayer, and sacrament. It’s a common practice for modern congregants to engage their voices and bodies in worship, even if these practices come in many forms. Online worship services may be witnessed more passively by congregants, but many churches still encourage participation by viewers through on-screen lyrics and prayers, a live chat that allows interaction throughout the service, and other modes. 

In my own nearly twenty years’ experience as a church music director in majority-white Lutheran (ELCA), Presbyterian (PCUSA), and Methodist (UMC) congregations, the role of the professional priestly class—inclusive of pastors, musicians, and lay leaders—has largely been to prepare content for the worship event in the form of liturgies, readings, prayers, sermons, hymns, and special music. Unlike the audience for an opera in which audience participation is limited to quietly listening while seated and clapping at appropriate times, congregation members do actively participate by standing, sitting, reading, singing, walking, touching baptismal water, and consuming communion elements. We also hope, as Lord names, that congregants will focus their sincere intention toward these activities, such that they mean the words they say and sing. 

But some churches are comparatively much more participatory. Consider charismatic Pentecostal and Baptist congregations, for example. Portions of worship may be structured around readings, sermons, and hymns in similar ways described above. But they also often include expansive time for intercessory prayer and movements of the Holy Spirit in which the whole congregation is open to embodied spirituality. The role of the priest, worship leaders, and worship planners is to prepare the container for the work of the Spirit to move and speak through the community. 

Participatory and Presentational Music-Making 

As a PhD ethnomusicologist, I’ve studied music traditions from all over the world, with varied participatory practices. For example, I played in a Javanese gamelan ensemble, where our performances were marked by clear audience-performer divisions reinforced by physical distance, elevated stages, lighting, uniform dress, and so on. I also used to attend weekly Mexican son jarocho gatherings to informally sing, play, and dance together, with no spectating audience present. 

My interdisciplinary academic training includes lenses from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and critical theory. I am interested in bringing these lenses to bear on our habits and rituals of congregational life—whether we call them worship or liturgy—to ask, what’s really going on here? How do our congregational gatherings train our bodies and form our normative values pertinent to human agency, community formation, and power?

In his book Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino differentiates between these as presentational and participatory modes of musical performance. Turino defines presentational performances as those in which “one group of people, the artists, prepare and provide music for another group, the audience, who do not participate in making the music or dancing.”³ An extreme example of a presentational performance is a modern symphony orchestra concert, in which an audience member’s singing or spontaneous dancing would likely provoke their ejection from the event. But it also aptly describes marching band halftime performances, indie rock concerts, K-Pop stadium shows, and much else. 

By contrast, participatory performance is one “in which there are no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing different roles,” like the son jarocho event I described above, as well as Puerto Rican bomba gatherings, traditional Venda (South African) coming-of-age rites, and much else.⁴ In these participatory music-making events, “the primary goal is to involve the maximum number of people in some performance role.” 

In attempting to apply this presentational-participatory framework to the wide spectrum of different musical events—rock concerts, karaoke, steelpan competitions, campfire sing-alongs, singer-songwriter rounds, hip-hop shows, and so on—it becomes immediately apparent that few musical events fall neatly into one category or the other. Indeed, presentational and participatory modes of performance are not a binary either-or, but a continuum. Some events even oscillate between one decisive mode and the other, like when a symphony’s holiday show ends with an audience sing-along, or when a Puerto Rican bomba group performs onstage at a folklore society gathering. 

Performance or Worship?

I find Turino’s presentational–participatory continuum useful when thinking about congregational worship, as well. However, I acknowledge that applying a lens from musical performances to our worship might be a difficult bridge to cross for some because “performance” has become a dirty word within worship settings that suggests that our egos are involved, and looking good or sounding impressive has become more important than our praise and worship of God. How many times have church leaders reminded us “it’s worship, not a performance!” Church music scholar Monique Ingalls encountered this critique when writing about church music performance, and she began writing about “performance” with a strikethrough—performance—which she termed “performance under erasure.”⁵ 

Ingalls’s argument is that church music and worship leaders engage in performance, even if we would rather call it something other than “performance.” However, Ingalls understands the term in a specific way, as defined by performance theory scholars like Richard Schechner.⁶ Within performance theory, performance encompasses anything that people do to create and communicate shared meaning and values.⁷ This includes modes of speech, bodily postures, emotional expressions, styles of dress, arrangements of time and space, elevation of sacred objects or texts, formations of relationship, and so on ad infinitum. Marcell Silva Steuernagel’s 2021 book, Church Music through the Lens of Performance, connects the dots between definitions of performance and ritual, as defined by theorists like Catherine Bell and Ronald Grimes, showing that what we call ritual and performance are quite interrelated.⁸ Worship, like music, is a multivalent ritual performance (or, if you prefer, performance) that communicates a complex set of preferential values, both explicit and implicit, through meaning-laden symbols. So, in what ways are our worship services variously participatory and presentational, and what implicit values are communicated therein?

The Politics of Presentational and Participatory Worship

Drawing out Turino’s presentational and participatory categories further, it becomes evident that these modes emphasize vastly different social values. Presentational performances emphasize individual virtuosity, mastery, and expertise. Emphasis is put on the authority of experts. In music, expert musicians focus on creating pleasing sounds for the enjoyment of a captive audience; indeed, performers with highly divergent training and experience rarely perform onstage together. Because the experts are often adept players who can memorize complex parts or read music off a page, musical compositions can have quite a lot of intensive variation—shifting time or key signatures, complicated forms, and little-to-no repetition. Further, the music often tends toward closed, scripted forms, like a piece of written music played correctly note-by-note, a band’s song that is played the same way every time, or a jazz ensemble’s structured chord changes that underscore a solo. The beginnings and endings of musical pieces and programmatic events are also often organized and apparent.⁹

Highly presentational worship services value and emphasize expertise, as well. In the Lutheran tradition, for instance, those without requisite training and authority are not customarily allowed to preach or preside over rites like communion. The printed book of liturgy has many opportunities for embodied congregational participation through responsive readings, hymn singing, sitting and standing, and imbibing communion elements. But seldom does participation include spontaneous offerings by congregation members. Instead, participation is limited to the scripted words, melodies, and choreography predetermined by experts. 

Consider, too, how other elements, like space, dress, literacy, and time, function to elevate—sometimes literally—people in authority. The chancel area is often elevated, and the preacher’s pulpit is raised even higher, so the congregation must look up to see them. Religious authorities often wear vestments, distinctive clothes that mark their status. Participation by the congregation is often dependent on the ability to read that which someone else has written, whether it’s words from a page, musical notation, or both. Further, sacred time is highly structured, and spontaneous congregational participation may be considered a disruption or distortion, interrupting sacred time—or causing the service to go over the appointed hour.

Is emphasizing expertise an evil? Certainly not. The pastoral work of teaching and shepherding disciples is a serious one that benefits from training and preparation. Sound biblical exegesis relies on a thorough knowledge of the diverse languages, cultures, and contexts that birthed our sacred texts and interpretations. The task of forming and sustaining a spiritual community also requires capable leaders who understand how to shepherd a congregation through the joys and hardships of life together. A good pastor not only must be a good teacher, but must manage conflict, understand individual and collective needs, inspire commitment, act in kindness and grace, and draw boundaries that keep people safe—not to mention adeptly manage money, facilities, staff, and much else. 

But are churches’ presentational proclivities emphasizing authoritative values, in which expertise conveys a responsibility to nurture people’s spiritual growth and health, trusting God to work and speak in the hearts and lives of the people? Or do we emphasize authoritarian values, which implicitly distrust people’s experiences of God and the holy, demanding obedience rather than co-creation? When the people’s actions are only considered trustworthy when uttered verbatim from a received script, and in which no critical thinking, questioning, dialogic interpretation, or meditative musings are considered worthy of collective worship, what does this teach people about their relationship with God? In an age of rising global authoritarianism, and where 72 percent of American Protestant Christians voted for an aspiring authoritarian candidate, we ought to ask ourselves, “Where did our people learn that authoritarian control is godly?” 

By contrast, participatory music—and worship—is primarily concerned with the involvement of the maximum number of participants. A successful gathering has a role for everyone. With no audience to listen to the resultant sound, participatory music emphasizes the experience of being together and doing the music-making. Participatory music tends to have varied roles for novices and experts. Novices, with fewer musical skills, may repeat the same few chords over and over, sing a repeated response, or beat a steady rhythm. The sound is often marked by heterophonic density, which is the thick texture that results from people playing a little bit out of time or out of tune with one another, but generally together. It’s usually quite difficult to pick out an individual voice or instrument from the texture.¹⁰ Experts, though, may add variation through solos or improvisation. But an expert’s added flourish is for the player’s own experience of fun and challenge in the group dynamic, or “flow” in the words of educational psychologist Csikszentmihalyi, not chiefly to showcase their technical prowess.¹¹

Participatory musical events often have an improvisational ethos, ranging from the song list to the length of each tune, to the length of the entire gathering. When the beginnings and endings of songs are indefinite, Turino describes them as “feathered.” This feature can be found in Celtic jam sessions where anyone in the circle may call a tune and a song may start out with one or two people playing, while others pick it up as it goes along. Usually, however, participatory music-making events draw from shared or traditional canons of songs that most everyone knows—rarely are new songs written or introduced into these contexts. Such collectivist events emphasize social synchrony—attention to, and interaction with, others. The events are highly attuned to the collective interests and energies of the gathered community.  

What is the cognate to a participatory worship gathering? Consider the Pentecostal worship described in the opening paragraph, where congregants’ experiences are so central, time and space bends to respond to the spontaneity that arises. For instance, if one person is “caught” by the Spirit, others gather around to support and encourage this moment of ecstatic spiritual in-dwelling, encouraging the person’s body to be overcome by the Spirit, and listening for a prophetic word. Congregation members move from their seats, encircling the person. The pastor, too, walks down from the pulpit to pray over them, while the organist improvises along with their gestures and words in a kind of responsorial dance. With many people praying audibly, the same heterophonic density can be heard in the sonic texture. And this kind of gathering may last a long time—indeed, I’ve experienced charismatic church services that extend for three or four hours. 

Participatory worship can, of course, take many forms. One example might be an All Saints service with open time in the middle for people to light candles, bring forward pictures of loved ones, and speak a few words aloud while music plays gently in the background. Another might look like a sermon with time for meditative writing or even sharing with neighbors. Another might be weekly worship that begins with a long-form piece of repetitive music with Orff instruments borrowed from an elementary school available to play—and no wrong notes (because those keys have been removed—or because we tolerate “wrong notes” as part of heterophonic density). Our congregation has done all of these and much more, and we have grown resilient in our experimentation, knowing that sometimes participation leads to flourishing—and sometimes we retool and try something else. 

If our congregational worship tends to emphasize presentational modes, introducing participatory worship practices may take time. Hosting workshops for congregation members to write parts of a written liturgy, prayers for the week, or even write new melodies for worship may open new creative possibilities. An expanded Prayers of the People, where individuals may raise up prayer requests may add time to the service—but also is a practice of multivocality, uplifting many different voices in all their diversities. 

In any case, the key questions I seek to answer in shepherding our congregation toward a blend of presentational and participatory worship modes are “am I involving the maximum number of people?” and “am I allowing people to co-create worship in various ways?” Participatory worship teaches us how to live together in a community of faith, a dialogic call-and-response to the initiation of God in all our hearts and lives. 

Notes

1. Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 3. 

2. An adaptation of John Blacking’s definition of music as humanly-organized sound, outlined in How Musical Is Man? (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1973). 

3. Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 26.

4. Turino, Music as Social Life.

5. Monique Marie Ingalls, “Awesome in This Place: Sound, Space, and Identity in Contemporary North American Evangelical Worship” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania), 202.

6. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, media ed. Sara Brady, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013).

7. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

8. Marcell Silva Steuernagel, Church Music through the Lens of Performance (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ronald L. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

9. Turino, Music as Social Life, 59. 

10. Turino, Music as Social Life, 59. 

11. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1990).