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ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT
SCHOOL OF MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE ARTS
MASTER OF ARTS
SONGS TO TEACH THE FAITH: SONGS TO KEEP THE FAITH
Are churches and schools equipping their young people
with a suitable body of sacred song?
By ELSPETH CHANTLER
May 2006
Songs to Teach Keep the Faith: Songs to Keep the Faith is an in-depth study of children and religious song, including Anglican Church schools, community schools and churches of all the major denominations represented in the locality of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Through detailed primary research it sought to answer two main questions. Are the young people attending Sunday worship joining in with the singing? Does the repertoire used in schools collective worship adequately prepare young people to participate in the sung worship of their church? To find out, I hired a team of research assistants to help me undertake a series of ten participant observations designed to assess how young people responded to the sung worship in the normal Sunday worship of ten different churches. After each service observed, researchers interviewed the young people using a short questionnaire. To establish a picture of music in collective worship in schools, a questionnaire was sent to all the primary schools in the same locality. The data generated from these research vehicles yielded clear results; a) the majority of the young people attending normal Sunday worship do not join in with the singing, b) the repertoire used in schools collective worship does not adequately prepare young people to participate in the sung worship of their church, as there is increasing disparity between the repertoire employed in schools and churches. It was found that this disparity of repertoire, and indeed idiom, coupled with young people's routine absence from the liturgy due to Sunday School attendance, seriously impedes young people's ability to participate in the sung worship of their congregation.
I have discussed these findings in the light of the related literature and subsequently produced the document, Guideline Recommendations for Churches and Schools which details the best practice identified and the actions proposed.
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