ABSTRACT
In this era of YouTube and GodTube, when worship leaders compete on the televised vocal talent contest American Idol, and when websites like spotifyforlife. com can help one find the most popular playlists of Christian music for digital streaming, we can often take for granted the interconnectedness of music, media and Christianity. Music and media have been an intertwined part of the lived experience of Christianity for hundreds of years, but we often think of our current time in church music history as a media age. In part this is because today we are aware of so many new ways to make and access Christian music. In past centuries, we’ve encountered Christian music in manuscripts, books, records and on the radio, but today we can carry a library in our pocket and share our self-produced worship songs with people thousands of miles away via the Internet. New technologies offer different sets of possibilities for how we worship – how we hear, how we sing, how we feel and how we connect.
