This interdisciplinary volume brings together leading writers and thinkers to provide a critique of a broad range of topics related to Hillsong Church. Hillsong is one of the most influential, visible, and (in some circles) controversial religious organizations/movements of the past thirty years. Although it has received significant attention from both the academy and the popular press, the vast majority of the scholarship lacks the scope and nuance necessary to understand the complexity of the movement, or its implications for the social, cultural, political, spiritual, and religious milieus it inhabits. This volume begins to redress this by filling important gaps in knowledge as well as introducing different audiences to new perspectives. In doing so, it enriches our understanding of one of the most influential Christian organizations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Starting as a single congregation in Australia, Hillsong Church now has campuses worldwide, releases worship music that sells millions of albums and its ministers regularly appear in mainstream media. So, how has a single church gained such international prominence? This book offers an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which music and marketing have been utilised in the pursuit and production of spiritual experience for members of Hillsong Church. An experience that has proven to be incredibly popular. The main theme of this book is that marketing, specifically branding, is not just a way to "sell" religion, but rather an integral part of spiritual experience in consumer society. Focussing on the London Hillsong church as a case study, the use of its own music in tandem with strong branding is shown to be a co- and re-productive method of organizing, patterning, and communicating information. The church provides the branded material and cultural context in which participants’ sacred experience of self unfolds. However, this requires participants to "do the work" to properly understand, and ultimately embody, the values associated with the brand. This book raises important questions about the role of branding and music in forming modern scared identities. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Ethnomusicology and Media Studies.

This book highlights the expansion of the influential Pentecostal Hillsong Church global megachurch network from Australia across global cities. Ethnographic research in Amsterdam and New York City shows that global cities harbor nodes in transnational religious networks in which media play a crucial role. By taking a lived religion approach, media is regarded as integral part of everyday practices of interaction, expression and consumption of religion. Key question raised is how processes of mediatization shape, alter and challenge this thriving cosmopolitan expression of Pentecostalism. Current debates in the study of religion are addressed: religious belonging and community in global cities; the interrelation between media technology, religious practices and beliefs; religion, media and social engagement in global cities; media and emerging modes of religious leadership and authority. In this empirical study, pressing societal issues like institutional responses to sexual abuse of children, views on gender roles, misogyny and mediated constructions of femininity are discussed.

In Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments from the Margins Rocha, Hutchinson and Openshaw argue that Australia has made and still makes important contributions to the ways in which Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianities have developed worldwide.

The relationship between musical activity and ethical significance occupies long traditions of thought and reflection both within Christianity and beyond. From concerns regarding music and the passions in early Christian writings through to moral panics regarding rock music in the 20th century, Christians have often gravitated to the view that music can become morally weighted, building a range of normative practices and prescriptions upon particular modes of ethical judgment. But how should we think about ethics and Christian musical activity in the contemporary world? As studies of Christian musicking have moved to incorporate the experiences, agencies, and relationships of congregations, ethical questions have become implicit in new ways in a range of recent research - how do communities negotiate questions of value in music? How are processes of encounter with a variety of different others negotiated through musical activity? What responsibilities arise within musical communities? This volume seeks to expand this conversation. Divided into four sections, the book covers the relationship of Christian musicking to the body; responsibilities and values; identity and encounter; and notions of the self. The result is a wide-ranging perspective on music as an ethical practice, particularly as it relates to contemporary religious and spiritual communities. This collection is an important milestone at the intersection of ethnomusicology, musicology, religious studies and theology. It will be a vital reference for scholars and practitioners reflecting on the values and practices of worshipping communities in the contemporary world.

"When did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expanded into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches? In her exciting new book, anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently have been at the forefront of new forms of global Pentecostalism. She shows how new and reconfigured forms Christianity in both the Global North and South are increasingly digitally mediated, engaged with youth and popular cultures, and involve new forms of consumption, branding and identity. The Australian megachurch Hillsong has expanded globally through a Cool Christianity style which embraces pop music, digital media, spectacle, branding, and celebrity culture. Rocha follows young Brazilians from their budding Hillsong fandom, to their journey to Australia to join the church and study at its College, and on their return to Brazil. She argues that Brazilian middle-class youth join Hillsong to become cosmopolitan and to distinguish themselves from the Pentecostalism of the Brazilian poor. Notwithstanding Hillsong's recent scandals, the megachurch offers them an alternative geography of belonging, where pastors speak English and Christianity is about love, ethics, rationality, autonomy, and more equal relations between congregants and pastors. Rocha makes a strong argument for the importance of the local in globalization studies, and the key roles of class, affect and aesthetics for an understanding of the formation of religious subjectivities and communities"--

The five-volume Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in Britain and Ireland as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Royal Supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond Britain and Ireland--and also analyses newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier British and Irish dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent of ecclesiastical organizations. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V follows the spatial, cultural, and intellectual changes in dissenting identity and practice in the twentieth century, as these once European traditions globalized. While in Europe dissent was often against the religious state, dissent in a globalizing world could redefine itself against colonialism or other secular and religious monopolies. The contributors trace the encounters of dissenting Protestant traditions with modernity and globalization; changing imperial politics; challenges to biblical, denominational, and pastoral authority; local cultures and languages; and some of the century's major themes, such as race and gender, new technologies, and organizational change. In so doing, they identify a vast array of local and globalizing illustrations which will enliven conversations about the role of religion, and in particular Christianity.