‘Would Jesus Play Guitar?’ and Other Questions From Conference on Contemporary Worship

The Banner has a subscription to republish articles from Religion News Service. This story by Bob Smietana was published Aug. 18, 2026 on religionnews.com. It has been edited for length and Banner style. The Banner added a sentence to the 14th paragraph and added the final paragraph, to provide context for the Christian Reformed Church.

Nashville (RNS) — Recent decades in America have seen a revolution in how some Protestants worship.

In many cases services that were once centered around prayer, hymns, a sermon, and the Lord’s Supper, now often resemble a Coldplay concert followed by a TED Talk—a long worship song set followed by a topical sermon with slides.

And worship songs have become a primary way people experience God.

This reality led Paul Ryan, a worship pastor at Calvin University and on staff at the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship, to ask a complicated question. If Jesus were preaching today, would he still take up bread and a cup of wine and say, “Do this in remembrance of me” as he did in the Bible?

“Or would he pick up his acoustic guitar and say, ‘Sing this in remembrance of me?’” asked Ryan, during a meeting of worship scholars in Nashville earlier this summer.

The question came up during a talk by Emily Snider Andrews, a scholar at Samford University in Alabama, about the way praise music can make God “experientially real for participants,” similar to the embodied practice of the sacraments. Ryan said that scholars have struggled to find the right language to talk about what happens when people sing in modern worship services. Those churches aren’t intentionally trying to replace Communion, the sacrament through which Christians recount Jesus’ last supper with his disciples and his death on the cross. But they do see something powerful and different happening in the way people worship.

The discussion of whether worship music has become a new sacrament was one of about two dozen discussions at the two-day Conference on Contemporary Praise and Worship, held July 28-29 at Belmont University in Nashville.

During the event, scholars discussed the theology and history of worship music, talked about the role money plays in shaping worship, and even whether worship music could benefit from an “oldies category” the way that rock music has. They listened to keynotes from speakers such as Melanie Ross, associate professor of liturgical studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and spent a lot of time eating together and talking about what they’d heard.

One thing was notably missing from the agenda: The 60 or so scholars who attended the event did not sing.

That was on purpose, said Adam Perez, assistant professor of worship studies at Belmont, who was one of the conference organizers. Most conferences that focus on praise and worship music are for church leaders, he said, and focus on learning new songs or getting practical tips for worship.

The focus of this conference, one of the first of its kind, was more on the bigger picture—about what the rise of modern worship music means and how it is changing the church. He said that this kind of music has played a major role in reshaping the American religious landscape. “How is it that very few people are talking about it?” Perez asked.

He said scholars who focus on contemporary praise music have gathered together before, but usually at a conference with a larger focus, such as the American Academy of Religion or the American Musicological Society, where this topic is just one of many.

“There are not many places where it’s just assumed that this matters,” Perez said. “We start with the assumption that everybody agrees this phenomenon is worth studying.”

Perez is also part of the Worship Leader Research Project, which studies the songs in churches and who writes them—as well as surveying worship leaders. In 2024 he contributed to publishing a Reformed analysis of the then top 100 most sung/reported songs from Christian Copyright Licensing International, the CCLI Vetting Project: A Reformed Voice.

The conference led off with a panel of industry insiders for wide-ranging and sometimes frank talk about music, data, economics and the sometimes-messy lives of songwriters.

One of the big questions: How does big data affect worship songs?

Not too much, said Stacey Willbur of TIM Publishing, a company started by famed worship leaders Chris Tomlin and Jason Ingram. Willbur said that, while publishers spend a lot of time sifting through data, she prefers that songwriters spend more time praying and reading the Bible and thinking about the people in churches who might sing that song.

Once the songs are written, data does play a role. And so does money, said Jimi Williams, president of Jesus Culture Music. Williams, a longtime music industry staffer, told attendees that when he worked for Capital Christian Music, which is owned by Universal Music Group, every year he’d get a budget revenue number.

“We don’t care who you get it from,” he recalled his bosses saying. “Just go find it. But you are going to hit that number.”

Jamie Rogers of Capital Music Group said she balances two kinds of success—both financial and spiritual. She wants the musicians she works with to fulfill their calling to write worship music. And she wants to help churches. But she also has to pay the bills.

“We’re not evil business people,” she said. “I want this music to go far and wide for the kingdom, just as much as you.”

Ross, professor at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, made that point in her keynote address, entitled “Everything New Is Old Again,” which compared changes in the church music business, from the 1920s to 1960s to contemporary trends.

Not everyone was thrilled by the commercial success of Christian songs on the radio, or by what were then called “gospel hymns”—catchy and emotionally engaging tunes meant to be sung at revivals and church services.

Author and pastor A.W. Tozer was no fan of these modern songs. He felt the music of the church was being cheapened by pop sentimentality—a criticism modern worship songs face today. “For they’re all cheap, and they’re borrowed from Tin Pan Alley,” he wrote in 1953. “And if you would merely change the name Jesus and put the name Frankie Sinatra or Clark Gable in, you wouldn’t know the difference.”

Ross went on to explain that economics have always shaped the songs that churches sang. While church leaders often evaluate the music and theology of hymns, those weren’t the only criteria. Songs are expensive to publish, especially newer songs that might not have a long shelf life.

“The repertoire that denominational editors preferred also happened to be the repertoire that was the least expensive to publish,” Ross said. “I think that alignment deserves more attention than it usually receives.”

While this conference addressed how contemporary worship has shaped the church, in June the synod of the Christian Reformed Church moved to include in its Church Order specific guidelines for how worship be conducted such that “God is not worshiped in any other way than has been commanded in his Word.” The request came from Classis Minnkota (a regional group of churches), which expressed, “In the absence of clear theological guidance in the Church Order, consistories are left either to improvise or to follow prevailing cultural models of worship that are often contrary to biblical principles.” Synod 2026 recommended the proposed changes to Church Order Art. 52. They would come into effect when adopted by a subsequent synod.

c. 2026 Religion News Service