Slow but continual change characterizes faith communities’ long-standing struggle to articulate both emergent identities and timeless truth-claims through worship music. Current American mainline Protestant practice – in which even single congregations often use multiple Sunday-morning services to support contrasting musical styles – provides a particularly vivid illustration of these complex dynamics of music, worship, and identity. My analysis of one such congregation explores the dynamics of these historically on-going tensions through emergent reconfigurations of musical meaning in post-denominational North America.

My dissertation focuses on one Presbyterian congregation in Nashville, Tennessee. Hillsboro Presbyterian typifies many American mainline Protestant churches that, in adopting guitar-driven praise and worship music alongside organ-and-choir-based hymnody, have projected potential growth, but also evangelical infiltration, identity loss, and theological shift to be among the direct results of their intentional musical diversity. Based on over 800 hours of fieldwork and nearly 100 interviews, my ethnographic analysis demonstrates how parishioners subjectively navigate Hillsboro Presbyterian Church’s selective utilization of various musical systems of meaning to experience significant, yet non-threatening, musical diversity in worship. Examining this congregation’s affinity for internal ambiguity demonstrates how worshippers subjectively and emergently apply the labels “contemporary” and “traditional” to position their worship within broader Christian practice, yet simultaneously move beyond these static categories to continually integrate, reconcile, and challenge musical markers of their localized religious identity.