Honoring Global Church Music: Two New Online Resources

November 19, 2024
2 Global Projects

Research in the field of church music consists of work conducted by scholars from across the globe. While various cultures share many common threads, each community and each ecosystem have unique attributes that make their sharing of the gospel distinctive. Often, extensive academic research is attained through the observations and conclusions of those visiting faith communities and not from the publication of direct voices within these sacred spaces.  Enter the Global Church Music Bibliography created through the work of the Dunn Center for Christian Music Studies at Baylor University. This project responds to the struggle to find research by church music scholars writing about their own traditions outside North America. This project intentionally and exclusively consists of English-language research by non-Western scholars and allows users to engage with the material in an interactive format. 

Dr. Monique Ingalls, Director of Research and Graduate Programs in Church Music, spoke about the substance of the Global Church Music Bibliography as well as the Nigeria Christian Songs Website.

"As strange as it might seem to say, one thing that makes me excited about both projects is that they are not finished yet!  By saying they are “unfinished,” I don’t mean that they are still under construction, or that they are deficient in any way. We’ve built sturdy structures, but ones that are open to the addition of more information, more coverage, more perspectives. They are open because they are products of an ongoing collaboration, charting ongoing conversations. These sites provide evidence of the flowering of scholarship around Christian music, both in Nigeria and across the world. They provide a glimpse into a rich, complex, and compelling church music cultures. And these websites provide a concrete way to amplify scholarly voices across the world so that they can be heard by new audiences, whether these are scholars, church leaders, or just curious observers of global musical traditions."

On Thursday, November 14th, the Dunn Center hosted an online launch for this resource along with a demonstration of the Nigeria Christian Songs Website. Scholars from around the globe were invited to participate. The launch showcased the tireless work of the student research team and allowed for a demonstration of the many ways to interact with the new digital bibliography. At the launch, Dr. Ingalls shared about her hopes for the two sites.

"It is my hope that the sites we are launching today serve as both mirrors and as windows. Good mirrors reflect images of things as they are. When we look in a mirror, we see both our assets to be highlighted and celebrated, but perhaps our view also includes aspects we might like to change. We hope this “musical mirror” will spur dialogue about church music and worship among scholars and in our partner churches in Nigeria and beyond. We also hope that this site will be a window that scholars and church leaders around the world can look through to better understand music in worship in a global perspective. When we look through a small window into a large house, we know that our view is partial and we don’t expect to see everything in the house. But we hope that what we can see through this window will challenge stereotypes as it broadens all of our perspectives about music and worship in Christian communities worldwide."

The team building this resource consisted of Dr. Monique Ingalls and Dr. Shannan Baker, along with support from graduate students Jane Akenga, Kristi Noel, Isaac Montgomery, Armindo Ferreira, Chanmi Kim, and Sen Kikon.  

Jane Akenga, a master's student in church music from Kenya, reflected that, “as a student who enjoys doing comparative research on liturgical practices between churches in Kenya and other western counties, this project has created more awareness to me on the availability and diversity of church music materials from different countries.” In addition to a focus specifically on church music and worship, this project presented opportunity for students to gain knowledge on research and bibliographical sources. “This project has yielded multidimensional benefits to me such as enhancing my writing skills, organizational skills on Zotero, and analytical skills in finding relevant sources for specific subjects,” said Akenga. 

Armindo Ferreira, a PhD student in church music from Brazil, hopes the resource will also build bridges to musicology, ethnomusicology, and other fields. He said, "As an international student, I was very excited to be part of this project. I could see the diversity of academic productions in different countries and from various perspectives. This shows that the area of Church Music is a promising field of research and is constantly being updated, which can generate good opportunities for research and other partnerships."

With Baylor University’s recent addition of Pro Mundo to its motto, the Dunn Center is engaging with and exploring new innovative ways to expand creative efforts far beyond the campus and into the world.  


About the Global Church Music Bibliography

The Global Church Music Bibliography is an interactive bibliography platform. This project responds to the struggle to find research by church music scholars writing about their own traditions outside North America.  While research exists about church music in different parts of the world, it is most often done by outsiders to that community. (In many cases, an American scholar travels to those places and then writes about what they observed.). This project intentionally and exclusively consists of English-language research by non-Western scholars.  This project provides various ways to engage with the material, including an interactive map.

Graduate students were also involved in creating this project.  A team of Baylor church music students contacted scholars, researched sources to include, and wrote annotations.  These students were able to cultivate research skills that they can use in their research beyond the project.

Visit the Interactive Bibliography

This resource is organized into various sections to allow people to engage with the material through an interactive map, denominations, or musical styles.

As a part of this project, we invite people to send in resources that we are currently missing.  We hope to continue adding to this resource and expanding it so that more and more countries on the map are filled in through resources.

Landing Page for Global CM Bibliography

About the Nigerian Christian Songbook

The Nigerian Christian Songs project started during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when Dr. Monique Ingalls was invited to teach a course over Zoom for the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary in Ogbomoso, Nigeria.  The first class surveyed over 400 Nigerians to ask them about their church music practices.  The students’ work resulted in a website that features songs sung in Nigerian churches.  Since the start of the website, two more classes have added songs and additional content.

This project is important because it allows the Nigerian church to present itself to the world.  In some circles, we view global music in a certain way.  The genre of “global song” in the West has provided us with a stereotypical picture of worship in other cultures with traditional instruments and indigenous music.  Through the Nigerian Christian Songbook, these stereotypes are broken.  On the website, we see Western hymns alongside praise choruses in Yoruba and Nigerian gospel music.  Other parts of the website provide pictures and videos of Nigerian churches worshipping.

This project has continued to expand each year with the help of co-facilitators Dr. Ayobami Ayanyinka and Dr. Shannan Baker.  We hope our partnership with the seminary helps break down the stereotypes we have of worship in other cultures and allows us to learn more from our Nigerian brothers and sisters.

Visit the Digital Songbook

Nigerian Christian Songbook

A Word of Thanks from Dr. Monique Ingalls

For both websites, we all owe a profound debt of gratitude to Dr. Shannan Baker, Baylor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Music & Digital Humanities. Dr. Baker helped in the original design of the Nigerian Christian Songs site as a doctoral student and has continued as webmaster for this project. She is also the primary digital designer for the new Global Church Music Resources site. She and I developed the core idea for it together, but she was the one who made it look nice, and more importantly, made it work. We could not have done this without the expert help of data sciences librarian Joshua Been and his team at the Baylor Libraries, so deepest thanks to them. And thank you to all the Baylor’s master’s and doctoral students who helped with this site over the last three academic semesters. These include Jane Akenga, Armindo Ferreira, and Kristi Noel, who you met previously today. Other students who worked on the project during the prior academic year included Adekunle Oyeniyi, Chanmi Kim, Maroun Azar, and Sarah Martinez.