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Culture and Religion: An

Interdisciplinary Journal
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Singing praise in the streets: Performing

Canadian Christianity through public
worship in Toronto's Jesus in the City
parade
Monique M. Ingalls

Faculty of Music , University of Cambridge , 11 West Road,

Cambridge , CB3 9DP , UK
Published online: 24 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Monique M. Ingalls (2012) Singing praise in the streets: Performing Canadian
Christianity through public worship in Toronto's Jesus in the City parade, Culture and Religion: An
Interdisciplinary Journal, 13:3, 337-359, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2012.706230
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2012.706230

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Culture and Religion

Vol. 13, No. 3, September 2012, 337359

Singing praise in the streets: Performing Canadian Christianity

through public worship in Torontos Jesus in the City parade
Monique M. Ingalls*

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Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, 11 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP, UK

Festivals, parades and other public cultural spectacles are important sites in
which communities demarcate their boundaries and attempt to expand them
by claiming public space. This article draws from ethnographic fieldwork at
Torontos Jesus in the City parade, an annual event in which Toronto-area
Christians take their message to the citys downtown in a Carnival-style
procession, to explore what Amanda Weidman has called the politics of
voice in the parade: how religious participants create, contest and negotiate
various affiliations in the public sphere through their musical performance of
congregational songs. Exploring what sounds are produced and why reveals
how parade participants use musical performance on the city stage in their
quest to define what it means to be a Christian, an ethnic minority and a
Canadian in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: public religion; religious music; religious identity; religion and
multiculturalism; religious festivals; congregational music

Descrio da parada

On a Saturday afternoon in early September 2010, several thousand evangelical

Christians process through Torontos downtown district during the annual Jesus in
the City parade. On the rectangular route that begins and ends at Queens Park
behind Ontarios parliament buildings, the parade is a mass of swirling colours
from marchers parade T-shirts, biblical costumes, glittering banners, and
handmade signs containing short biblical quotations or lyrics from popular
congregational songs (Figure 1). The sounds are just as striking: blaring from
each of the 13 musical parade floats are upbeat devotional songs in a wide range of
musical styles, from pop-rock to Chinese orchestral music to gospel soca.
The smaller floats, including vans and pick-up trucks, play pre-recorded song
mixes from their speakers, while the larger floats carry 8 15 musicians who
perform the music live. Participants marching around the floats sing and dance
along with the loud, rhythmic music (Figure 2). Sometimes when the floats stop at
traffic lights, the musical offerings blend together, creating a cacophony of praise.
The Jesus in the City parade is a public religious event that illustrates what
ethnomusicologist Rasmussen (2009, 125) has called the festivalization of
religion, characterised by busy intersections of dogma and information, ritual

*Email: mmi23@cam.ac.uk
ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online
q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2012.706230
http://www.tandfonline.com

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M.M. Ingalls

Figure 1. Dancers, flaggers and banner carriers wait for the 2010 Jesus in the City parade
to begin at Queens Park, Toronto, Canada.

Figure 2. Paraders march and sing behind the Faith Sanctuary float at the 2010 Jesus in
the City parade, Toronto, Canada.

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Culture and Religion

339

and performance, piety and politics. Bramadat (2002) notes that such cultural
spectacles serve as important sites in which communities are created, contested
and represented; thus, they provide a significant basis for studying the complex
interrelationship of ethnic, national and religious affiliations in contemporary
Canada.
This article shows the ways in which public musical performance is a potent,
if contested, means of Christian self-definition in urban Canada. It seeks to
contribute to emerging sound studies and ethnomusicological scholarship that
demonstrates the importance of musical performance in creating publics and
constituting communities once only imagined (Schmidt 2000; Rasmussen 2001;
Gautier 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Weidman 2006; Rasmussen 2009; Weiner 2009;
Sakakeeny 2010). In performing congregational worship songs in the heart of
their city, Jesus in the City parade participants sing Gods praises in the streets
both figuratively and literally; thus, voice is a key analytical category in this
exploration. I employ Weidmans (2006) theoretical framework the politics of
voice, that she defines as a set of musical practices and ideas about selfrepresentation that produces ideological subjects through performance. Following
Weidmans (2006, 12) call for attention to the sonic and material aspects of the
voice and how these aspects are constructed through moments of self-conscious
discourse, this article considers in what ways the Jesus in the City parades musical
performances serve as means or technology for producing the voice, in both a
sonic and an ideological sense among Christians in the greater Toronto area.
Drawing from ethnographic field research conducted in the several months
surrounding the 2010 Jesus in the City Parade,1 I examine the parades unique
politics of voice by showing how participants use musical performance to orient
themselves within broader Canadian society and Toronto-area Christianity.
I demonstrate how musical performances in the parade are used variously for
musicospiritual warfare (Butler 2005; Goodman 2009), for negotiating the
interrelationships among various religious, national and ethnic affiliations, and for
reconciling imperatives for unity and diversity. Listening closely to parade musical
performances and participants narratives about them reveals that music forms the
nexus of local, national and global discourses and suggests that understanding
contemporary religious interculturalism necessitates attention to the sonic
dimensions of public spectacle.
Singing Torontos Christian voice: religion and the politics of voice
in urban Canada
Fieldnotes, 11 September 2010, Downtown Toronto
Standing on a corner at the intersection of Charles and Yonge Streets, I wave
to musicians I recognise on the lead float as it passes. This float, encircled by a
banner reading Festival of Praise, features a ten-piece band comprising several
guitars, steel pan, hand percussion, a drum kit and four vocalists. The band
members hail from across the city and suburbs and represent a number of walks

340

M.M. Ingalls

of life: while three members are part- or full-time professional musicians playing
Caribbean music gigs around the city, a local gospel music radio DJ, a church
music director, a clerical worker and several business professionals fill out the
band. Following immediately after Festival of Praise is a float from Destiny and
Dominion Word Ministries, a fast-growing charismatic church that meets in a
converted warehouse in North Toronto. At the helm is a white woman in her early
30s with a small build and a powerful voice; she leads a band of seven
instrumentalists and vocalists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Her fullvoiced singing provides continuity between contrasting styles as the band moves
from R&B-influenced gospel hymn to a pop-rock song, and she punctuates the
silences in between songs with prayers and exhortations to the passersby. A group
of teenage girls walking behind the float sing along as they carry a number of
national flags that, one of them later tells me, represent the countries of origin of
specific church members.
A few moments later, two floats sponsored by Korean congregations from
around the city pass by. While the marchers vary widely in age, the faces on the
Korean floats are predominantly youthful. On the first, a band comprising college
students and staff of Torontos Korean chapter of Youth With a Mission plays and
sings a pop-rock worship song in English that I recognise from its frequent airplay
on area Christian radio stations, as a four-person team performs an interpretive
dance. The band on the second float plays a well-known contemporary Christian
worship song from the US whose lyrics have been translated into Korean.
Following the Korean floats, I catch a glimpse of Andrea, a mother of four young
children and the wife of a minister at a Hungarian Full Gospel church in West
Toronto. The float she marches beside, sponsored by three Toronto-area
Hungarian-speaking churches, is decorated with hearts inscribed with the national
flags of countries from around the world, under a large red heart-shaped sign
reading Jesus Loves Toronto. Marchers from the Hungarian churches sing along
with a pre-recorded mix of congregational songs blaring outwards from their float.
As the float passes, the set list transitions from an upbeat song in Hungarian with a
distinct minor modal melody to a well-known pop-rock congregational worship
song in English.
This ethnographic vignette gives a sense of the multiplicity of musical voices
in the Jesus in the City parade, ranging from instruments, to CD recordings, to
human voices with a variety of inflections of timbre, tone, and volume. The
account further highlights how each float serves as a node in an interconnected
network of area churches, linked by mobile participants and shared media to
immigrant populations from the Caribbean, Asia and Eastern Europe and suggests
the range of musical choices available to participants. To understand how these
musical performances serve as platforms for a Christian politics of voice, it is
important first to situate the parade in its religious, civic and national contexts.
o que a marcha The Jesus in the City parade is a strikingly multicultural instance of an
evangelical Christian event that has been called a praise march, a public
demonstration focused on literally singing Gods praises in the public square

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ambiente
da marcha:
bandeiras de
muitas naes,
msicas
traduzidas para
o coreano,
sonoridades
hngaras,
msicos de
diferentes
inseres
profissionais

Culture and Religion

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march for
Jesus

341

(Bartkowski and Regis 2003, 243). The urban praise march became an
international evangelical and charismatic Christian practice beginning in the
late 1980s with the global spread of the March for Jesus, a UK-based paradesponsoring organisation that drew an estimated 60 million participants in its
international marches between 1987 and 2000. Though the March for Jesus
dissolved as an organization in 2000, it spurred the renewal of Protestant parading
worldwide and continues as a locally organised Protestant expression in many
parts of Latin America and the Pacific Islands (Ediger 2004).2 While Torontos
Jesus in the City parade has never been affiliated with the March for Jesus, it has
drawn participants from similar churches and charismatic church networks and is
currently the only downtown Toronto parade organised around religious affiliation
alone as opposed to a shared culture, ethnicity or political stance.
In the context of the city of Toronto, the Jesus in the City parade is a relative
newcomer to a city well known for its public festivals and parades, including
Caribana, the Pride Parade and the Santa Claus Parade that are estimated to draw
a million participants or more (Huque 2007). Torontos Jesus in the City parade
was founded by the late Myrtle Solomon, an Afro-Caribbean immigrant, and her
Canadian-born daughter Ayanna Solomon. This first parade, held in 1999 and
called the Parade of the Centuries, brought out an estimated 1500 marchers and 5
floats. Believing they were called by God to continue the parade, the Solomons
founded the non-profit organization Festival of Praise that runs from an office in a
Toronto-area Pentecostal church and organises music-related seminars and
special events throughout the year, though its main event is the annual parade.
With the help of year-round publicity in local Christian television and radio
programs, newspapers and Internet sites, the parade has seen a steady addition of
new church networks. In 2003, a large contingent of Chinese Christians joined the
parade and helped with Chinese-language publicity, with Korean church networks
joining the effort shortly thereafter. In 2009, two floats sponsored by Toronto-area
Eastern European churches joined the parade ranks. The 2010 Jesus in the City
Parade drew between 10,000 and 15,000 participants and included 24 parade
groups and 13 large musical floats on truck and tractor-trailer beds. Of these floats,
five were sponsored by individual churches, while eight were co-sponsored by
cooperating churches and organisations.3 It was preceded and followed by a twohour-long pre-parade rally and an hour-long post-parade rally in Queens Park,
featuring music and dance performances, congregational singing, inspirational
messages and prayers from designated speakers. The parade itself took
approximately two and a half hours, wending its way around a roughly rectangular
course along several of the major thoroughfares of Toronto. From its starting place
in Queens Park, a large downtown green space immediately behind the Ontario
Parliament buildings, the parade traversed a short section of Bloor Street (the
citys major east/west thoroughfare) and a segment of Yonge Street (Torontos
major north/south artery), before a short walk down College Street and beside the
Parliament buildings to end where it started in Queens Park. In 2010 and in
several years prior, the parade was scheduled during the Toronto International

342

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levantar
"vozes"
contra a
"perda"

M.M. Ingalls

Film Festival in part to capitalise on the increased number of visitors and residents
that flock to the city centre.
To understand the purpose for the Jesus in the City parade and how it serves as a
platform for a Christian politics of voice in Toronto, it is important to understand the
changing role of religion in Canadian public life. Beginning in the latter quarter of
the twentieth century, Christian affiliation and political authority experienced a
rapid and consistent decline, as secularists sought to extricate religion
particularly establishment Christianity from the public sphere (Stackhouse
1990; Bramadat and Seljak 2008; Young and DeWiel 2009). Changes in public
policy guided by the belief that religious divisions threaten the Canadian
multicultural ideal are among the factors diminishing the influence of Christianity in
the Canadian public sphere (Bramadat and Seljak 2008; Young and DeWiel 2009).
As a result of these societal shifts, Canadian Christians particularly in diverse,
urban areas employ a common rhetoric Bramadat and Seljak (2008, 15) call the
discourse of loss because churches can no longer assume that their values and
objectives are . . . co-extensive with the values and objectives of the larger society.
Jesus in the City parade participants and leaders often framed their actions
explicitly in terms of this discourse of loss. For many, the parade was an
opportunity for active self-representation against a backdrop of secularism
interpreted as societal indifference to or even hostility towards Christian
belief and a perceived discouragement of religious expression within the
Canadian public sphere. When describing the rationale for the Jesus in the City
parade, the discourse of voice is endemic: participants are encouraged to lift
up one voice, to represent Torontos Christian voice, and to singing praise
with a loud voice, whether against competing voices or oppressive silence.
Parade founder Ayanna Solomon attributed her decision to start the parade
with the firm belief that God wanted Christians to have a voice in the city.
She compared Jesus in the City to Torontos Caribana and Pride parades, where
other groups lend their voice to whatever they believe in. For Solomon, the
Christian voice was best proclaimed through the action of musical voices
singing praises in the city streets (Solomon, personal interview, March 2010).
Conversations with two float music leaders, Rosie Allagas Cooke of Destiny
and Dominion Word Ministries and Melanie Seaton of Festival of Praise,
reinforced the idea that music in the parade plays an important role in Christian
politics of recognition in adding to the multiplicity of conflicting voices in the
public sphere. For Seaton, the parades purpose was taking worship out from the
four walls [of the church] to where we need to be . . . to raise up this godly standard
and let people know were here (Seaton 2010, personal interview by author). For
Cooke, the heart of the parade was a united declaration of Christian belief: that
we are not as Christians standing by allowing every other person who has
something to say to just go and say it, [or] just sitting back and doing nothing
because we are afraid to stand up for what we believe. Were showing that were
united, were a strong front . . . and we want [them] to be a part of that (Allagas
Cooke 2010).

Culture and Religion

343

For these parade music leaders, collective singing becomes a primary means
of recognition and an icon of a unified self-representation. But, as Weidman
(2006) points out, the construction of voice through music and sound is a
complex process fraught with tensions and negotiations. The explorations that
follow highlight two distinct registers of the politics of voice within the Jesus in
the City parade, showing ways in which participants moderate aspects of pitch,
volume, timbre and cadence both literally and metaphorically in their quest
to sing into being the Christian voice of Toronto to their city and nation.

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Waging war: voicing spiritual conflict in the public sphere

rota por
smbolos
de poder

guerra
sonora

North American evangelical Christians have long used the city as a stage for public
spectacles whose ultimate aim is spiritual revitalisation and the shaping of national
priorities (Elisha 2011; AlSayyad and Massoumi 2011). Miedema (2005, 6) has
noted that public religion is necessarily prescriptive, involving an attempt to
shape a community or society into an ideal, to impose on that society values
considered sacred or transcendent by some, but not necessarily by all. However,
within a given religious event, there may be disagreement as to what this
prescription constitutes or how best to encourage the broader society to accept it.
In the musical performances of the Jesus and the City parade, we can hear a
resounding dissonance in how the Christian community positions itself in
relationship to the broader Canadian society.
Like many contemporary urban demonstrations, from Orange parades in
Northern Ireland to second-line parades in New Orleans to Pride Parades in
New York City, participants in the Jesus in the City parade engage in a ritual
performance of a desire for social power. Whether through carnivalesque
subversion or more militant rhetoric, ritual civic demonstrations inaugurate a
temporary status reversal in which transforms parade participants into owners of
the streets (Regis 1999; see also Bakhtin 1968 and Turner 1969). 4 In charismatic
Christian praise marches such as Jesus in the City, marching on the streets is
understood as an act of entering into enemy territory in an attempt to claim
(or reclaim) the city, region or nation.5
The city streets along which Jesus and the City paraders march are significant for
the battle: in part, the route was chosen to encompass symbols of power and moral
corruption. Yonge Street, the main north/south road through the heart of the city, is a
long and contested symbol of the citys moral vision (Ruppert 2006). After walking
several blocks of Yonge Street, the marchers head back west along College Street,
and then turn north to Queens Park in full view of the front of the Ontario Provincial
Legislature. In pre-parade meetings, rallies and prayer walks, parade organisers
encouraged used music as part of sonic warfare against targets as secularisation in
government, behaviours deemed immoral, and social ills such as joblessness, racism
and homelessness. On the parade day, some parade musical leaders told me that they
directed their songs as symbolic weapons as they prayed silently against the strip
clubs, bars and fortune-telling parlours they passed along the parade route. Melanie

344

M.M. Ingalls

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Seaton, a Toronto-based professional musician and musical director for the parades
lead float, recounted spontaneously transitioning into a song that referenced the
cleansing power of Jesus blood when passing a strip club at a particular part of
dana e Yonge Street (Seaton 2011, personal interview by the author).
msica com On the 2010 parade day, warfare metaphors were rife within speech, song and
meforas dance performances. The very first performance during the pre-parade rally
de guerra illustrates this performative warfare strikingly: this rally began with a dance
troupe decked in matching camouflage performing an interpretive dance to the
song Waging War, an urban gospel song whose lyrics proclaim the defeat of
spiritual enemies and the taking back of territory for the glory of God.6
The martial metaphor of raising a standard to rally the Christian community
and to signal its presence to the broader society reverberates through many of the
musical choices for the parade. While spiritual warfare metaphors have biblical
origins and are common across a variety of Christian traditions (see Csordas 1997;
Harding 2000; ONeill 2010), this particular metaphor is particularly widespread
in the evangelical and Pentecostal churches of which most participants in the
Jesus in the City parade are members.7 Raising a banner through musical praise
in public is intended as an act of defiance against the threats posed by
secularisation and pluralism in the public sphere (Bramadat and Seljak 2008).
Participants used specific worship songs both as emblems on a banner and as
expressive weapons in the symbolic battle that Butler (2005, 316) has called
musicospiritual warfare. The act of raising a banner musically occurs through
what participants described as lifting up the name of Jesus through the act of
levantar o collective singing and music-making. Parade song choices from across a variety of
nome de churches in the parade refer to this figurative act or enable it through song.
Jesus
Examples of this theme abound in the songs music leaders chose for the parade,
including Lord, I Lift Your Name on High, High and Lifted Up, Lift His Name
and We Want to See Jesus Lifted High.8
We Want to See Jesus Lifted High, an upbeat rock anthem written 1993 in
connection to the UKs March for Jesus movement, was performed in the Jesus in
the City parade by the band on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Council (CCRC)
float.9 The band, a group of four vocalists and four instrumentalists, largely
comprised South Asian members from across Catholic and charismatic churches in
the greater Toronto area. Ray DSa, an engineer and second-generation South
Asian immigrant in his mid-20s who was an active member of St. Catholic parish in
Mississauga and the citywide Catholic charismatic prayer group ministry, served
as the bands musical leader and keyboardist. DSa recounted that he chose We
Want to See Jesus Lifted High and placed it near the beginning of the bands set
list because the lyrics clearly get the message out of why were doing what were
doing (DSa 2010, personal interview by author).
The CCRC bands performance of this well-known congregational worship
song provides a musical elaboration of the connection between raising a standard
and lifting up the name of Jesus. Performing on a float with a large central cross
draped in red and gold cloth and large, wood-hued rosary beads, the band vocalists

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Culture and Religion

345

sang confidently a collective prayer: we wanna see Jesus lifted high/a banner that
flies across this land. The band performed the chorus lyrics like a chant in an
athletic event, half-singing, half-yelling the repeating four-note motive we wanna
see/we wanna see/we wanna see Jesus lifted high and often inserting three short
claps in between each sung phrase. When the band arrived at the bridge after the
second chorus, they again voiced lyrics that took up martial imagery, casting
prayer as a weapon in the endeavour to take ground from and destroy the
stronghold from a menacing (but unspecified) enemy. While throughout the
song the chorus allowed participants to perform their desire that Jesus be exalted
in their land, slight alteration of the lyrics in the final chorus allowed them to
confidently announce eventual victory: Were gonna see Jesus lifted high.
Parade music leaders supplemented militant songs that sought to lift Jesus
high as the banner under which Christians could rally and claim territory with
songs that proclaimed the rule of God over the city using political metaphors.
Songs using metaphors of kingship, authority, power and dominion abounded in
songs such as Our God Reigns, Jesus, You Reign, Jesus, You Reign on High
and The Whole Earth is Full of your Glory.10
While some of these songs treat the dominion of God as a certain present or
future reality, others suggested that Gods reign could be brought to reality by the
performance of human agents. The opening songs chosen for a Korean
interchurch bands parade set began with two midtempo numbers expressing
these themes. According to Junghoo Lee, a singer active in his local church band
at the Korean Pentecostal Church of the Resurrection in North Toronto, the songs
were chosen for their power to make known the name of Jesus Christ. The band,
comprising five instrumentalists and five singers from a number of North Toronto
Korean churches, performed God of This City, followed by Jesus, We Enthrone
You with an interpretive dance accompanying it (Figure 3). While God of This
City proclaimed that the Christian God the King of this people the Lord of this
nation, Jesus, We Enthrone You emphasised agency of worshippers in
constructing a throne through their song.11 The short repeated chorus began with
the prayer we proclaim You as our King/ . . . we raise you up with our praise.
The musical performance sonically depicted the lyrical ascent: as the songs
melody line spiralled upwards, the performance grew in intensity as singers
increased their volume and as the instrumental texture and dynamics intensified.
Vocalists lifted their hands towards the skies, with upraised faces and closed eyes
while reiterating three times the phrase at the end of the chorus, as we worship,
build a throne.
Songs like Jesus We Enthrone You are musical ways in which the parade
enables participants to perform an ideal social and religious order. In her account
of Brazilian Catholic pilgrimage, Reily (2002, 17) describes this conjoining
process as enchantment, an experiential state in which musical performance and
belief become intertwined and where participants construct and simultaneously
experience the harmonious order that could reign in their society. Through
singing songs of warfare and domination though bringing worship to the

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346

M.M. Ingalls

Figure 3. Singers perform an interpretive dance on an interchurch Korean float at the

2010 Jesus in the City parade, Toronto, Canada.

streets the groups of the Jesus in the City parade musically inscribe this
ideal moral order upon the city streets of the Toronto.
Using your inside voice in the streets: strategies of sonic identification

From the musical performance explored so far, it would seem that Jesus in the City
parade participants use music as sonic warfare, battling in the public sphere for
spiritual renewal and a land united by Christian belief and practice. However,
parades are multifaceted displays whose messages frequently show a multiplicity
paradas of orientations (Ashkenazi 1987; Bryan 2000; Goldstein 2004), and the Jesus in
como
the City Parade is no exception. Despite the prevalence of warfare rhetoric in
eventos
many of the songs chosen for the parade, nearly all float music directors thought of
multivocais the parade as form of evangelism designed to lay the groundwork for nonbelieving bystanders to accept the Christian message and join the Christian
community. Sometimes in contradiction to their previous statements, many
leaders told me that music was a way to express religious messages that bystanders
would find uplifting, entertaining, and non-offensive, invoking the Christian
responsibility to love your neighbour when discussing these soft-sell tactics of
relating their message. D.J. Kim, worship leader for a Korean Baptist church plant
in the Koreatown district just west of the University of Toronto, recounted that he
tried to pick the songs that will lift up the name of Jesus, bless people, and
entertain and not offend the bystanders (Kim 2010, personal interview by author).

parada como
evangelismo
contradizendo a
parada como guerra
(eu no acho
contraditrio)

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A perception to which Toronto-area Christians are sensitive is the negative

stereotyping of evangelicals as puritanical kill-joys unable to enjoy themselves
and out of touch with the broader society.12 To combat this perception, organisers
borrow the parade format of Torontos immensely popular Caribana parade, itself
modelled on the Trinidadian Carnival.13 Jesus in the City comprises almost entire
Protestant Christians who do not generally participate in or condone Carnival
celebrations; however, the lead float sponsored by the Festival of Praise
organization plays Caribbean soca and calypso; marchers adorn themselves with
garish (if modest) biblical costumes, carry brightly coloured signs and banners
and dance to upbeat music. By using the recognisable cultural form of the highly
popular Caribana, parade organisers and participants hope to invoke its fun,
festive atmosphere and thereby encourage a favourable interpretation of their
community and receptivity to their message.
Choices of parade songs also evidenced marchers conscious efforts to identify
with bystanders. Parade organisers and music leaders sought to provide music that
translated easily into bystanders experiences, and churches selectively filtered the
songs they sang, avoiding certain theological expressions or worship practices that
spectators might find esoteric. A large number of songs chosen for the parade
contain positive rather than oppositional messages emphasising the love and
acceptance of God and proclaiming participants desire for the well-being of
Toronto, Canada and the world: Lord, You Are Good, God Is Love, God Is So
Good, God So Loved the World and Love Toronto, Love the World. Music
leaders sought to cater to bystander expectations of lively, upbeat and fun parade
music, using such mass-mediated popular music styles as rock, pop, gospel, reggae
and soca.
Some parade music leaders took an even more direct approach to musical referncia mdia de
identification. Phillips, float music director and church worship leader for Evangel massa para chamar a
Temple, a large multi-ethnic congregation in north Toronto, used the Jackson 5s ateno do pblico
signature riff in their song I Want You Back (1969) as an instrumental
introduction and chorus-verse interlude for the worship song Everywhere I Go,
the first song in his bands set.14 In describing the mixture of the two songs, Phillips
explains that he layered [the song] with that motif underneath it intentionally to get
peoples attention. Just to say, this is something you can identify with, but overtop
of it is the whole message of Christ. You may think its about this, but its about
that (Phillips 2010, personal interview by author). Phillips musical juxtaposition
was a way to encourage identification on a musical level, even as the songs lyrics
pointed to differentiation with regards to its explicitly religious message.
The concern for musical identification evident in the use of familiar forms and
planejamento do
genres is also demonstrated in an acute awareness of acoustical space. While
alcance do som
parade organisers were concerned to see that each truck had the appropriate size
of speakers so that the music was amplified adequately, parade sound engineers
tweaked volume throughout the day to conform to the differing acoustical spaces
of the city and to avoid bleeding into music of adjacent floats. When the streets
narrowed and were enclosed by tall office buildings, many music leaders would

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M.M. Ingalls

switch midway through a loud song to a softer song in their set. One participant
explained the imperative of being loud enough to hear but loud enough to offend
as an imperative to use your inside voice out in the streets because if you see
people putting their hands over their ears, then theyre not getting the message.
The Jesus in the City parades aesthetic of sonic moderation is in direct contrast moderao sonica
to other parades in the city, in which all-encompassing sound at ear-splitting
volumes is often understood to be the sonic ideal. Huque (2007, 147) writes that in
Torontos Caribana and Pride parades, the prevailing aural aesthetic is the noisier,
the better because the sound is an expression of political power and a means of
drawing attention to transgressive messages of the parade participants.
In contrast, Jesus in the City parade participants attempt to maintain a sonic
balance to ensure receptivity to their message. In commenting on sonic balance,
Jason Reynolds, a float music leader and sound engineer, explained his sensitivity
to amplitude as part of a Christian responsibility to be hospitable to next-door
neighbours. Reynolds went on to draw a distinction between public spaces such as
the streets of downtown Toronto (their space) and spaces for religious
observance within the walls of the church (our space): Lets have them invite us
into their space and then lets befriend them in their space and win them into our
space (2010, personal interview by author).
There are vestiges of the warfare rhetoric in Reynolds response: the parade is
framed as a tactic designed to win the non-Christian to the church. However,
there is a subtle shift in thinking here that is significant because it makes the
distinction between identification and warfare. Rather than understanding the
parades purpose as claiming public space for Christianity, Reynolds comment
frames the parade as a neighbourly visit of one group into a space over which they
do not claim ownership. In this view, participants use music to put their best face
forward with the goal of encouraging interested bystanders to visit their space, the
local church communities from which they came. The parade is a space of ritual
enactment designed to give bystanders a glimpse of the kind of life possible in
an alternate religious sphere as it is displayed by Christians in a multiethnic,
multi-religious society.
This simultaneous concern to identify with bystanders is related to themes of
domination and taking back the streets in that both stem from a desire to
transform society. While both of these orientations fit broadly within an explicitly
evangelical understanding, these alternate discourses express different understanding of how the Christian community should be oriented towards society at
large. The ultimate aim of bringing the city of Toronto, the nation of Canada, and
eventually the world into the Christian fold is not contested, but the best means of
its achievement promote these broadly differing strategies.
Lifting up one voice to God: performing unity and diversity through singing
Exploring musical performances of warfare and identification has demonstrated
how Jesus in the City parade participants use music to perform simultaneous,

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conflicting orientations to those outside the Christian community as they take a

musical stance intended to be both confrontational and persuasive. Musical
performance in public spectacles not only allows these Christians to perform their
relationship to broader society through an outwardly directed voice; it also
enables inwardly directed, self-conscious reflection on what aspects shouldmsica produz sujeitos
characterise this shared voice. As Weidman (2006) notes, a collective voice ise suas posies, no
not the natural expression of a pre-existent group, but rather is activelyapenas reflete
constructed and contested. Through conversations with Jesus in the City paradeposies e identidades
organisers and float musical leaders, this section highlights a tension within thepr existentes
self-conscious discourse about the construction of a Christian voice and ways in
which music is productive of particular subjects or subject positions, rather than
merely reflective of social structure or expressive of identities (2006, 13).
In particular, it explores a central tension participants must negotiate when
choosing musical styles and songs: how to simultaneously perform unity and
diversity through song.
One of the express intentions of the parade is to bring Toronto-area Christians
from a variety of backgrounds together, uniting them through the act of singing.
The third tenet of the parades vision statement to encourage unity in the Body
of Christ, lifting up one voice unto God uses a vocal metaphor for unity in a
parade conspicuously and audibly divided along lines of ethno-linguistic
background. Of the eight musical floats sponsored by more than one church or
organisation, only the Catholic charismatic float was co-sponsored by churches of
the same denomination across ethnicity. The seven remaining co-sponsored floats
were sponsored by church and organisational networks on the basis of shared
ethnic background.15
For parade organisers and leaders, the imperative to unify a diverse public
through music was counterbalanced by a simultaneous imperative to intentionally
perform diversity and resist tendencies to homogenise. In a March 2010 personal
interview, Ayanna Solomon explained to me her reason for creating the parade
vision statements second tenet, to restore the cultural relevance of music and the
arts to the church, interpreting it as a call for churches to promote greater musical
and artistic creativity and freedom of expression in their worship. From her
experience as a congregational music consultant for several churches in the
Greater Toronto area, Solomon believed that many churches operated in a musical
rut because they used mainstream congregational music overwhelmingly or
even exclusively as the basis for their worship. She recounted visiting churches
across denominations and ethnic backgrounds and singing the same handful of
songs over and over again in congregational worship: the songs of the Christian
culture of white North America.
Solomons post-colonial critique implicitly implicates the Anglophone
evangelical media establishment, and against this frame she promotes an
alternate vision or, perhaps better, hearing of the sounds of Christian Canada.
Against what she sees as the homogenous Christian culture that dominates
church music-making, Solomon expressed her desire that worship become more

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questo da (falta)
diverse, and that people embrace their culture. To this end, she and the other diversidade tnica no
Festival of Praise parade organisers make a conscious attempt to reflect som
the diverse ideal on the main stage during the rallies before and after the parade.
Pre- and post-parade rallies of 2010 included groups who performed music and
dance and/or led congregational song in styles including Spanish-language
hip-hop, pop/contemporary, traditional Korean and a range of gospel styles
including traditional, contemporary, urban and Southern gospel.
This imperative to express both unity and diversity through song was taken to
heart by various church musical leaders. Listening to parade song leaders
narratives and documenting their song choices revealed a number of different
strategies for performing ethnic, national and religious identities. The ensuing
discussion highlights several of these strategies, showing how participants
engaged in an effort to create a unified but diverse religious public through
variously navigating, reconciling or simply juxtaposing tensions between
identification with and differentiation from each other through their choices of
songs and styles.
The primary way most parade groups reconciled these imperatives was to use
song repertoire in performing unity and musical style to perform diversity.
However, varied the instruments or vocal styles, the song repertoire among the 13
musical floats was remarkably similar. Multiple conversations underscored this
similarity: when I asked participants to generalise about the songs from the
various parade floats, most told me that the majority they had heard were well
known, popular congregational worship songs. Andrea Gubco, head of the
musical selection committee for the Hungarian interchurch float, told me that
pretty much everybody does the same type of songs (2010, personal interview
by author). Similarly, CCRC band leader Ray DSa recounted that there were a
lot of common songs going around. There were different styles, different ways
[different groups] played it, but most of the songs we heard were similar (DSa
2010, personal interview by author).
After speaking with Gubco and DSa, and nine other parade music directors
about their song selection, I constructed a list of nearly 100 songs chosen for
performance in church parade floats.16 Of the songs on this list, approximately
90% fall into the repertory known as praise & worship music, a mass-mediated
congregational song genre produced by the transnational evangelical media
industry in North America, the UK and Australia and the product of an increasingly
global Christian popular culture (Hackett 1998; Marshall-Fratani 1998;
Butler 2005; Rommen 2007; Nekola 2011; Ingalls 2011 and forthcoming).17
Parade float song selection overwhelmingly reflects the music of the Christian
culture that Solomon sought to avoid; however, most parade music leaders
emphasised ways in which these songs enabled unified singing and reflected a
unity of practice across an area of disparate church communities. The shared
musical repertory enabled individuals across churches to join in singing each
others songs and even prompted some impromptu musical collaborations. In the
2010 parade, Days of Elijah, a widely known praise & worship song that uses

pro meu caso

importante pensar
que a diversidade
no tem essa
coincidncia tnica,
mas uma
diversidade
subsumida a nichos
de mercado das
gravadoras

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351

prophetic imagery to describe the return of Jesus to earth, was performed by at

least 4 out of the 13 float bands. During the parade, when the Catholic charismatic
float band realised that the float in front of them (from the predominantly black
United Pentecostal church Faith Sanctuary) was playing Days of Elijah, CCRC
music leader DSa halted his band in its tracks and the musicians joined the other
float. This collaboration was one of the most memorable moments of the parade
for DSa. The all-encompassing intensity of the sound resulting from the
spontaneous, collaborative creation between predominantly South Asian Catholic
and black United Pentecostal church groups linked a specific sonic experience
with a new sense of identity as a collective public.
Yet, as frequently as musical leaders pointed to the common worship song
repertory, many of them were equally adamant about the uniqueness of their
groups style. While stylistic variety was on occasion chosen strategically as an
evangelistic tactic, the majority of musical leaders pointed to their choice of style
as more or less reflecting the way their band played the given song during any
given Sunday morning worship service.
In his study of contemporary Jewish worship, Summit (2000) has shown thatna marcha do brasil
paying attention to stylistic junctures of choice moments in which a communityest em jogo a
chooses among a set of musical resources is important for understanding howrepresentatividade das
segments of the community perform diversity. For many communities involved inlideranas, rdios e
the parade, musical styles were chosen to reflect the particular ethnic backgroundsgravadoras e no de
with which they were associated. The greatest stylistic diversity on parade floatsestilos
came from churches and church networks such as the CCRC, Evangel Temple,
Faith Sanctuary and Destiny & Dominion Word Ministries; all ministries selfidentified as multicultural whose congregations were marked by intentional
cultivation of ethnic diversity. Because music leaders were practised at
incorporating different musical styles into their Sunday morning worship, they
incorporated them into their floats at the parade as well. During the 2010 parade,
Destiny and Dominions band performed an unscripted set of over 20 praise &
worship songs well known to the churchs band set to Caribbean, traditional gospel,
urban gospel, adult contemporary and rock styles. According to Rosie Allagas
Cooke of Destiny and Dominion, because we have a very multicultural church . . .
were open to bringing all different styles. Because we [understand] that were
ministering to the people (Allagas Cooke 2010, personal interview by author).
Participants from non-English-speaking groups used praise & worship music
predominantly as well, and in addition used song language similarly to style to
negotiate between expressing a unique cultural identity and reaching out to the
community. Five parade floats were sponsored by first- or second-generation
immigrant groups from non-English-speaking countries, including two
interchurch Korean floats; a Hungarian float; a float from a network of Chinese
churches; and a float co-sponsored by area Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian
churches. The musicians on most of these floats performed a mixture of
English-language praise and worship songs, translated praise and worship songs,
and songs composed in a style of praise & worship (generally pop, rock or

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M.M. Ingalls

gospel-based) but originating from the non-English-speaking countries and with

texts in those languages.
Further conversation with participants from the Hungarian group showed that
the balance between choice of song language often reflected shifting strategies of
how to negotiate the imperative of unity and diversity, often perceived as a choice
between expressing a distinct ethnic identity and identifying with other marchers
and bystanders. From 2007 to 2010, a committee from three sponsoring Hungarian
churches has chosen a playlist of 7 10 pre-recorded songs to broadcast from their
float for the marchers to sing along with. Each sponsoring church sings in
Hungarian almost exclusively in their Sunday morning worship, and so for their
first year participating in the parade, the committee chose pre-recorded songs
entirely in Hungarian. According to Andrea Gubco, committee member and
Hungarian Full Gospel Church pastors wife, this was seen in retrospect as a poor
choice because the people around us didnt understand the words, so we werent
really gearing the songs toward them. We were just singing for ourselves (Gubco
2010, personal interview by author). To avoid this perceived musical selfindulgence, for the 2008 and 2009 parades, the committee chose four English
songs and four Hungarian songs. In the months leading up to the 2010 parade, the
committee nearly decided to choose only songs in English for the parade; however,
they ended up including two Hungarian songs at the beginning of the set before
eight English-language praise & worship songs. Though Gubco was originally in
favour of the English-only option, she came to approve of the decision, reasoning
that the Hungarian songs were very close to our hearts, and thus uniquely capable
of ennobling and invigorating her fellow church members (2010).
Examining musical choices made by parade groups show how musical style
and language are related to identification on multiple levels. Praise & worship
music, for many of these groups, is the most useful repertory to serve these various
purposes because it enables them to navigate the imperatives for unity and
diversity. Collective performance of the same songs with other parade groups gives
participants a feeling of collective identity; however, because songs may be set to
differing musical styles and translated into home languages, they are also capable
of reflecting difference. Performing praise & worship music during the parade,
then, simultaneously enables the expression and the control of difference, aspects
of globalised religions portable practices and transposable messages (Csordas
2009) that have led to its use in evangelical Christian worship across the globe.
While the vast majority of church groups relied upon the standard repertory of
praise & worship songs, it is worth exploring in more detail one parade group that
did not incorporate these songs at all. The lead float, featuring the Festival of
Praise worship band, represented a notable abstention from mainstream praise
and worship music. Seaton, a first-generation Caribbean immigrant, multiinstrumentalist, and professional musician, and her band of 10 musicians used
musical style rhetorically as part of a sustained internal conflict concerning
tension between religious and ethnic heritage within several of Torontos AfroCaribbean churches. Each of the songs the Festival of Praise band performed

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were newly composed songs that fell stylistically into Caribbean calypso and
soca. Unlike the styles performed by other parade groups, these Caribbean
popular musical styles were not generally included into Sunday worship services
at members home churches. Seaton described what she felt was a widespread
struggle within many Caribbean diasporic churches in the Toronto area: diasporic
congregational members want to use Caribbean-style songs in Sunday-morning
worship, but many religious leaders do not allow (or heavily moderate)
Caribbean musical styles in their services because of associations with various
kinds of behaviours deemed immoral. Most of these churches employ gospelinflected praise & worship music instead.18
Despite heavy demands on her time as a mother and professional musician,
Seaton willingly volunteers many hours for rehearsals and performances at the
Jesus in the City parade each year. Seaton and other band members expressed
their joy and gratitude for being able to use their skills in and love for a musical
style that represents their ethnic and national origins but is not readily accepted in
their churches. Jesus in the City allows members of the Festival of Praise band to
performatively respond to an internal conflict and to combine religious and ethnic
identities in a way they feel they cannot in their home churches or church
networks. The public, carnivalesque parade space allows for a temporary status
reversal, where the dance-inspiring style associated with a Caribbean heritage
and ethnicity that is denied a place on Sunday mornings is given an honoured
place at the head of the parade.
Through examining music chosen for the Jesus in the City parade, it is clear that
there is a complex relationship between congregational song genres, musical style
and the politics of voice. Many parade participants use praise & worship music to
construct a unified Christian voice that both represents a distinct ethnic heritage
and signifies a shared Christian religious affiliation. While using this shared
musical repertoire to perform unity through enabling simultaneous participation,
they marshal style and language in complex ways, sometimes to reify difference
and at other times to identify across boundaries. Musical repertories and styles
outside the mainstream provided a way for these groups to assert difference and,
in the case of the Caribbean group, to use public space to air an internal group
tension.
Concluding thoughts: public voices and the sounds of religious
interculturalism
This article has explored how public musical performance in Torontos annual
Jesus in the City parade enables participants from varied backgrounds to
constitute and represent themselves as a community. Paraders raise their voices
together in song in an act of sonic warfare against foes of secularisation and
pluralism that they believe threaten to silence Christian expression in the public
square. But, marchers are not simply seeking group recognition; their purposes
are explicitly evangelistic. Through singing praise in the streets, they seek to give

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M.M. Ingalls

voice to the call of Jesus to the citys and nations lost to come home to the
community of faith.
Music plays a crucial role within the parades politics of voice, shaping how
this Toronto-area Christian gathering defines and represents itself to the broader
Canadian public and embodying tensions between approaches to the broader
society and enabling simultaneous performances of unity and diversity. As
Sakakeeny (2010) has noted in his study of music in New Orleans second-line
parades, the Toronto-area Christian community makes audible . . . both fissures
and alliances in their community as they use a variety of sounds, songs and styles
to negotiate between competing notions of ideal relationship between religious
community and broader society at one hand, and ethnic, cultural and religious
identifications on the other. The parade enables the layering of simultaneous
performances (Regis 1999, 483) of ethnicity, culture and religion, and the
multilayered polyphony of Torontos Christian voice is key to the experiential
power of the parade for participants and its incorporation of Christians across
boundaries of language, culture and denomination.
Listening to the music of the Jesus in the City parade shows how these songs
provide an aural challenge to negative stereotypes and a shared performance
tradition participants use to represent themselves as a unified but not uniform
public. It suggests that studies of sonic and musical dimensions of such
contemporary public religious displays are necessary for understanding the
emerging transnational and yet intercultural religious landscape. While many
studies of changing North American religious landscape focus on distinct ethnic
groups or immigrant groups (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000, 2002; Bramadat and
Seljak 2005, 2008; Leonard 2006; Levitt and Hejtmanek 2009), relatively few have
explored the new sets of social relations being forged among immigrants of
differing backgrounds who are members of the same religion. As religious
immigrants find themselves in closer geographical proximity, there is increasing
potential for communities once connected by imagined bonds to form a visible
and, significantly, audible public. Enabled by a shared mass-mediated
congregational song repertoire, participants sing into existence a new religious
public in an open dialogue with their ethnic groups of origin and their national
communities, both old and new. Shared sounds and songs connect local
communities while mediating their differences, as participants come together to
construct the Christian voice of their city, region and nation. By exploring urban
religious spectacles and asking what kinds of sounds are produced and why, we can
start to hear how participants are seeking to define both for themselves and for the
broader society what it means to be religious in the twenty-first century global
city.
Notes
1. Field research consisted of attending parade meetings beginning in April 2010,
accompanying organised prayer walks to prepare participants for the parade, visiting
several sponsoring and participating churches, going to performances of the some of

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fez trabalho de
campo com os
organizadores

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

355

the parade bands and observing the event itself. The formal interviews for this project
were designed around the individuals who made organisational decisions or musical
choices in the parade. (Shorter interviews with parade participants and informal
conversations with parade participants and bystanders supplemented these core
interviews.) Two dozen interviews were conducted with 11 out of 13 music directors
for the parade floats. These interviews focused on choices of songs and styles for the
parade, the rationales behind these choices and personal narratives of both musical
and non-musical experiences during the 2010 parade and previous parades. I
compiled song lists into a list of nearly 100 songs sung during the Jesus in the City
parade and analysed them for common themes, songs and stylistic preferences. Over
the course of the year of field research, I developed long-term and reciprocal
relationships with several parade organisers. On the day of the parade, I served as
unofficial photographer, donating my photos of the event to the organization for use
in their promotional materials. I continue to keep in contact with parade organisers
and attendees via email and through the parades Facebook site.
The March for Jesus, which began in the UK in the late 1987 with 15,000 people,
became an annual international event through the 1990s, drawing an estimated 60
million participants worldwide between 1987 and 2000 (Ediger 2004). The British
organisers of the March for Jesus planned for it to phase out and held the last
centrally organised march in 2000; yet, in some places, the March for Jesus
continued under independent organisation. In many places in Latin America and the
Pacific islands, the March for Jesus has become an annual fixture; in Brazil, it draws
millions of participants across many cities annually. For the history and philosophy
behind the March for Jesus, see Kendrick et al. (1992) and Ediger (2004). For further
studies of international Marches for Jesus, see Bartkowski and Regis (2003),
Fer (2007) and Wightman (2007).
The 24 groups include organised groups on foot without a truck or van float,
including several smaller church groups, a tae kwon do studio marching in formation
and church vans carrying the elderly, infirm or disabled with the parade around the
circuit.
For further explorations of these dynamics in a variety of contemporary global
contexts, see Ashkenazi (1987), Regis (1999), Bryan (2000), Huque (2007),
Goldstein (2004), and Sakakeeny (2010).
According to Fer, Taking over the streets through public, collective spectacle is,
first of all, a concrete expression of Pentecostal militants entry into enemy
territory. [This] is [conceived] not only as a space of private individual suffering but
the public site of spiritual conflict. Taking the streets is [therefore] symbolically
taking the city (2007, translation mine).
This song was popularised by the well-known US gospel artist CeCe Winans on her
2007 album Thy Kingdom Come (EMI Gospel). It includes a refrain with a call and
response between the solo vocalist (Winans), who sings about taking territory back,
as the gospel chorus chants were waging war.
Themes of triumph prevalent in the Pauline epistles (e.g. I Thessalonians 5:8;
Romans 6:13, 23; Ephesians 6:10 17) are through to be drawn from the common
first-century Jewish theme of God as a divine warrior (Reid 1993). Raise the
Standard was a popular slogan for the popular evangelical mens conference
Promise Keepers who named their 1995 event Raise the Standard and incorporated
it into their conference mission statement: The practical expression of the mission of
Promise Keepers is to encourage, equip and motivate the men of all nations to raise
the standard of Jesus Christ in their own lives, families, churches and communities.
Raise the Standard was the title of a popular double-CD set of worship songs

356

8.

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9.

10.

11.
12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

M.M. Ingalls
produced in 1995. (Promise Keepers, http://www.promisekeepers.org/about/
pk-history, accessed 28 September 2011.)
Lord, I Lift Your Name on High and Lift His Name were performed on a float
sponsored by several Korean churches. Lord, I Lift Your Name on High and
High and Lifted Up were sung as a medley by the United Pentecostal Faith
Sanctuary churchs float. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal Council float included
Lord, I Lift Your Name on High and We Want to See Jesus Lifted High.
Numerous conversations with parade music directors and organisers revealed that
nearly every church group chose to sing at least one song that fit this lyrical theme.
We Want to See Jesus Lifted High. Words and Music by Doug Horley. CCLI Song
No. 1033408. q1993 Thankyou Music (Admin. by EMI Christian Music
Publishing).
Jesus, You Reign on High is an original soca and pop-based song written by parade
founder Ayanna Solomon and sung on the lead float by a Caribbean band. The Lord
Reigns was performed by Destiny and Dominion Word Ministries float.
Words and music by Paul Kyle. CCLI Song No. 37845. q1980 Thankyou Music
(Admin. by EMI Christian Music Publishing).
This is a conception that praise marches in a variety of settings have consciously
worked to dispel. See Wightman (2007), Kendrick et al. (1992), and Bartkowski and
Regis (2003).
Share, a black Canadian newspaper, invoked the Caribana/Carnival frame for its
article on the 2010 Jesus in the City parade in article headlined Playing Mas for
Jesus.
Though not mentioned in our conversations, I found that the mixture of these two
songs has been popularised by commercially popular worship leader and songwriter
Israel Houghton. Though the riff is not featured in any commercial recordings of the
song, YouTube videos show that it is common in live performances, complete with
singers doing Jackson 5 dance moves along with it.
These seven floats comprised the Afro-Caribbean Festival of Praise lead float, three
interchurch Korean floats, a float sponsored by a network of Chinese-speaking
churches, a Hungarian float and a float of a collection of Eastern European churches
that participants referred to as the Slavic float.
My conversations with parade musicians on the day of and after the parade yielded
comprehensive song lists for 9 out of 13 musical floats, supplemented by field
recordings of songs performed by the remaining floats.
Praise & worship music, also known as contemporary worship music, or simply
worship music, is a broad repertory of congregational songs set to popular music.
Praise & worship music originated as simple newly composed choruses among
members of the 1970s Christian counterculture and developed among charismatic
and Pentecostal churches networks before its adoption into evangelical Christian
churches more generally in the 1980s and 1990s. The songs, produced in evangelical
media centres of Nashville (US), Eastbourne (UK) and Sydney (Australia), are now
distributed and sung worldwide. For further discussion of the history and global
transmission of this repertory, see Ward (2005), Evans (2006), Ingalls (2008),
Nekola (2009) and Ingalls (forthcoming).
When asked to describe what songs counter to the Caribbean music to form a
balance, Seaton replied that Some of the churches go into the Hosanna, Integrity
and Hillsong-type music. And then theres some who go toward the R&B stuff, or
theyll take the old hymns and put their flavour to it (maybe a bluegrass or a country
or a two-step thing). Or some of them will do a lot of praise and worship.

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