“I Plug the Service into Planning Center”: Contemporary Evangelical Worship as Digital Religion

The present study follows approaches from Digital Religion Studies to argue that contemporary worship has transformed evangelicals’ church music and worship culture into a digital religion in which digital media informs religious practice, expression, identity, affiliation, and authority. A media ethnography of the public-facing online discourses of seven major providers of digital worship production and planning tools, supplemented by an illustrative case study of a representative local evangelical church, supports two key claims: evangelicals have negotiated digital media technologies in line with their values by socially shaping their digital worship production tools, but with the effect of mediatizing contemporary worship as a form of popular therapy culture. From the perspective of worship leaders, however, digitized worship production and planning creates a technological imperative whose pursuit offers an “illusion of choice” but whose algorithms constrain contemporary worship practices into predetermined paths.