The Music Ministry of Southwood Baptist Church

Southwood Baptist Church, an independent Baptist congregation in southwest Fort Worth, Texas, no longer meets. This page is a historical record of how its music ministry was organised and what it understood itself to be doing, drawn from the church's own pages.

A sacrifice of praise

The ministry published a short statement of philosophy, and it is the most revealing paragraph the church left behind about its worship. Worship, it argued, was not primarily something a congregation received:

We don't just come to receive something; we first give something — a sacrifice of praise. In that praise we find joy unspeakable and full of glory!

That is a settled position and not a throwaway line. It sets itself against a way of thinking about a service that was widespread by the 2000s and is more widespread now — the service as a product, assessed on whether the music was good, whether it moved you, whether it met a need you brought through the door. Southwood's answer was that the direction of travel runs the other way. The phrase “sacrifice of praise” comes out of the letter to the Hebrews, and the word sacrifice is doing real work in it: something is being handed over, at some cost, whether or not the person handing it over feels like it that morning.

Practically, that position has consequences for how a church runs its music. If worship is an offering made by the whole congregation, then the job of the platform is to make congregational singing possible rather than to perform to it, and the measure of a Sunday is not whether the band played well but whether the room sang.

The ensembles

Across the years covered by the archive, Southwood's music ministry supported an unusually wide set of groups for a congregation of its size:

• the Southwood Sanctuary Adult Choir;
• an orchestra;
• a praise band;
• a praise team;
• the Southwood Praise Teen Ensemble;
• an audio and visual tech team.

That list repays a second look, because it is not one music programme but two overlapping ones held together in the same building. A robed sanctuary choir with an orchestra is the older Baptist pattern. A praise band with a front-line praise team is the newer one. Many American congregations spent the 1990s and 2000s choosing between them, sometimes acrimoniously, and a great deal of ink was spilt over what were called the worship wars. Southwood appears simply to have kept both, and to have run a teen ensemble alongside them so that the pipeline into the adult groups never closed.

The tech team sits in the same list as the singers, which is a small but telling piece of filing. At Southwood the people running the desk were treated as part of the music ministry rather than as facilities staff, and a good number of them were teenagers — the arrangement described in the youth ministry record, and connected to the broadcast work set out in the audio and video record.

Hymnody and the Baptist choir tradition

An independent Baptist congregation in Texas in this period sang from a settled body of material: the eighteenth and nineteenth century English hymn writers, the American gospel-song tradition of the later nineteenth century, and the revival and convention songs that came out of the South and shaped what Baptist congregations expected a Sunday morning to sound like. The shape-note singing schools and the convention songbooks that fed that repertoire are documented in the collections of the Library of Congress, and the denominational side of the story — hymnals, songbooks, and the publishing houses that produced them — is held by the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

The choir was the institution that carried this repertoire. A sanctuary choir is a demanding thing to sustain: it needs a weekly rehearsal, a director who can teach music to people who cannot read it, robes and a rehearsal room, and above all thirty or forty adults willing to give up a weekday evening for years at a stretch. Where a choir survives, it is usually the most durable social body in the congregation, and it tends to outlast several ministers.

The shift toward praise bands

The praise band and praise team arrived in Baptist churches through the 1980s and 1990s, and they changed more than the instrumentation. A choir faces the congregation from behind the preacher and sings at set moments; a praise team stands in front and leads continuously, and the congregation follows a small group of voices rather than a large one. The music itself moved with it — fewer verses, more repetition, a wider vocal range in some songs and a narrower one in others, and a shift from printed hymnals to projected words, which is why the projection team appears in Southwood's ministry list at all.

Running both models at once, as Southwood did, is more work than choosing one. It means two rehearsal schedules, two sets of instrumentalists to keep, two repertoires to maintain, and a weekly negotiation over what goes where in the order of service. That the church sustained a choir, an orchestra, a band, a team and a teen ensemble simultaneously says something about how many of its members were prepared to give an evening a week to it.

The work behind a Sunday

Very little of a church music programme is visible from a pew. Music has to be chosen weeks ahead and often bought; parts have to be copied for whichever instruments happen to have turned up this season; the choir has to learn anything unfamiliar over several rehearsals; the order of service has to be agreed with the preaching; and somebody has to know who is away on which Sunday and cover the gap. In a volunteer programme all of that is done by people with day jobs, in the evenings, for nothing.

The minister of music at Southwood kept a worship blog and newsletter, which is where much of that week-by-week planning surfaced for the congregation to read. Neither the blog nor the newsletter survives in the archive. A volunteer signup form also existed, inviting members to indicate an interest in the praise team, praise band, choir, tech team or orchestra; that form is deliberately not reproduced here, since this is a record rather than a working church website, and the ensembles it recruited for stopped rehearsing years ago.

The music ministry sat within the broader programme described in the ministries record, and its ensembles sang at the services whose pattern is set out in the weekly rhythm record.