Hillsong Movement Examined

Tanya Riches is a lecturer at Hillsong College, Sydney, and a researcher at the Centre for Disability Studies, an affiliate of The University of Sydney. She is an Australian songwriter and singer, whose first song was published by Hillsong Music Australia when she was fifteen years old. She has conducted three Hillsong choirs at two campuses (the City adult and youth choirs, and Hills youth choir), and administrated Hillsong’s United band for six years, during which time it achieved gold album status. Her MPhil thesis, entitled “Shout to the Lord: Music and change at Hillsong: 1996-2007,” charted the theological, musicological, and business change over ten years. She has published various articles on Hillsong Church, and to date, the only ABC Religion & Ethics opinion piece addressing this topic. She currently attends Hillsong Alexandria campus in Sydney. Tom Wagner is an ethnomusicologist based in London. His PhD thesis, entitled “Hearing the ‘Hillsong Sound’: Music, Branding and Transcendence in the Religious Experience Economy,” is based on three years of participant observation conducted at Hillsong Church London from 2011-2014. To date, he has produced five scholarly articles on the movement and collaborated with The New York Times on two articles regarding the church. He has co-edited two previous volumes on congregational music and media.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. “Flowing Together”: The Origins and Early Development of Hillsong Church within Assemblies of God in Australia.- 3.  “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion and the Rise of Hillsong.- 4. Creating The Hillsong Sound: How One Church Changed Australian Christian Music.- 5. The Sisterhood: Hillsong in a Feminine Key.- 6. A Comparison of the Religious and Ethnic Ethos of Hillsong College with Paul the Apostle.- 7. ‘The Come to Brazil Effect’: Young Brazilians Fascination with Hillsong.- 8. The Music That Just About Everyone Sings”: Hillsong in American Evangelical Media.- 9. Singing Beyond Territory: Hillsong and Church Planting in Oxford, UK.- 10. Hillsongization, Religious ecumenism, and uniformity: A Hungarian case study.- 11.Because They Can: Hillsong and Social Transformation.- 12. It is (not) alternative: On Hillsong’s vision as sacrament and spectacle.- 13. The Contours of Hillsong’s Socio-Ethical Engagement.- 14. The Powerful, “Sensational” Hillsong Brand.

“The strength of this volume is the commitment of its contributors and editors to understand the Hillsong movement on its own terms. Every discipline and methodology engaged utilizes the tools, terminologies, and frameworks available to provide new insight into the ecclesiological phenomenon … . This volume provides us with their introduction, and several points at which we can begin to dialogue and discern together the shape of Pentecostal engagement with the Great Commission and Great Commandment in the 21st century.” (David Ketter, Pneuma, Vol. 40 (3), 2018)