Who’s Minding the Music?: The Impact of Charismatic Renewal on Southern Baptist Training of Worship Leaders

As the largest evangelical Protestant group in the United States, no single depiction will do justice to a faithful description of the liturgical life currently present in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). There exists much diversity, and Southern Baptists themselves do not agree on the proper liturgical heritage of their historical predecessors. Still, as others have demonstrated, the conservative Southern Baptists leading the Convention since the early 1980s have increasingly rallied around a liturgical tradition rooted in in the confluence of liturgical historian James White’s “Frontier worship” and what Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong describe as the “rivers” of “Praise & Worship” and “Contemporary Worship,” the style, ethos, and practices that, for many in the U.S., have come to be identified as “the new liturgical normal.” Like many evangelicals in the U.S., today’s SBC leaders have largely settled into contemporary worship and many of its Charismatic-influenced practices as the assumed and unquestioned model. It is presumed, as SBC pastor and educator Matt Boswell puts it, that “worship leaders ought to come to lead...with a guitar in one hand...” While this has no doubt affected a number of practices and systems related to the worship ministry of SBC congregations, it has particularly influenced the avenues for training those called to lead worship in the local church. This paper traces the development of worship leadership practices in the SBC by focusing on the leader’s education for the task and the ways in which Charismatic-influenced contemporary worship music (CWM) practices have influenced the denomination’s training paths for its worship leaders. SBC congregations have a relatively long history of valuing musical education for the ministers called to lead public worship. Given the SBC’s adoption of many Charismaticinfluenced musical practices in recent decades, the nature of and pathways for this education have evolved significantly. Concluding observations describe these developments as further solidifying the future of the SBC in the liturgical life and ethos of charismatically renewed contemporary worship while maintaining connections to its own historical precedents.