How does a worship team measure success? What does winning look like?

Being involved in discussions on what makes for good worship is an interesting experience. What I find in the midst of the back and forth banter is that the dialogue most often is not about the content and craft of worship, but its style. I am not suggesting for a moment that the style of worship is unimportant, but what I find problematic is the notion that what makes for good worship is what people believe will attract others; and they usually define attractive worship according to what they like.

Several years ago, I was out of town at a conference. On Sunday morning I made my way to a historic Congregational Church. The sanctuary was old, but well-kept and attractive. There was no screen for PowerPoint. The church has two traditional services on Sunday morning and two times for worship on Sunday evening it refers to as contemporary/liturgical. Every service was filled to capacity. The congregation was multigenerational and ethnically diverse. College students make up 38 percent of the congregation and 49 percent of the members are in their twenties. The pastor’s sermon was excellent — it was well-crafted, authentic and substantive. Indeed, the entire worship experience could be described in this way. (I forgot to mention that the Sunday I was there, they were taking in approximately 30 to 40 members at each of the four services.)

The diagnoses for why people don’t sing in church are many and varied. I tend to break these diagnoses down into three categories: strong opinions that I agree with, strong opinions that I do not agree with and empirically-verifiable scientific studies. Unfortunately, the last category is rare, which is surprising considering how many “labs” (churches) we have available to test! There have been some great studies on the benefits and effects of group singing — many with religious implications — but not many that tell us how to get people to sing.

That doesn’t mean that some of those strong opinions aren’t correct. Congregational music professionals can have some pretty good ideas on how to increase singing participation.

I’ve been a big fan of John Bell’s theories of how to get more people to sing. He writes about them in “The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Song.” At a workshop I attended, he said that he had been blessed “with a mediocre voice,” because when congregations heard him lead singing, they automatically thought, “I can do better than that, and I’d better help him out.” John has some practical ways to get people to sing, including teaching the songs to the congregation before worship (what a concept!) and using hand gestures to indicate pitch and rhythm.

One of my favorite scientific studies runs counter to a lot of conventional church wisdom. “The Science of Singing Along: A Quantitative Field Study on Sing-along Behavior in the North of England,” by Alisun Pawley and Daniel Müllensiefen, analyzed the participation of various patrons in English pubs. They found that people are more likely to sing along if

Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” The Village People’s “YMCA,” and Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer” all made the top ten list for most-sung songs in pubs. They are not exactly standard hymn fare for the church. (A summary article with samples of the music can be found here.)

“ … ritual isn’t about expressing religious commitment at all, but about doing something in a way that marks the moment as different from the everyday and forces you to see it as important.” That quote came from an article about “Religion without God” that speaks of a growing movement of atheists to gather for “church” services.

As one person put it, “Singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. Which part of that is not to like?”