Making Jesus Famous

Chapter 1 examines the worship concert, a mass gathering marked by participatory engagement that differentiates it from a “mere” concert, as a lens to investigate the interplay between pop-rock performance conventions and evangelical congregational singing. It identifies the range of performative strategies whereby a contemporary worship-music concert crowd becomes authenticated as a concert congregation united in worship. Through musical style, song lyrics, and discourse about music-making, many of the activities associated with rock concerts are reframed as acts of worship. This reframing has musical and political consequences: understanding the concert gathering as worship shapes evangelical expectations of the “worship experience,” which in turn influences what evangelicals expect from worship music in their local church congregations. The desire to realize these ideals fuels the sale of worship-related music commodities produced by the Christian recording industry.