Beeson Podcast, Episode 492 Wen Reagan April 14, 2020 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School, on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. Doug Sweeney: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. I am Doug Sweeney here with my co-host Kristen Padilla, and today's guest, Dr. Wen Reagan. We have invited Dr. Reagan to speak with us today about the intersection of history, theology, worship, and the arts. and Before Kristen introduces him, let me convey Easter blessings to all our podcast listeners. We hope you join with us in celebrating Jesus' resurrection, which enables us by faith to overcome the forces of sin and death and the devil in our lives and in our world. Now, Kristen, would you please introduce Dr. Wen Reagan? Kristen Padilla: Hi, everyone. We have Dr. Wen Reagan in the studio today. He is Associate Director of Samford University's Center for Worship and the Arts in the School of the Arts, and is Visiting Assistant Professor of music and worship. A leading expert on the history and theology of contemporary worship music, Dr. Reagan teaches courses on church music, worship leadership, and the theology and history of worship. He is also the director of worship arts at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Birmingham. He holds a Ph.D. and M.T.S. from Duke University and Duke Divinity School, respectively. He is married to Casey and they have three beautiful children. Welcome, Dr. Reagan, to the podcast. Wen Reagan: Thank you. So glad to be here with you all. Kristen Padilla: We are excited to have you to talk to us about this very interesting topic of the intersection of theology, worship, and the arts. But first, let's begin with more of a bio. Where are you from? And how did you come to faith in Jesus Christ? And maybe just a short word about how you got to Samford. Wen Reagan: I hail from the great state of North Carolina, born and raised there. My parents are from there, moved from the tobacco farms in Eastern North Carolina to Raleigh, Durham area, so that's where I grew up. And my story of faith, I liken it to a stumbling pilgrim, a bumbling stumbling pilgrim. I stumbled into things. And so, I came to faith in high school, and I stumbled onto an Appalachian service project, mission trip basically, in the Methodist Church and came to faith in high school there, kind of blindsided by God on that trip, a little bit of a Damascus Road experience. And then, came home, on fire for Jesus, also was an annoying teenager to my parents, I'm sure. That was part of my rebellion even. I came from a pretty nominal Christian home and so, to be on fire for Jesus was outside of the norm for the family culture. But sometimes, God works in funny ways like that. Wen Reagan: So, we had that and then I went to college at Duke and first went to visit the Methodist fellowship group and said, "Heya, I've started playing guitar in our worship band at church, and want to know if I could play guitar here and with your group." And they're like, "Well, maybe we'll see. We sometimes do that." And it's like, all right, go to the next table over, and it's Campus Crusade for Christ. So, that's a weird name. I don't really know what that means, but they seem like nice people. So, started talking with them and, "Hey, can I come and play guitar?" "Dude, you can come play guitar with us tonight. Come rock out for Jesus." So, I stumbled into evangelicalism because I'd come from a mainline kind of Pietist tradition, and it was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. I loved it, but the people were great and they loved rock and roll. And so, I found myself there and quickly got steeped in kind of an introduction to the reform theology, through kind of the Baptist variant. Wen Reagan: And then after college, we got married right after college, and we're at a Bible study by a pastor who was starting a church plant in the PCA, and they needed worship leaders. So, we stumbled our way into the PCA, and spent 10 years there, learning the great Presbyterian reform tradition as well. During that time, felt a calling to seminary and onwards to teach on theological education. So, went back to Duke for seminary and that's a wonderfully ecumenical mainline seminary. And then I was in a wonderfully conservative evangelical denomination. So, the tension there was, it was difficult but beautiful. I really wouldn't trade that tension for the world. I feel like I learned how to bridge different worlds and even how to love my enemies, which was constantly changing in what that was. Wen Reagan: During seminary, felt a call back to actually my baptismal roots. I had been baptized in the Episcopal church. And I felt the call to Anglicanism. And eventually, that call materialized. We got called to service, worship directory church, All Saints Church in Durham, North Carolina. And so, we moved into Anglicanism and have been there for about four years. All the while, did my doctoral work. And eventually, this job opened up at Samford to help direct the Center for Worship and the Arts and to teach worship, and we had heard great things about Samford and even great things about Beeson and knew that Beeson was here as well. So, we leaped, we jumped, and that's what brought us here, and we've loved it ever since. Doug Sweeney: Wen, you not only have bridged different denominational traditions, you have bridged different academic disciplines in your own career, which I find fascinating and I hope our listeners will too. As a church historian myself, I am pleased that you earned your Ph.D. in American Christianity at Duke, but with concentrations in church history, theology, and worship in America. That's an unusual combination. I think it's really cool, but it's unusual. Tell our listeners a little bit about how those things combined in your thinking, and what difference the combination has made for the way, first of all, you do your work as an academic, but then second of all, the way you do your work in the church. Wen Reagan: As an undergrad at Duke, I had the privilege of studying under Hans Hillerbrand, who was one of the great scholars of the reformation. And so, I went to seminary expecting to do reformation studies, but I stumbled, again, into Grant Wacker's Introduction to American Christianity, and I was enthralled within the first week. I mean, the drama, the palpable drama of dealing with Christianity in America and watching the historical course of these theologies stream through the centuries, and not only impact things that happened hundreds of years ago, impact today. Wen Reagan: Going to these churches, and having to experience, especially in the South, this is a church that was built with slave-owner money. And how do we deal with that? How do we think about it? How do we process that? How do we figure that out? And that was constantly kind of the barrage that came in that class. And it was neverending. I mean, it just kind of punches in the face of, "Wow, this is the history of Christianity in America." So, there was an ugliness, but the beauty at the same time, and to me, it was the mixture of those things, especially thinking back to being a sinner and a saint. And I don't know, I fell in love with the drama of trying to figure out what it meant to be a Christian in America. And then, how do I teach future pastors even, to think about this thing they've inherited, and how do they carry it with them? So, I was kind of hooked from jumping into that class. Wen Reagan: And then from there, it became biographical. Church history then had been a love from undergrad and then through seminary. Theology as well, but I had been leading worship for probably 12 to 15 years at that point in churches. Suddenly, my historical lens started to kind of collide with my liturgical lens and okay, where did this come from? And these traditions I'd come out of. The big question that started to emerge for me was, how did rock and roll get in the church? How did that happen? What were the forces that made that happen? And when you start to look back on the history of rock and roll, I mean, in the '50s, rock and roll was the devil's music, and it's racialized, right? I mean, there's this sense of, this is what many white Christians saw as jungle rhythm, right? So, they had racialized this concept. How do we go from that to within the next 50 years? I mean, you hardly can step into a church without getting some kind of form of rock, folk, pop music involved. So, I was really interested in that. Wen Reagan: So, I dove into that as my dissertation topic, and I really wanted to see theologically how rock and roll got justified then. And I think maybe one of the big kernels that I came away with was, evangelicals in America have always done this thing that has both good and bad elements to it. But whenever they, we, whenever we come to a medium, a technological medium, usually it's charged at first, ethically. So, if you look at radio, radio is the principality of the power of the air. Radio was seen as this devil's tool. But once evangelicals, who were a very pragmatic group, once we realized we can utilize a tool or a medium for the building of the kingdom, then we actually hollow out that medium ethically and see it as something can be filled, either with good or bad. Wen Reagan: So, rock and roll then gets this hollowing out and they realized, "Oh, if we changed the lyrics, the medium itself is fine." And of course we can actually debate, you don't just get to hollow out a medium. A medium carries its whole ethical world with it. So, rock and roll, as it comes into this sanctuary, carries this entire invisible apparatus and industrialization, a marketing element, a marketplace element, a certain affect over sematic stances, right? As a worship leader, the way you emote when you're leading worship, all these things come in invisibly or implicitly. And so, I was just fascinated to kind of tease out how that happened, how it gets justified, and then what it means for the church. Kristen Padilla: Well, we want to continue this conversation. It's so fascinating about your research and work. But before we go further, can you say a word about the work that you do at the Center for Worship and the Arts? What is the mission of the center, who are you trying to serve, and how are you working toward fulfilling it? And you may also, if you want to, Wen, just say a word about the conference that you're planning in October. Wen Reagan: Sure. So, the Center for Worship and the Arts at Samford University, our mission, we seek to equip congregations to engage intergenerational and artistic worship practices that glorify God, that honor Christ, and that join the transformative work of the spirit in the world. Big things there, so we equip congregations, and our two big pillars are intergenerational worship and artistic worship. Many churches do both these well, but generally in America, churches have a challenge, certainly with intergenerational worship. We see much of our worship life is geared towards marketed cohorts of generations, much as our society has been since really World War II, maybe even further back if you follow marketing history in that sense. So, we want to counter that because the church in its truest form, in its best sense, going towards the building of the kingdom of God is intergenerational. So, we want to help churches think about, how do we make our worship more intergenerational and then artistic for us as a holistic practice? Wen Reagan: Many churches are really good at practicing musical arts in churches, but visual arts, architectural arts, spoken word arts, the whole gamut. We're really interested in helping churches to think about that and to equip them with that. So, we think of our work really as a bridge. We like to bridge riches. So, we have riches here at Samford, at Beeston as well, right? This whole kind of Samford community, riches of resources, of faculty research, of programs, and we want to bridge those riches out into our community, out into churches in Birmingham and in Alabama, and then the Southeast region at large. And then of course, there are riches out in our community that we want to understand better and learn from, here at Samford. So, we're constantly connecting with congregations to both provide and equip, but also to learn from, through our programs so we can learn how to better serve them as well. Doug Sweeney: Dr. Reagan, you've done some research on the Hillsong movement, and I bet a lot of our listeners know a little bit about the Hillsong movement, and probably benefit from some of the fruit of the movement, but some of our listeners probably know almost nothing about it. Can you just give us a brief primer on what's the Hillsong movement and then more importantly than that, how has your study of that movement informed your understanding of evangelical worship? Wen Reagan: Yeah. So, Hillsong, and if you don't know Hillsong, Hillsong emerged as a prosperity megachurch in Sydney, Australia, and that's where it starts, really in the early '80s, and hits American shores with the song Shout to the Lord, which many might know, around 1995, and since then has just become the juggernaut in worship music globally and certainly, in America. And so, I actually, I have two pieces I worked on, on Hillsong, one with colleague, Kate Bowler, Church Historian Theologian at Duke University, who she's focused on the prosperity gospel. Wen Reagan: And so, we were really asking, first, prosperity gospel, what does the prosperity gospel have to do with contemporary worship music? What's the historical intersection there? And we found some really interesting things. I think one is that the prosperity gospel through the '80s and the '90s, in many ways, was pioneering megachurch initiatives and endeavors both aesthetically and programmatically. So, you think about televangelistic endeavors, you think about the quality of production, whether it be in recorded music or live services and all that. So, they're really starting to leverage these things into contemporary worship music, as it's developing in the '80s and the '90s. And Hillsong is probably the best intersection of that. Most people, when they think about Hillsong, they don't think about the prosperity gospel. And partly, that's because the music itself, the lyrics and the music don't really communicate the prosperity gospel, which is a study in and of itself. Wen Reagan: But if you go and listen to sermons at Hillsong Church in Sydney, you're going to hear the prosperity gospel, not in an intense format. It's what Dr. Bowler would call soft prosperity. So, we looked at that and how Hillsong and others had basically leveraged this pursuit of bigger, better, louder worship, in a way. Because the prosperity gospel, it's interested in celebrating that God has these things for you in your life, and to leverage that kind of thematic motif into worship music. And it was a good wedding in that sense for them because worship music was industrializing at the same moment and growing. Wen Reagan: The second research piece that I've done a book chapter, we did this book last year on Hillsong. In fact, it's the first academic volume, edited volume, specifically focused on Hillsong and it's a group of global scholars across the world that had worked on it. Wen Reagan: And my question was, when you go and look at newspaper articles or magazine articles in Australia about Hillsong, Hillsong is maligned in its own country. It is. People approach it with skepticism, prophet in its own village, in that sense. But in America, Hillsong has generally been celebrated. So, I wanted to know, why? Where is this discrepancy between American media on Hillsong and Australian media? And the result, the end that I came to, the conclusion was that, in Australia, Hillsong is incarnated. I mean, it's a church, it's a megachurch in the suburbs of Sydney. And so, as awesome as its music might have been for most people, the music could not monopolize its attention because so many people were worried about the prosperity gospel, the way it was implicated in politics, both locally, regionally, and nationally in Australia, and in several scandals that kind of came out. Wen Reagan: And to be fair to Hillsong, whether or not those actually ended up being things that they were guilty of, that was part of the question, but all of these things being incarnated, have to deal with their neighbors in Australia, was radically different than in America. Because in America, Hillsong really appeared in America as a sound, or a liturgy even. It was disconnected from a church. Most Americans experienced Shout to the Lord or they experienced Hillsong United, starting in the 2000s, and didn't even know that it was connected to a megachurch, a prosperity megachurch in Australia. And as I said before, the lyrics don't necessarily communicate prosperity theology. So, they kind of took America by storm and kind of were able to either travel under the radar, the theological radar, they would look for that, or float above it nebulously as this kind of wafting sound. Wen Reagan: So, I kind of explored that through the different media in America and Australia. And it's really fascinating. I think that they've really conquered the world because they've approached it first and foremost as this band or a sound or a liturgy as opposed to a church. Now, of course Hillsong is in L.A. and New York City as congregations now, and you're starting to see articles that are concerned about, what does that mean, that they focus on celebrity a lot? So, Americans are starting to experience a little more of what Hillsong is maybe holistically, for good or ill. And so, it's changing now, but for the longest time, it was the sound of Hillsong. Kristen Padilla: That's fascinating. Another area of research that I think could be of interest to our listeners is your research on Afro-Pentecostal music in the early 20th century, as a forerunner for contemporary worship music in the late 20th century. What have you learned from this research that would be of interest to our listeners? Wen Reagan: Yeah, I know when I came to contemporary worship music as a student and started thinking about it, I imagine most Americans too, you think about it starting with white evangelicals, and you think about maybe the Jesus people movement in the '70s. And certainly, there was a big explosion there, but contemporary worship music as a larger maybe abstract idea does not start with white Christians in America. In fact, right before that, it was not even white evangelical Protestants, it was mostly white Catholics even, in the folk mass movement. But long before that, in the early 20th century, it was African-American Christians who really jumped in and created this new experience of using popular musics and incorporating them into sanctuaries. And that to me was, I think, really important and fascinating. I think because we do, we think of this as a dominant kind of white narrative. Wen Reagan: But in the end, like so many times in American history, it's not. It starts with African Americans. So, I went back and really wanted to explore, what happened in the early 20th century and after Pentecostals and with music? And it's fascinating because you get the same kind of narrative that white evangelicals later would have to deal with. That narrative is this one of, when you include popular musics into the sanctuary, the tension of these border skirmishes, right? What belongs in the sanctuary and what doesn't? What kind of music does? What kind of music doesn't? What's the devil's music? What's God's music? So, as Afro-Pentecostals brought in these instruments and blues and jazz and ragtime into this new kind of amalgamation of music, gospel music, proto-gospel music, really, churches were in an uproar. And so, you'd find middle-class black churches, "We're not going to sing this stuff" and would even kind of rail against it. Wen Reagan: But middle-class African Americans would often go on Sunday evening after going to their church to go hear the Pentecostal music because it was amazing. I mean, it was just phenomenal. Women like Arizona Dranes, Mahalia Jackson, these women who were doing this kind of amazing music. It was kind of underground. So, railing against on Sunday morning, but then visiting on Sunday evening. And then Thomas Dorsey, I mean, this brilliant musician comes along and with others too, with Mahalia and others, but amalgamates this further to combine it with hymnody in a sense to create black gospel music. Wen Reagan: So, in the teens and the '20s, 1920s, you get this tension. But then by the 1930s, there's this resolution because gospel music starts to finally switch over, and it starts to flood middle-class black churches. But African Americans had to deal with this and figure out culturally, what kind of music belongs and what doesn't. And it was just fascinating to watch because the tenor of that and the different patterns and the collateral damage, even that happened, would then later be followed by white evangelicals 50, 60 years later. So, I just thought that was a great window, especially in American church history, to kind of look back and say, people have been doing this for a long time, this tension, this war, the worship wars. They happened long before we think they even happened, even in a modern musical sense. Doug Sweeney: So, how has all this history and theological education we've been talking about so far affected your own music, Wen? Kristen and I, and I hope lots of our listeners, know that you yourself are a composer, you're a worship leader. What kind of worship leader and composer are you? What's your own approach to these things? And what difference has theology and has church history made in the way you do business? Wen Reagan: Yeah, great question. I mean, as a songwriter, I often write music with a larger network called Cardiphonia and we're a national, well, really even international network of worship songwriters. We really try to write into the gaps. And by that, I mean the worship music industry, in many ways honestly, does great work in there, there's great music that's put out, but there are topical thematic gaps. So, for instance, we'll put out an album for songs for Ascension Sunday. We'll put out... We just, our most recent album was on Psalm 119, and taking each stanza of the acrostic and running that. I write a lot of service music, really, for curiaes or hallelujahs, or agnostaes, for my own Anglican tradition, but in a folk-rock kind of pop vein. So, anywhere the gaps have come in the industry, it really is where I'm passionate about filling for the church, for the benefit of the church. Wen Reagan: As a worship leader, yeah, for my students too, we talk about this a lot. I mean, worship leadership particularly, I mean this is true everywhere, but in America, this is particularly important. Worship leadership is primarily a pastoral vocation. It's primarily a pastoral vocation, as opposed to an artistic production or an artistic performance. That's point one because I think that so many of our students who come in, they're watching Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, Passion, they're watching these professional artists, and their conception is that, "Okay, this is what worship leadership is." That's part of it, but not at its core. At its core, it's the deep, mundane, regular work of pastoral leadership. Wen Reagan: And then, I think the other big thing that's important to me, is this false dichotomy about performance. A lot of our students come in, and you probably will, I mean, people hear this in their churches who even put, "God, please make this so this is not a performance." And of course, there's a certain type of performance and artistic performance and entertaining performance that we don't want it to be. That's about the entertainer. It should be. That's why entertainers are amazing. The focus comes on them, they do something amazing, and we applaud them. Not that kind of performance. Wen Reagan: Yet as any preacher knows, and as any liturgist knows, I mean, the liturgy, worship is a performance, and those who are leading it need to have some sense of a godly sense of, they're performing. Now, what do I mean in that sense? I don't mean, again, focus on us, but I do mean, you're practicing, you're anticipating, you're modeling for your congregation, what maybe even proper worship or ideal worship or at least worship that can facilitate their own worship to God, looks like. So, I try to, my students, I'm trying to pull them away from that false dichotomy because it comes out of a charismatic Pentecostal disposition that wants to say anything that's kind of performed or contrived is not authentic. What's authentic is spontaneous or extemporaneous. It's affective in that, and it's emotional in that spontaneous way. Wen Reagan: And that's just not true. God's people for the longest time have been practicing and performing worship in God. There's a way to do that in a very godly way. So, we focus on that a lot. I think that's really important in my own practice is to remember that, and in that, my performance then rests in the performance of Jesus. Jesus is the high priest. Jesus is the Latour ghost. Jesus is the worship leader, and he has already provided a perfect and obedient performance for us in his life and his death and his resurrection. So, I don't have to come and carry the weight of a performance as a worship leader. I can come and rest in the performance of Christ, trusting that it's sufficient for me and for my flock, and that's an amazing thing, right? To be able to rest in that. So, we encourage our students in that as well. Kristen Padilla: For those listening who are called to worship ministry or perhaps they have a family member or someone in their church who is looking at colleges or graduate schools, wanting to pursue ministry in some kind of a worship capacity, talk to us a little bit about what they can find at Samford, maybe on an undergrad level. And then for a graduate degree, maybe say a word about our joint degree that we have with the School of the Arts, that Beeson has with the School of the Arts. What does this degree offer students and how do our schools collaborate with one another? Wen Reagan: Yeah, great question. So, for our undergraduates, we have two majors, a BM, so a bachelor's in music, which allows you to kind of intensely go into the musical realm, BM in worship leadership and a BA in worship leadership and allowing you to kind of, if you want to get more of a broader kind of liberal arts perspective, you can come in that. And we have a minor as well. They're all great programs. We have a lot of ensembles here on campus. So, we're a practitionally-based program, meaning you're going to come in and get deep theological, liturgical kind of elements in the classroom, in a liberal arts fashion, but you're also going to have a chance to practice all of that in our ensembles, which is great. So, we do that. I help direct the campus worship team here on campus for undergrads, and we get to put into practice things we're learning in the classroom. Wen Reagan: And then as a graduate student, yeah, we have this fantastic joint degree program, so you can come and not only get a master's in music and church music, so we call it our master's in music and church music, but you can get an MDiv at the same time. And to me, that is just ideal graduate education. Because again, back to what I just said, the primary role, primary role of a worship leader is as a pastoral vocation. Those two degrees together, that's killer. That's just fantastic. It's what you need, that holistic training. So, we're super excited about that. And I'm fairly new here to Samford, so I'm still learning about all the different ways we do collaborate. Wen Reagan: But I think a few things off the top, I mean, we are planning this conference together in October, really excited about, and this is really, I think in many ways carrying off the beauty of holiness is coming in August. So, this will be the beauty of God and worship and preaching that we're doing jointly with the center for preaching here at Beeson. And we're just super excited about that conference. It's going to be a great time learning about how theological aesthetics intersects with our liturgical and homiletical kind of training and worship. Wen Reagan: Another way, actually, we have residents, undergraduate and graduate residents that we hire and train and mentor at the center. And this year, I'm so, I've been thrilled that we've had our first Beeson graduate student with us, which has been fantastic. So, I'm looking to build a bigger pipeline there. I love Beeson students, so if you're listening to this and you're thinking about coming to Beeson for graduate education and you're interested in worship, come. There is a place for you, and you can come hang out with us at the Center for Worship and the Arts as well. Doug Sweeney: Wen, we're almost out of time, but is God teaching you anything these days, in your life, in your family, in your work, that might be a real encouragement to our listeners? Wen Reagan: Yeah, so, we're planning, every summer, we plan a big program called Animate and it's a big summer program to train high-schoolers how to lead worship. Our theme this year is rest. And so, I've been trying to spend a lot of time in the word, thinking about rest, time in researching and reading on rest, resting in God. And man, I mean, we just live in a world that is... I mean, we don't know how to do it. We don't know how to do it. And we're in a political climate, we're in a health climate at this very moment where we're terrified, and to remember that God is a God of rest, and God is a God that provides rest. Wen Reagan: "Come ye who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy, my burden is light." So, that's been on my heart, and that's been such a comfort in these days of anxiety, of craziness around the world, that God says, "Be still, come and rest in me." Doug Sweeney: That is a good word. You have been listening to Dr. Wen Reagan, Associate Director of Samford's Center for Worship and the Arts in the School of the Arts, and Visiting Assistant Professor of music and worship. He is a good friend of ours here at Beeson. He is a fantastic new addition to Samford University. We thank him very much for being with us here on the program today, and we thank all of you for joining us. God bless you. Goodbye for now. Kristen Padilla: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquerilla. Our cohosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.