THERE is a growing number of new initiatives in Christian liturgy and mission attempting to respond to the growing threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinction. Music in worship is one of them.
Can we sing praise to God for the beauty of the earth, when so much of what was bright and beautiful is now tarnished and broken by the human selfishness and failure that lie behind the current ecological crises? Should our hymns and worship songs include repentance, grief, lament, and protest? Can we express in worship our troubled uncertainties about the impending huge changes ahead?
Mark Porter, who now lectures in Erfurt, achieved a London doctorate in ethnomusicology — a multi-disciplinary approach that, through fieldwork and analysis, provides insights into the diversity of musical practices and experiences, particularly — for Porter — within worshipping communities.
This book is a personal journey of discovery, emotionally engaged, and theologically alert, in which Porter brings musical and ethnographic skills to exploring the recent changes within the Church’s responses to music-making, and particularly in its attitudes to the looming climate crisis. He interviewed more than 40 people in very different contexts, focusing initially on their use of music, as new rituals are developed and new worship songs composed.
This process exposed wider issues concerning beliefs in God as creator, human relationships within communities and with the natural environment, and also attitudes, power balance, and priorities. He notes the space that music opens up to enable personal, congregational, and cultural changes to be made.
In one chapter, Porter explores how a focus on ecological issues can work within the worship-song format. Another notes how important music has become within recent Christian protest movements, such as Christian Climate Action, seeking for God’s justice, and framing protest in terms of worship, prayer and grace.
One chapter celebrates how the papal encyclical Laudato Si’ inspired a range of musical initiatives promoting environmental values, connecting worship, theology, justice, and peace. There is a fourth conversation about lament, grief, and mourning. He refers to a Requiem written in memoriam for 12 recently extinct species. How do we create music, liturgy, an ritual that relate to the context of troubling emotions concerning the environmental crises? The last set of conversations relate to Forest Church — a fresh expression of church which meets outdoors, engaging with nature-based spiritualities.
This is a pioneering and wide-ranging study of the place of Christian music in a changing, troubled world. Porter says that his discoveries inspired him, but also left him wondering whether they were really radical enough.
This clearly written book, very fair to the diversity of Christian traditions, and with an extensive bibliography, will be of particular interest to church musicians and Christian environmentalists.
Dr David Atkinson is an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Southwark.
For the Warming of the Earth: Music, faith, and ecological crisis
Mark Porter
SCM Press £40
(978 0-334-06568–5)
Church Times Bookshop £32