Singing praise in the streets: Performing Canadian Christianity through public worship in Toronto's Jesus in the City parade

Abstract

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 Toronto's Jesus in the City parade, an annual event in which Toronto-area Christians take their message to the city's 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

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 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 parade's Facebook site.

 2. 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).

 3. 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.

 4. 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).

 5. 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).

 6. 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 ‘we're waging war’.

 7. 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 men's 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 produced in 1995. (Promise Keepers, http://www.promisekeepers.org/about/pk-history, accessed 28 September 2011.)

 8. ‘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 church's 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.

 9. ‘We Want to See Jesus Lifted High’. Words and Music by Doug Horley. CCLI Song No. 1033408. ©1993 Thankyou Music (Admin. by EMI Christian Music Publishing).

10. ‘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.

11. Words and music by Paul Kyle. CCLI Song No. 37845. ©1980 Thankyou Music (Admin. by EMI Christian Music Publishing).

12. 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).

13. 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’.

14. 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.

15. 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’.

16. 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.

17. ‘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).

18. 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 there's some who go toward the R&B stuff, or they'll 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’.