Music-making, especially singing within a spiritual community, is soul food. It shapes and integrates our experience and understanding of the Holy. It gives voice to our heartfelt praise and prayer. It connects us to other voices and bodies around us. It moves energy within a worship space. It engages our whole being - body, mind, breath, spirit. Words and tunes continue to sing in us even when we are not fully conscious of them.

But as I work with congregations around the country, I frequently see that the formative, generative, and enlivening potential of music is unrecognized or diminished. While congregations might be able to articulate a theology of worship (why they sing), their musical practices (how they sing) can be disconnected from, contradict, or subvert, their theology.