As the livestream of Gather25 began, five children stood at the edge of an auditorium stage as a guitar picked a simple introduction to “This Little Light of Mine.” A spotlight focused on a boy who sang the first verse in English, then panned as each took a turn singing a few lines in their own languages.
A 25-hour-long event broadcast last weekend from seven locations around the world, Gather25 is the latest effort to bring together the global church for worship across tribes and tongues.
“I think people are hungry for this,” organizer Jennie Allen said in a Fox News interview. “I believe in the diversity of the church. Each stream of the church is causing good in different ways. At the end of the event, we’re going to be singing ‘How Great Thou Art,’ and our hope is that for one moment, the whole world would sing one song to God.”
Between the live locations, TBN broadcast, and livestream into 21,000 churches and homes, organizers estimate that 7 million people tuned in.
The vision in Revelation 7:9 of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne,” has inspired worshipers for centuries and added an eternal dimension to international gatherings of believers.
But logistically and practically, leaders aiming to represent the diverse languages and styles of global worship almost always struggle to share platforms and microphones equitably.
Ethnodoxologists, who study global worship, examine the challenge for international gatherings to bring together Christians in song while resisting the pull toward the cultural and musical practices of the well-resourced and influential segments of the church.
The week prior to the live event, the collective of worship artists involved in Gather25 released an album, Hear the World That You So Love Sing Back to You. Executive producers Matt Redman and Jason Ingram assembled a team of Christian musicians and songwriters from ten countries.
“It all makes for such a unique project—and such a beautiful glimpse of the global Church—alive and well, and singing her heart out,” said Redman in promotion of the album.
Many of the artists featured on the release already had large platforms. Nigerian worship leader Sinach (who wrote “Way Maker”), Guatemalan group Miel San Marcos, and Brazilian worship leader Gabriela Rocha each have millions of followers on social media and produce music that generally falls in the same contemporary praise and worship style that is popular in the US.
The album also includes several songs that incorporate Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, and Swahili, but in terms of musical expression, there is a generally unified sound: Western pop-inflected praise and worship.
“I didn’t see a lot of diversity in the musical expression,” said ethnodoxologist Joy Kim, who works for Proskuneo Ministries. “That’s not necessarily a problem if there was deep collaboration involved. If artists from around the world were involved in the songwriting process and it all came out sounding like Western pop, that’s one thing. But all we can see is the outcome.”
Gather25 began at the US location, in Dallas, with children singing an American folk song popularized during the Civil Rights Movement, followed by a dance-team performance and an energetic worship session by award-winning gospel artist Tye Tribbett. Christine Caine, Francis Chan, Priscilla Shirer, and Rick Warren offered remarks and prayer.
As the hours went on, the broadcast locations moved around the world: Romania, Rwanda, India, Malaysia, the UK, Peru, and an undisclosed location featuring Christians in the persecuted church.
The live events themselves included more musical diversity than the album. At 2 a.m. Central Time on Friday night, Americans could tune in to hear worship leaders in India sing in regional vocal styles as they led congregational music. During the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time slot on Saturday, performers in Rwanda displayed traditional dance and drumming.
Gather25 handout photoAfrican Christians filled the arena in Kigali, Rwanda, and celebrated the chance for their ministries and leaders to be in the global spotlight: a children’s choir from Uganda, drummers from Burundi, a gospel singer from Nigeria. Rwandan pastor Hassan Kibirango called it “exhilarating” and one of the “landmark moments” in his life to speak at the event.
While the sessions were translated in real time—organizers say 87 languages were offered—Christians from the US and the West also heard musicians around the world sing familiar songs or English lyrics.
With the global growth of contemporary praise and worship music from the United States, the UK, and Australia, churches in Nigeria, South Korea, and the Philippines can sing some of the same songs used in American megachurches.
Historically, the church has moved between a unified musical repertoire and regional diversity.
But this isn’t the first time in church history that there has been interest or movement toward a unified musical repertory and practice.
The Roman Catholic Church prioritized a standardized liturgy and collection of chants, so before the Reformation, Christians mostly heard the same music and text in the same language (Latin) during services.
Baptist, Methodist, and Lutheran missionaries brought their own hymnody with them in the 18th century, seeking to unify the church across geography. In some cases, that meant elevating Western musical practices over local ones as the “true” music of the church.
“There was a shift in the mid-20th century toward encouraging Christians outside the Western European music tradition to embrace their own musical expression,” said Brian Hehn, the director of the Center for Congregational Song. “But the global church has only had a few decades to fight against the existing musical hierarchy. And they don’t have the resources to fight the music industry.”
Hehn said that the musical hierarchy of the church still powerfully shapes worship practices of Christians around the world and challenges the ongoing pursuit of a global practice or “global song.”
“People with resources and power have to stop and think, Are we setting up people across the world to worship in their own voices, through their own local expressions?” said Hehn.
Joy Kim, the ethnodoxologist, acknowledged that intercultural collaboration can be hard and expensive, especially when it comes to songwriting across language barriers.
Outside the US, most church musicians are bivocational and serve in contexts where they don’t have the time and resources to travel to songwriting meetups. Even in an age of videoconferencing, cowriting or recording doesn’t work as well when everyone can’t be in the same room.
“If I had the money, I would invite worship leaders from around the world, pay all of their expenses, and write music together,” Joy Kim said.
Jaewoo Kim, the author of Willingly Uncomfortable Worship and director of public relations and ministry development for Proskuneo Ministries (and Joy Kim’s husband), wrote about the value of looking beyond Western Christian music after last year’s Lausanne Congress. Like Gather25, Lausanne gathered Christians from over 200 countries and territories virtually and in person and aimed to represent the diversity of the global church.
“The songs chosen [for Lausanne] were also predominantly written by Western or English-speaking composers,” he wrote. “Every song is born out of a specific context. When we sing a song from another part of the world, we not only bring a particular culture’s language into our congregation but also welcome that country’s story and its lived theology in word and melody. This is an exercise in mutuality.”
Joy Kim said that the work of learning to make worship more “polycentric”—giving equal weight to multiple cultures rather than one dominant culture—leads to rich relationships and a more expansive view of the global church. And she said she is hopeful that events like Gather25 can be a step in a good direction.
“We all need to learn what it means to have worship that is polycentric, multicultural, and intercultural—worship that reflects the bride of Christ,” said Kim. “I rejoice in efforts like this event to bring non-Western worship leaders and multiple languages to the same platform. We have a long way to go, but I celebrate it.”
