Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation

“This is a brave book that dares to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the intersections of race, worship and music. It is a model of engaged scholarship and will be essential reading for pastors, worship leaders, and students of congregations. Gerardo Marti is emerging as one of the leading sociologists of religion in the United States with a distinctive methodological approach in the field of Congregational Studies.” —William McKinney, President Emeritus, Pacific School of Religion

“Dr. Marti makes a unique and important contribution to our understanding of multi-racial churches as worshiping communities. His central focus on the worship ritual helps us to understand the meaning and lived experience of multiculturalism for participants. For social scientists and other scholars, he helps us to understand the social processes which forge commitment and identification across the most divisive of social barriers. A smart, interesting, and humane book.” —Penny Edgell, author of Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life

“Marti is a master at unpacking the culture of a congregation. Music, he shows us, is never just about sound. It’s about who and how, feelings and bodies and ethnic identities. What he tells us about how music works is far more interesting and complicated than the how-to books would have us think.” —Nancy Ammerman, author of Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners

“Gerardo Marti adds another valuable volume to his works as an accomplished researcher and sociologist about multiethnic churches in America. What is most valuable about the book is the large collection of quotes sprinkled throughout from a plurality of voices that illustrates the diversity, complexity, and richness of worship in multiracial congregations.”–DJ Chuang, Worship Leader Magazine “A thoughtful and provocative read…Gerardo Marti has produced an interesting book focused on m

Gerardo Marti is a member of the pastoral staff of Mosaic and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Azusa Pacific University. A trained sociologist and ordained pastor, Marti researches issues in the multiethnic and multiracial churches and congregational responses to social change.