## Summary Monique Ingalls is an ethnomusicologist at Baylor University whose work treats contemporary worship music not as a genre but as a social practice that forms communities. Her concept of five *modes of congregating* explains why a song carries the formation of its original context into any new setting — meaning a stadium worship song brings the stadium's formation into a small-congregation sanctuary even when no stadium is present. Her work is the primary academic resource for the formation critique of contemporary worship music. ## Key facts - **Affiliation.** Baylor University, ethnomusicology. - **Method.** Ethnography, participant observation in worship settings across multiple contexts. - **Orientation.** Academic / descriptive; not polemical. Her work describes what contemporary worship does formatively, which can be used by both defenders and critics. ## Key work ***Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community*** (Oxford University Press, 2018). The foundational academic text for understanding how CWM shapes communities. Argues that what matters is not just what a song says but what it does — what community practices, what expectations, what relational dynamics it instantiates when sung in a specific context. ## Five modes of congregating Ingalls identifies five distinct contexts in which contemporary worship music is sung, each with its own formation logic: 1. **Concert** — large venue; audience/performer distinction is explicit; formation toward spectatorship and individual encounter. 2. **Conference** — multi-day gathering of worshipers from many congregations; cross-pollination of practices and formation toward network identity. 3. **Church** — regular congregational gathering; the primary context for which most worship songs are ostensibly designed, though many CWM songs are structurally written for concert/conference settings. 4. **Public** — outdoor, city-square, or non-church settings; evangelistic formation logic. 5. **Networked** — digital, online, parasocial; formation toward individual devotional practice mediated by a celebrity worship leader rather than a local body. ### Why this matters for vetting A song written for a **concert** context (Bethel Music's stadium recordings, Hillsong Live) carries the concert's formation when transplanted into a **church** context. The congregation does not become a concert audience consciously — but the song's structure (long build, solo-istic melody, unresolvable sustained final chord, ambient stage production) pushes the congregation toward spectatorship rather than participatory singing. The formation happens whether or not the worship team intends it. This is distinct from the manipulation critique (see [[Valerie Hobbs]]). Ingalls describes *unintentional* formation through structural features of the genre. The song does not need to be consciously manipulative for the formation to occur. ## Significance for St. John's UCC context The "modes of congregating" framework is the most pastorally useful version of the formation critique: - It explains to musicians *why* a well-intentioned worship team using Bethel Music recordings still produces a different congregational experience than one using hymns or CMP songs. - It does not require attributing malicious intent to anyone — the formation is structural. - It gives the music committee a vocabulary for discussing song selection that is about *function* rather than *theology alone*. ## Related adjacent work **Richard Ingold** — "God, the Devil, and You: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Analysis of the Language of Hillsong" (*Literature & Aesthetics*, 2014). Free access. A linguistic complement to Ingalls's ethnographic work, analyzing specifically how Hillsong lyrics construct God, the self, and the enemy in text. ## Related - [[Valerie Hobbs]] — manipulation-frame complement to Ingalls's formation frame - [[Praise and Worship Theology]] — the theology that drives the practices Ingalls describes - [[Blended Worship]] — Ingalls's modes of congregating are relevant to the blended/convergence distinction - [[2026-04-24 Worship Music Vetting Compendium]] — source for this entry