Sacrifice of praise: emotion and collective participation in an African-American worship service

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 1996 by Timothy J. Nelson

These factors of structural ambiguity and resistance to high visibility, both of which operate to inhibit congregational response, must be overcome. It is the task of those in performance roles to evoke congregational participation through the nature and quality of their performances, and in this they draw upon several resources. I will focus here upon two types of performances: music and spoken discourse.

Music is a very important resource for drawing out congregational participation and includes such elements as the number and type of instruments (particularly the use of drums), style (volume, rhythm, instrumental breaks, elaborate or simple structure), the proportion of the service dedicated to music as well as the length of each particular song, the expected participants (soloists generally evoke less fervor than choir or congregational singing), and finally, the lyrical content of the songs (emotional sentiments of praise or comfort in everyday language rather than abstract concepts or archaic words and phrases).

While the power of music to stimulate a collective response is fairly transparent (and therefore somewhat suspect among some ritual participants, as we have seen), the use of language to stir the congregation is less obvious. From my observations of Eastside Chapel, I noted two rhetorical strategies used for different types of ritual speech. First, there is the use of standard formulas and stock phrases which appear primarily in prayers and testimonies, a phenomenon noted by many other scholars of the African-American church (cf. Goldsmith 1989:110 and Lewis 1964: 145). Drake and Cayton (1962: 620) reported that "there is a common stock of striking phrases and images which are combined and recombined throughout the Negro lower-class religious world." In fact many of the same phrases that Drake and Cayton recorded in Chicago over fifty years ago can still be heard almost every Sunday at Eastside Chapel and at almost any other black congregation in the Charleston area. Such phrases as "I thank the Lord that he woke me up this morning clothed in my right mind. He didn't have to do it but he did," and "He took my feet out of the miry clay and He placed them on a rock to stay" are particular favorites.

Although one might expect that this formulaic repetition would act to dampen congregational response, at Eastside Chapel the use of certain well-worn phrases invariably brought about an enthusiastic, emotional response. In fact, they elicited much more response than a less formulaic statement with the same content would evoke. This was brought home to me in a personal way one morning during the monthly "Men's Prayer Breakfast." When it was my turn to pray, I began to ask for safety on the road for my wife and myself as we were going to be driving a long distance on the following day. In my spontaneous prayer, I framed the request as if I was making ordinary conversation, making it up as I went along. While previous prayers had evoked heartfelt cries of "Yes, Lord" and "amen" from the other men, my prayer did not meet with the same agreement until Lenard Singleton interjected the phrase "We ask for your traveling mercies" over my own words. When this stock phrase was uttered, all of the men responded "Yes, Lord" in unison.