St. Augustine and Sound Reinforcement

It has been a few weeks since my last post and Red Team has continued with the mic-less experiment. The new semester is also well under way and I am teaching a course on the history of christian worship. Inevitably, I am drawing comparisons between contemporary worship practices and the description of older practices.

Something I will be researching and writing much more about is the movement in American Protestant churches to model (or re-model) their sanctuaries as concert venues. Consider this example of a church in Alabama.

The worship center was originally part of the First Baptist Church's campus in the heart of Bessemer, Alabama. The room was a stylistically traditional facility with a typical stage, choir loft, organ and bacony [sic]. Ricky Todd, worship pastor, expressed concerns early into the project about the traditional nature of both the acoustics and the unusually high ambient light levels due to the 20-foot tall windows running down either side of the facility. . . In late 2006 The Foundry pressed forward with the complete renovation of the facility's interior.

The renovation included the instillation of theater lighting, a complex sound system and state of the art video and projection equipment (hence the concern over the "unusually high ambient light levels"). It also included "acoustical materials that were installed on the side walls and the balcony face, as well as the materials that would be suspended overhead" to remove those troublesome "traditional acoustics" (acoustics which were designed to naturally enhance a congregation's singing but which prove too live and unruly for an amplified rock band).

"Their desire," the article explains "was to transform the space into a uniquely modern, multi-functional venue." Now, since remodeling, the building "has successfully hosted a number of concerts and community events, as well as their regularly scheduled Thursday and Sunday night worship services." What I want to draw attention to is the implicit assumption that the physical and technical properties of a concert venue is the same as a sanctuary. The two are now interchangeable.

While most small to mid-sized churches cannot afford this sort of renovation, many aspire to it. My guess is that this concert venue aesthetic only really started making inroads into regular sanctuaries in the last 15 years. What this means is that there is a new generation of Christians who have very different expectations for Sunday morning worship than their parents. Just consider the change in congregational singing. Most people focus on the change in repertoire, but in this post I want to think about volume.

The use of sound systems means that an individual or small ensemble not only leads the congregation's singing but (in many cases) is all that can be heard. For a new generation of worshipers this has become the preferred/accustomed style of worship.

I have recently been made aware of the way the concert hall aesthetic is influencing churches' understanding of volume and congregational singing. I heard of a minister in Ohio (not in my own congregation) who has requested the volume of the music is turned up so that people don't feel self -conscious when they sing. He believes that members of the congregation are worried that their neighbors can hear them sing. I am sure this is true for some. In this understanding, singing God's praises is a strangely individualistic experience. Singing in church becomes little different than singing along to a worship CD in your car. It is no longer congregational singing.

Baptism of St Augustine, Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497) 

There are, of course, many different ways that people experience and express their worship of God -- all of them valid. But if (as I wrote in a previous post) congregational singing is a constitutive practice and discipline of the Church that unites a community of dissimilar people in singing God's praise, then this concert hall aesthetic of congregational worship poses a theological problem.

In class this week we read St. Augustine's account of his baptism in 387 C.E.:

The tears flowed from me when I heard your hymns and canticles, for the sweet singing of your Church moved me  deeply. The music surged in my ears, truth  seeped into my heart,  and my feelings of devotion overflowed, so that the tears streamed down. But they were tears of gladness

It was not long before this that the Church at Milan  had begun to seek comfort and spiritual strength in the practice of singing in which the faithful united fervently with heart and voice (Confessions, IX.6-7)

For Augustine, it is hearing the voices of the church united in singing that proved so moving and that gave the church comfort and spiritual strength. 

So how might this change the way we think about sound reinforcement? Worship leaders and sound teams, I suggest, should set their volume at a level that enables us to hear the voices of the church. A rock band -- even in a small venue -- has to raise the volume of all the instruments and voices to balance the volume of the drum kit. A worship band in church need only raise its volume to balance (and compliment) the singing of the congregation.  Any louder and we risk drowning out the voices of the church (ekklesia), we lose a practice that celebrates and builds unity and we jeopardize a practice that  brought comfort to Augustine and the persecuted church in the fourth century.

Augustine's experience is not so foreign to us today. Four weeks ago after the service I was told, "I love hearing everyone singing. Our voices just peal off the walls" (thanks to those pesky traditional acoustics!). As I have already observed, the drop in volume actually increases the congregation's singing. Last Sunday we led the congregation singing the Lord's Prayer set to the well worn tune Kumbya. Listen to how the voices swell in the final verse when the instruments stop playing. Like Augustine, I found  "the sweet singing of your Church moved me  deeply."

Father God in Heaven (click to listen)