Congregational Music, Conflict and Community

This book is the first study of the music of the contemporary "worship wars" to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations at the height of these conflicts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical taste nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals' experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars.