The 2024 Passion conference opened with a countdown video. The crowd of 55,000 students packed into Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta cheered with anticipation. What would the primary song be? Who would lead it?
What was the Holy Spirit about to do?
Flashing lights and a drum track led into the opening of Elevation Worship’s “Praise,” with the mantra, “Let the whole lot that has breath praise the Lord.” Worship artist Brandon Lake and a team of singers emerged on the stage.
After days of music and teaching, through the final session of the conference, attendees and leaders were surprised by a spontaneously prolonged worship session.
Most people don’t get to worship with a crowd of 55,000 regularly. That immersive experience is one reason hundreds of Christians travel to events like Passion, Worship Together, and Sing! every year.
These conferences also function settings where worshipers encounter and fall in love with recent music. Though the stage production and arena energy isn’t replicable of their local contexts, the songs themselves are: Recent research found that worship leaders usually tend to use a recent song in the event that they encounter it at a live event.
These events are the most recent iteration of practices which have a protracted history within the church: pilgrimage and temporarily gathered corporate worship. Christians in Europe through the Middle Ages walked miles from shrine to shrine to venerate saintly relics and temporarily adopt the monastic practice of living a life set apart for devotion and worship.
Before stadium sets and massive screens with lyrics, Nineteenth-century tent revivals attracted participants with passionate preaching and spirited music, which regularly fused recent refrains set to folk tunes with hymns and traditional sacred songs to cultivate a more rapturous, affectively heightened atmosphere.
Ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls refers to modern conference congregations as “pilgrim gatherings” and “eschatological communities” in her book Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community.
“Evangelical participants step outside the purview of normal religious authority and are invited to check out recent kinds of non secular identities forged within the crucible of intense spiritual experiences,” Ingalls writes.
Kristian Stanfill, worship pastor at Passion City Church, sees the large temporary congregation on the annual Passion conference as a way of making an “eschatological community,” a shadow of what believers will experience in eternity.
“We prayed for the truth of heaven to be a reality on earth,” Stanfill told CT.
Stanfill says that the planning team for this yr’s Passion conference, held in January, felt an unusual sense of urgency and that leaders and participants showed up ready for revival.
“We sensed a special weight around this yr,” said Stanfill. “Looking on the times we’re living in, we’re seeing the enemy deceiving a recent generation, convincing them to live for less. But their eyes are being opened to see that only Jesus offers abundant life. That’s why they refill Mercedes-Benz Stadium to worship and seek God. They want something real, something that lasts.”
Halfway through the worship set on the ultimate morning of the conference, Stanfill sensed a prompting to decelerate and wait to maneuver on from their recent song, “Cry Out.”
“I don’t know why I began singing ‘Agnus Dei,’ it wasn’t a song we had in our pocket, but the scholars just took over,” said Stanfill. The crowd and the leaders on stage sang “Agnus Dei” for 20 minutes.
“We all just lost track of time. We all got lost in Jesus for those 20 minutes.”
The potential for spontaneous experiences is an element of what makes conferences like Passion special. It’s also what drew pilgrims to the Asbury revival in 2023. These events can function spaces to experience the “one-heartedness” that has historically accompanied revivals, and the music utilized in these settings becomes linked to the extreme communal experience of the event itself.
Passion is essentially attended by highschool and college students from across the United States. Other conferences like Worship Together and Sing! aim to achieve worship leaders and church musicians. Recent research suggests that while streaming has modified the way in which worship leaders find recent music, live events like conferences remain influential.
“I prefer to experience the song before I exploit it,” wrote one respondent to the 2022 Worship Leader Research survey, reflecting on why live events are so effective as spaces to experience and evaluate recent music.
The survey found that 71 percent of respondents were likely to contemplate using a recent song after encountering it at a gathering in-person.
“Live events help me see how a song is executed and the way it’s used and other people reply to it,” wrote one other respondent.
Marc Jolicoeur, one in all the members of the research team and an affiliate professor of worship arts at Kingswood University, observed that some worship leaders see conferences, live shows, and other in-person experiences as field tests for brand new songs.
“Leaders will say things like, ‘I need my congregation to experience what I’ve experienced,” Jolicoeur said.
Passion’s recent album Call on Heaven includes live recordings of most of the songs used on the 2024 conference, including the 20-minute spontaneous “Agnus Dei.”
For those that were within the stadium during that morning session, the recording provides a method to relive the seemingly infinite outpouring of song, complete with the shouts, cheers, and murmurs from the group. A video of that session spread on social media and attracted a whole lot of hundreds of viewers on YouTube, who left comments about their in-person and online experiences of being inspired by the event.
“This moment modified me. I’ve all the time been a worshiper and have enjoyed rewatching this clip over and over over the past 6 weeks,” wrote one commenter on YouTube.
Call on Heaven preserves a number of the aural sensations of what it was prefer to be within the room full of hundreds of worshipers singing “Holy, holy are you Lord God Almighty.” But as most conference-goers know, the emotional high of those live events isn’t sustainable. So what does it seem like to take the music related to these events back to the local church?
“The reality is, most services are usually not an emotional high, and that’s not a deficiency,” said Hilary Ritchie, who serves as minister for worship and the humanities at Hope Church, a Presbyterian (ECO) church in Richfield, Minnesota.
Ritchie’s church utilizes music by Passion, Elevation, and other popular artists, but she tries to look to her congregation and musicians reasonably than the live versions recorded at conferences when adapting the songs for her context.
“Some of these items aren’t transferable to a gathering of 175 people,” said Ritchie. “It’s so vital to have a pastoral sense of your congregation’s worship voice. What does your congregation need?”
Ritchie identified that while there are some potential problems with seeking to conferences as models for local churches, these gatherings are sometimes the one opportunities church leaders need to take part in congregational worship as true participants, not saddled with the burden of management or leadership. And while she likes to look to other similar churches to see what their smaller teams might do with a preferred song, visiting one other church on a Sunday morning isn’t often possible.
“We’re all the time working on Sunday mornings,” she said. “Sometimes a conference is probably the most expedient method to get you and your team to a spot where they’ll worship together outside of the weekly service they lead.”
But large conferences aren’t just worship events, they’re also promotional vehicles for popular worship artists and types.
Worship Together is owned by Capitol CMG (a subsidiary of Universal Music Group), and Passion is signed to Capitol CMG as well. Sing! features recent music from the Gettys and affiliated artists. These conferences promote the music and artists they platform by showing their effectiveness in an arena of worshipers.
Church musicians have been adapting music from skilled recordings for his or her churches for a long time, so the challenge of tempering expectations about what a song can “do” in a setting far faraway from an arena just isn’t recent. But when congregants return from a conference inspired, energized, and stuffed with suggestions, leaders often find yourself fielding unrealistic requests.
“I do think everyone understands that I’m not a jukebox,” said Ritchie. “And when someone approaches me with an concept that won’t work for us, I attempt to pastorally ask about their experience. They feel like God was doing something as they experienced that song.”
Spiritual encounters at conferences and revivals may be catalysts for real transformation and renewal that advantages the local church. Singing with a congregation of hundreds feels, for some, just like the closest they are going to get to experiencing God’s throne room on this side of eternity.
“The singing church is a strong thing,” said Stanfill, reflecting on his 19 years leading worship on the Passion conferences. “When we join and sing our faith together, it encourages the entire room. It reminds us that we’re a part of the dominion, and a part of a movement of God that is greater than ourselves.”
