It also reveals CCS as primarily a functional genre, facilitating musical worship for individual and gathered Christians. This study sheds new light on the CCS genre, articulating its musical, lyrical, and extra-musical elements in greater detail and depth than has previously been available. Finally, key CCS writers/producers/performers were interviewed to ascertain the degree to which they considered diverse and localised congregational engagement. Two key questions were explored: What can Christians sing? And, What do Christians want to sing, and why? Supporting data from the 2011 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) was also analysed and cross-tabulated. At the second level, Christians attending CCS-oriented churches were directly surveyed to ascertain their engagement with CCS. Key lyrical, musical, and extra-musical characteristics were identified. At the first level, twenty-five of the most popular CCS sung in churches around the world are subject to individual and collective analyses, based on their most-viewed YouTube versions. The methodology employed to achieve these aims is a tri-level music semiology (Nattiez, 1990). This thesis identifies, defines, and explores the CCS genre, its texts, its production and producers, and Christians’ engagement with these mediated texts as individuals, and in corporate worship settings. This thesis provides a broad scholarly platform for CCS a framework for their creation, analysis, and evaluation upon which future scholarship can build. Finally, lacking from the contemporary congregational song (CCS) discourse is a research method and meta-language to facilitate a generic understanding of the genre its texts, producers, and consumers. Moreover, the music of the genre is under-represented in analyses because researchers have preferred sociological, historical, or theological methodologies. Where it is available, it is most often the examination of a specific contextualisation of the genre. While professional and popular discourses relating to this genre are widespread, scholarly engagement is still nascent. Contemporary congregational songs (elsewhere referred to as ‘praise and worship’ music, or contemporary worship music) began some forty years ago in Western Pentecostal/Charismatic contexts, but their influence is now worldwide and pan-denominational.
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