Peter Althouse and Michael Wilkinson
In the mid-1990s, reports of religious fervor at a Vineyard church1 in Toronto began to spread throughout North America and Europe, if not the world. The British media dubbed it the “Toronto Blessing” as thousands of people came to Toronto to experience the latest wave of Pentecostal-charismatic renewal. During those early years, the church became independent from the Association of Vineyard Churches following a series of questions about the role of renewal and the strange bodily behavior of its participants and renamed itself the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. Its meetings reached their peak in about 1997, and some scholars reported that the renewal was over (Hunt 2009; Richter 1997). However, while scholars gave the Toronto church less attention, the renewal was undergoing transformation and gaining momentum in other ways.
In the last decade, the church has extended its reach, expanding into numerous countries with new churches. In 2010, the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship rebranded itself and its affiliations as Catch the Fire (CTF) to align with its global expansion. Numerous events are still held annually in Toronto, with thousands of people in attendance. CTF Toronto has planted new churches in Montreal, Raleigh, Houston, London, Oslo, and Reykjavik, with plans to expand in Germany, South Africa, and Australia. CTF Toronto has also developed ministry training schools for young adults, inner healing programs, prayer schools, and seminars. It has partnered with other renewal churches through a global network called Partners in Harvest. Other partnerships have developed with Randy Clarke and Global Awakening, Heidi Baker and Iris Ministries, Bill Johnson from Bethel Church in California, and Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer.
Soaking prayer is an integral part of CTF’s expansion. It is an innovation in the charismatic renewal that captures numerous types of charismatic prayer, including resting in the Spirit, anointing, prayer of the heart, divine presence, waiting on God, contemplation, hearing God, intimacy, healing, prophecy, and impartation (Csordas 1994, 1997; Poloma 2003; Althouse and Wilkinson 2011; Wilkinson 2012; Wilkinson and Althouse 2014). Impartation is a practice in which leaders quietly pray for those who are soaking in prayer by lightly touching the person on the shoulder or head. Participants believe that impartation releases spiritual power from charismatic leaders and their collaborators to the recipients of prayer. Soaking prayer cultivates the experience of divine love, which in turn facilitates loving others through acts of forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion, and benevolence. Soaking prayer is practiced in the context of CTF renewal meetings where people lie on the floor with pillows and blankets and claim to receive the Father’s love, while soaking prayer music plays softly in the background. Soaking prayer is also practiced individually at home, in small, intimate home groups, and in soaking centers in churches. CTF Toronto has expanded the practice of soaking prayer through conferences, schools, and weekend seminars. It has developed a structure of local soaking prayer leaders, regional soaking prayer coordinators, and national soaking prayer coordinators in Raleigh, Toronto, and cities within other strategic countries. It has also developed soaking prayer kits and teaching manuals to educate people on how to pray. Teaching on soaking prayer encourages people to play soaking prayer music CDs while they rest in a prone position and meditatively “receive from the Father.”
Music plays a vital role in the ritual context of praise and worship as well. In CTF churches and conferences, contemporary pop music is played while participants engage in kinesthetic movements of swaying, hand raising, dancing, jumping, bodily jerks, and flag waving to express their emotional jubilance. Others will lie on the floor, sometimes shaking and jerking, crying, or laughing. A Christian charismatic music group usually consisting of guitars, keyboards, bass, and singers performs from the auditorium’s platform. The two-stage progression of worship music begins with fast-paced music to encourage praise through bodily excitement, accelerating until it reaches a crescendo, and then quiets down in a calming manner for worship. It often includes emotional and/or bodily healing, manifestations, and signs and wonders. As the style of music and worship shifts from an energetic and expressive form to a slower and meditative one, participants are encouraged to “rest in the Father” and “soak in the Father’s Love” as they position themselves in a receiving mode. CTF leaders typically encourage participants to practice “soaking prayer” during this time at renewal meetings. Music helps cultivate embodied experiences such as laughing, weeping, spontaneous bodily movements, claims of sensory experiences of taste and smell, weighted pressure on the body, and feelings of tingling in the body. Participants report “prophetic revelations,” which include mental impressions or images believed to be divine communication.
Musical bodies in the charismatic renewal add to our understanding of the social and theological relationship between music, religious renewal, and embodiment. More specifically, music facilitates emotional entrainment between bodies in the context of sacred space (Clayton, Sager, and Will 2005; Collins 2004; Riis and Woodhead 2010; Robbins 2011; Smilde 2011). In this chapter, we draw on social scientific theories of embodiment and music to explain soaking prayer and the role that music plays in the production of emotional energy. We also include a discussion of the role of breathing, musical processes, and bodily interaction.
Our observations on the relationship between music and bodily experience in the charismatic renewal are shaped by social scientific theories on emotions, the body, and religion (see Riis and Woodhead 2010; Turner 1996; also Becker 2004; Clayton, Sager, and Will 2005). Theories of embodiment take their cue from the social sciences. For example, in Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), Randall Collins argues that life situations are characterized by social interactions. These interaction rituals (IRs) have the capacity to produce emotional energy (EE) in bodies through intense face-to-face situations. IR is a social mechanism in which mutually focused emotion produces a shared reality. Extending Durkheim’s collective effervescence and Goffman’s ritual theory, the shared reality produced by IR intensifies group solidarity and symbolism.
The IR model operates according to five qualities. First, an IR is a social activity that includes an aspect of situational co-presence. Second, human encounters may be characterized by focused interaction through the presence of people. Third, social interactions entail some pressure to maintain social solidarity, and so rituals are entraining. Fourth, rituals respect what is socially valued by promoting human interaction that leads to the establishment of sacred objects. Finally, when rituals are broken, there is a sense of unease, which may be met with a range of responses meant to exert social control or conformity to a moral code.
The basic ingredients of IR include the physical assembly of a group of people, a process involving shared action, awareness, and EE that contributes to new group symbols and identity. Collins’s model of IR, therefore, is one that varies along two lines: mutual focus and emotional entrainment. According to Collins, emotional entrainment occurs in group rhythmic synchronization that produces high levels of EE. The creation of EE is prolonged through symbols that effect morality. When the IR ends, the symbols of belief lose their emotional strength and revert to mere memories that eventually become dead and meaningless. However, new symbols can be created within the group as participants assemble and give focused emotional attention to one another in ritual activity.
Collins identifies a number of outcomes that are central to IR, including group solidarity, EE, symbols that represent the group, and feelings of morality. He states, “At the center of an IR is the process in which participants develop a mutual focus of attention and become entrained in each other’s bodily micro-rhythms and emotions” (2004, 47). EE is an important part of IR that requires attention. It accounts for the emotions experienced during a highly intensive IR, which is embodied by the participants. EE also has the ability to be maintained by the individuals after the ritual is over, so that it continues to motivate them to act accordingly in relation to the group and its objectives.
EE, however, is not just about a highly charged ritual that demonstrates a lot of excitement or the dramatic effects that one might associate with charismatic Christianity. EE refers to the long-term effects of IR. In other words, EE is a long-lasting effect that carries over to such an extent that participants are convinced of the experience to the point of acting upon it. EE is a strong, durable emotion that lasts over an extended period of time, not just a short-term disruption. It produces the capacity to initiate and act with resolve, in order to direct social situations. EE is therefore associated with a high level of attunement and long-term consequence.
Collins’s work on IR is not specifically focused on religion, although religion is not precluded from his theory. He briefly postulates that larger religious gatherings produce the strongest effects of EE, which fade with the smaller and less collectively emotional gatherings. The dominant person in the collective becomes a sacred object and repository of stored EE that can be expressed in a charismatic manner. Thus, large revivals or renewal gatherings are important in the continuation of EE, which will sustain smaller church gatherings for a time but eventually dissipate without the larger gatherings. Nevertheless, the concepts of entrainment and attunement and their relationship to the aural symbols of music help explain the religious intensity of soaking prayer and the charismatic renewal.
Chris Shilling (2005) argues that an embodied analysis of music must include how the body is both an important source for the creative production of music and deeply attuned to musical processes. Consequently, music has the capacity to take the body “beyond” itself in ways that transcend written communication and cognitive processes, and to shape behavior, form personal identity, and consolidate group fidelity. Music can stimulate “peak experiences” and religious epiphanies, acting as a stimulant or sedative. The body is the locale for the production of music involving techniques of fingering, vocalizing, and breathing, but the body is also the locus for the reception of music and inspires behaviors such as foot tapping, finger drumming, swaying, and dancing. Shilling examines three areas: the commercialization of music that influences human behaviors in the process of production and consumption; the social interaction between people as creative agents of music and the bodily receptivity of music where people are positioned within social environments; and the commercialization of music in the West, as well as whether this diminishes the degree of creativity in music. The second area is most relevant to a discussion of the role of music in the charismatic renewal, specifically in the way that the attunement of musical processes coincides with the interaction of social bodies in a particular collective milieu.
A phenomenological approach examines the relationship between musical processes in techniques such as rhythm, beat, meter, and tone; bodily interaction; and processes of movement (or stillness). However, music is not only a social construction but also rooted in the generative powers of the body (Shilling 2005; Csordas 2002; Becker 2004). Music has the capacity to heighten or lower arousal, which can influence a whole range of behavioral activity. The use of music in ritual contexts has been shown to affect the body by increasing or releasing tension, consolidating group identity, and heightening the effects of cultural symbols. Music has therapeutic effects on the body, supporting physical, mental, social, and emotional well-being. Music has been shown to affect heart rate, blood pressure, and sleeping habits in neonatal care. It can affect respiration, muscular energy, and receptivity to stimuli in adults. Music has been used to alleviate pain and to help in the rehabilitation of the body (Shilling 2005; Clayton, Sager, and Will 2005).
Judith Becker (2004) draws on the disciplines of phenomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and biology to argue that religious trancing is an ecstatic or alternate state of consciousness that is sensually rich and physically exertive, heightens emotional responses, and is enveloped in musical processes. She distinguishes between trancing, meditation (which strives for stillness and silence and transcends the emotions), and deep listening (which goes below the surface sounds to unlock the layers of imagination, memory, and meaning). Both trancing and deep listening embody strong emotions. Trancing triggers autonomic arousal and powerful emotional responses, while low-key emotions such as calm, peace, soothing, or comfort may follow trancing (49–52). Musical rhythm is also embodied as rhythmic entrainment, in which bodies synchronize in their gestures, muscular energy, breathing, and brain waves (127–28). Charismatic praise and worship resembles the state of trancing described by Becker and includes ecstatic phenomena, while the prayer time throughout the service (but especially after the service) produces low-key emotions of calm, love, forgiveness, soothing, and comfort. However, our informants report phenomena such as mental images, tongue speaking, sensory experiences, and prophetic communication while practicing soaking prayer, contradicting Becker’s assessment of meditation.
In Main Street Mystics (2003), Margaret Poloma’s analysis of the early stages of the Toronto Blessing accounts for the role of music and the body in renewal. She observed the significant place of music in charismatic worship rituals, which were normally performed for an hour at the beginning of the service, and in the context of prayer, usually at the end of the service. Music facilitates “mutual tuning-in,” a form of social interaction that is nonconceptual and precognitive; it is common in mysticism and Pentecostal-charismatic renewal generally. As such, music facilitates ecstatic practices in altered states of consciousness. Borrowing from David Wulff’s psychological arguments, Poloma discusses four bodily issues related to music: auditory driving (the use of loud rhythmic sounds in ecstatic states); subauditory sounds (noise that is inaudible to the normal range of hearing but picked up by other sensory clues); the Pavlovian model (the way in which vigorous and prolonged movement in ecstatic states increases or decreases heart rate, breathing rate, blood chemistry, and the sense of balance); and endorphins (the chemical known to affect altered states of consciousness in trances and pain reduction). She also makes a distinction between Ionian music, which is celebrative, and Lydian music, which is contemplative—types of music observed in worship rituals and prayer, respectively.
Poloma discusses the “mystical body” to capture the relationship between bodily phenomena such as shaking, laughing, weeping, and falling down with spiritual experiences. Experience is how reality is represented to personal consciousness, and that reality then needs to be expressed or rather communicated to others in the social milieu. In ecstatic settings, the mode of communication is often precognitive, verbally inchoate, and somatic. Rituals of play, prophetic symbolism, and prophetic mime are categories used to account for unusual bodily reactions while in an ecstatic state. Likewise, claims of inner or emotional healing, which include forgiveness, pain reduction, and physical healing, are among Poloma’s observations. Poloma makes a passing observation in her book that the cultivation of love is an important aspect of the ecstatic experiences of charismatics that social scientists need to take seriously, an observation that comes more to the forefront in the interactional model of “godly love” (see Poloma and Hood 2008; Poloma and Green 2010; Althouse and Wilkinson 2011; Wilkinson 2012).
Finally, the lens through which we observe our subjects is one of social interaction. Margaret Poloma, Ralph Hood Jr., Stephen Post, and Matthew T. Lee (see Lee and Yong 2012; Lee, Poloma, and Post 2013) developed a model of social interaction that attempts to account for the interactions between various social actors; it includes exemplars, collaborators, beneficiaries, and perceived interactions with the divine. Unique to the model is the attempt to capture human-divine interactions by taking seriously social actors’ claims of experiencing the love of God, which may produce motivational impulses to love others along a spectrum of observable benefits or acts of benevolence. The model is referred to as “godly love” to account for the range of such interactions, from claims of experience with the divine to social interactions between exemplars, collaborators, and beneficiaries.
The model is influenced by the sociological work of Pitirim Sorokin presented in The Ways and Power of Love ([1954] 2002). Sorokin postulated that love is a kind of energy that motivates and energizes people to engage in altruistic activities, but he also entertained the possibility that love could have a supraconscious or divine source. He proposed that love could be observed and empirically measured in terms of its intensity, extensity, duration, purity, and adequacy. The “godly love” model takes its cue from Sorokin in order to account for religious experience and the social benefits that result. Shilling’s theories mesh with Collins’s notion of the attunement and entrainment of EE in ritual chain interactions and Sorokin’s idea of love energy that has the capacity to prompt people to act in loving ways toward others. These works are further supported by studies of musical entrainment and social interaction conducted by Becker and Clayton, Sager, and Will. The synchronization of bodies with one another in the production of love and EE is facilitated through the attunement of music, in which rhythms, tone, and tempo reverberate with bodily rhythms.
The interface of music, worship, and soaking prayer in the charismatic renewal was observed in our two years of fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and survey data.2 During this time, we traveled across the United States, Canada, U.K., Australia, and New Zealand, where we carried out 25 different site observations of large renewal conferences, smaller soaking prayer schools and seminars, and intimate soaking prayer meetings in homes and churches. We conducted 126 face-to-face interviews with leaders and participants who practice soaking prayer, as well as a survey with 258 respondents. Part of our strategy in traveling to diverse sites was to capture the translocal character of the renewal that expands through numerous charismatic networks.
“Soaking prayer” is a rich term that refers to an embodied prayer ritual that captures all kinds of bodily practices and experiences. In the early stages of the renewal, people who attended the Toronto meetings would manifest somatic expressions such as laughing, weeping, jerking, or groaning. A prominent manifestation was that when people were being prayed for by the leaders or the prayer team, they would fall to the ground in a way that resembled fainting. Often they would stay on the ground and claim to experience a deep love of God. In the early stages, this practice was referred to as “carpet time,” because people could be seen strewn across the floor for long periods of time. One participant referred to soaking as a time when “you got prayed with and you fell down.... Carpet time. That’s the word. And you experienced his presence and you were gone.... We just, we had a prayer meeting, and then we’d have a prayer meeting after the prayer meeting just to do this, which wasn’t called soaking yet, to have ministry time, and to have worship, music playing [softly]; but not to worship, but to receive” (P33).3 Spontaneous falling, often identified as being “slain in the Spirit” by older Pentecostals or “resting in the Spirit” by charismatics, was initially called “carpet time” in the Toronto revival. However, the practice was soon regularized. Toronto Vineyard pastor John Arnott’s wife, Carol, was prominent in the development of soaking prayer. The ministry teams would spend much time praying for people, into the early hours of the morning, and continue for weeks on end. Carol claims to have been feeling very tired one night and God told her to just “lie down and let me soak you.” From that moment, soaking prayer developed into a ritualized practice of lying down and soaking in God’s presence for an hour to three hours at a time.
Music plays an important role in the practice of soaking prayer in both the large renewal meetings and the small, intimate settings of churches and homes. The large renewal meetings have four broadly discernible segments. They begin with a time of energetic praise, when people in attendance engage in enthusiastic singing and bodily movements. Although this portion of the service is more akin to patterns of charismatic praise, participants are observed lying down at the front and sides of the auditorium in soaking prayer, and leaders occasionally refer to this segment in terms of “soaking in the Father’s love.” A more intimate time ensues when the music slows and people are seen intently worshipping. The message or sermon is then given by one of the leaders or exemplars. And, finally, after the service, committed participants engage in an extended time of prayer (described above). There are also transitional times for announcements, testimonies, or tithes and offerings.
Renewal meetings take on the characteristics of music festivals in that pilgrims from all over the world will step away from the routines of daily life to attend conferences and immerse themselves in a different culture in order to experience renewal (Percy 1998; Althouse and Wilkinson 2011; Dowd, Little, and Nelson 2004). Musicians play in the style of contemporary pop music and begin with songs that have an energetic and fast tempo. The musical processes produce an atmosphere of emotional arousal and dissociative states through techniques such as acoustic driving, monotony, repetition, accelerando and crescendo, suspended musical phrases, and ascending fifths (Miller and Strongman 2002). As the musicians play, the worshippers engage in excited bodily expressions. People sway, moving their feet and nodding their heads. Some charismatics can be seen moving into the aisles and to the front of the auditorium in order to dance. Others carry colorful banners or flags and wave them about as the worship continues. In one meeting, the group marched around the church, accompanied by drumming, and chanted “press in.” If someone falls to the floor, a swarm of people circle around and pray for that person with loud exclamations of “more Lord,” “deeper Lord,” or “higher Lord.” In several of the large renewal meetings, we observed people lying around the edges of the auditorium, soaking, as the main event continued. Thus, in the large renewal meeting, “soaking” metaphorically describes the ecstatic experiences of participants who sense divine presence and who “receive” the “Father’s love” in the energetic state of worship. In these large events, we were aware of the collective energy that was being produced and could feel it reverberating through our own bodies. One researcher made the following comments in his field notes:
As I walk into the auditorium the energy is palpable. There is a driving drum beat anchoring contemporary praise music. Flags are being waved. Streamers are being spun around by enthusiastic participants. People are dancing, jumping up and down; some have their hands raised up praying. At about 7:30 the group breaks out in a chorus of glossolalia, a ritual called “singing in tongues” or “singing in the Spirit.” It lasts for a few minutes and then one of the female singers sings out a short prayer in sync with the music. A lull occurs in the service where the music quiets down and the lead singer asks the congregation, “Do we need to wait for that part of the service, or can we do it right now? Grasp onto the hand of Jesus for healing.” My own emotional reaction and bodily experience is one of tingling and the feeling of intense energy.4
Throughout the entire episode, music reverberates in the background and people synchronize to its rhythm, which in turn facilitates the bodily rhythms of those gathered in face-to-face co-presence (cf. Collins 2004; Shilling 2005; Becker 2004). Energetic bodily movements such as swaying and dancing and the body’s natural rhythm of breathing are attuned to the music and to other bodies as EE is produced, expressed, and stored. However, at about the midpoint in the service prior to the speaker’s message, the music reaches a crescendo, signaling the end of the time for praise, and the time for worship begins. The music for the latter slows down and becomes softer as people engage in a more intimate time, in which they claim to be in God’s presence. At this point, the service takes on a more contemplative, prayerful sense and the emotional tenor shifts from intense excitement to inwardness and intimacy. People are no longer dancing and have slowed their bodily movements. It is not uncommon in this segment of the service to observe people quietly weeping or laughing, many with intense expressions observable on their faces.
Soaking prayer also occurs in small, intimate groups in local churches and participants’ homes. These meetings do not have the excitement of the large renewal meetings but replicate and continue to cultivate their emotional intimacy. Unlike the renewal meeting, these smaller groups do not use live music but rather soaking CDs. The music can be instrumental or vocal and, depending on locale and the leaders involved, is particularized for differing contexts. Most soaking prayer music is melodic, played in major modes, and slow in tempo; it uses repetitive phrases and reprises and produces a calming, dreamy effect that allows participants to rest (or relax) in order to be in God’s presence and receive from God. Soaking prayer is a meditative type of prayer, but instead of occurring in silence, it is faciliated through entrainment by the music. The production of soaking CDs has become a cottage industry in which amateur musicians and singers record music to be sold through charismatic venues and at renewal gatherings (see Ward 2005). Individuals such as Jeremy and Connie Sinnott (the worship leaders of CTF Toronto), Ruth Fazal, Kelley Warren, Julie True, Marcel Preston, and Jonathan Clarke have become popular soaking musicians. Their music is played in small prayer gatherings in participants’ homes, in local churches, or privately by oneself. The music is usually limited to a few instruments. Keyboards play a central role in soaking music, though a listener can discern other instruments, such as the flute, violin, guitar, or cymbals.
Martyn Percy (1997) noted the sentimentality and sublime eroticism in the music of the Vineyard and the early years of the Toronto Blessing. The overtly romantic and erotic language of Vineyard music focuses on the relationship of the worshipper to God, in which the secret of knowing God lies in the inward movement toward intimacy, where God is experienced. Emotions and feelings are surrendered to God in order to produce inner control that counters the external forces of chaos: sickness, evil, dissipation, and impotence. The same could also be said of soaking prayer music, with lyrics such as “my heart beats as one with yours,” “take the sinner by the hand,” “love me every day,” “when I look into your eyes I am lost in everlasting love,” “longing,” “desire,” “surrender,” “melt my heart,” “your love enwraps around my heart,” “in my Father’s arms,” “come away my beloved,” “Jesus it’s your love that I receive,” “may the current of your love flow in the deepest part of me,” “take me deeper into your love,” and so forth. Moreover, the songs are often sung as a kind of love letter to God the Father, with an emphasis on referring to God and the worshipper in the first-person singular. The romantic language is not unique to soaking music but is part and parcel of the message of the renewal. John Arnott often talks about the renewal as a great love story in which the church as the bride is being prepared for the wedding. At one renewal event, Carol Arnott began the message with a string of exclamations, saying “I love you” as a sign of relationship to her beloved. In fact, she designed a prayer discipline in which every ten minutes her watch would beep and she would take a few minutes to express her love to the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit. This was while she was delivering a sermon to a crowd of more than one thousand.
Percy is quick to note that subliminally erotic language has a theological place within the broader Christian heritage of mysticism. Visions, sensual tickling, and bodily stirrings were elements observable in mysticism. The symbolism of marriage and consummation coincided with ecstatic behavior. Idioms such as “tasting” God, “kissing” him, “heart,” and being “embraced” by Christ were regularly used. Erotic spirituality was a way to embody religious experience that offered women marginalized by male-dominated clerical structures a means to reclaim authority (see Bynum 1992; Nelstrop 2009).
Finally, the practice of breathing, with its rhythms of inhalation and exhalation, the in-and-out process of physical air moving through the body, is an embodied practice related to prayer and is facilitated by the rhythms and beat of music (Percy 1997; Shilling 2005; Kearns 2005; Irigaray 2002). The vigorous bodily activity and excitement of charismatic worship produces rapid breathing, whereas the meditative practice of soaking prayer, in which one rests, slows the breathing rhythms. Breathing slowly and from the diaphragm is often associated with de-stressing and relaxation. In our observations and interviews, people reported that their bodies slowed down and their breathing became more regulated. This was our own experience, too, as we participated in the practice of soaking, noticing how our breathing changed within minutes and the muscles in our bodies started to relax. As the breathing deepened, the body relaxed, the mind slowed down, and the heart decelerated, as far as we could perceive. Exhalation would deepen and come from the diaphragm, and at times there would be sounds of contentment.
Curiously, breathing is an important practice of soaking captured in songs such as Julie True’s “Breathe You In” and Kelley Warren’s “Breathe on Me Breath of God.” The slow tempos and repetition of certain words, as well as nonverbal sounds such as “mmmm” and “oooooo,” regulate the movement of air through the body, allowing participants to slow down their breathing, relax muscular energy, and lower the heart rate. One young woman relayed a vision she experienced while soaking in prayer. As she was praying, she was being drawn deeper into the Father’s love but began to get panicky and could not breathe. She said, “And then I realized how deep I was. And I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. When I was—you know, lying on my back on the sofa and I was just so paralyzed. And—my chest, my chest was like, I felt my chest was breathing in and out. And I know that he was giving me the breath” (P59). Another person commented, “And so, I tend to just breathe in prayer, like I automatically pray” (P100).
The rhythms of breathing can be modified by the rhythms and beat of music. As groups of people come together for soaking prayer, bodily responses begin to synchronize through ritual interaction and produce high levels of emotional energy. Music is a vehicle through which attunement and entrainment are facilitated.
Charismatic renewal is especially effective in encouraging worshippers to allow their bodies to engage one another through music and prayer. The practice of soaking prayer is especially instructive, highlighting the ways in which charismatics experience attunement and embodiment while claiming to be transformed by divine love. This transformation is expressed in a love relationship, fully supported by the music, in which God as loving Father embraces the beloved, calling them to rest while enjoying his presence. In turn, the practice of soaking prayer is shared with other worshippers, who claim that these encounters with a greater love also fill them with love for others. The rhythm of worship is balanced with breathing, which is consequential for the participant in a therapeutic way as the mystical body is renewed through an experience of interactional love.
1. The Association of Vineyard Churches is a group of charismatic churches begun by Ken Gulliksen in 1975. In 1982, John Wimber’s church officially affiliated with the Vineyard. A short time later, he assumed leadership of the Vineyard churches and embarked on an aggressive church-growth agenda that resulted in numerous church plants in North America and eventually the U.K. Vineyard churches are charismatic in style, with claims of glossolalia, prophetic utterance, words of knowledge, laughter, and bodily falling while in an ecstatic state. C. Peter Wagner (1988) described this development in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity as the “third wave” of Pentecostalism. For further reading, see Percy (1996) and Miller (1997, 2005); for a popular history, see Jackson (1999).
2. The project was supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation and the Flame of Love Project.
3. We use the letter P to refer to participants throughout the chapter. Interviews were conducted with 126 participants. P91, for instance, means “participant 91.”
4. The field notes were written in point form and put into narrative structure to capture the sense of what was observed.
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