(RNS) — In mid-July, Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, was transformed into a place of worship as more than 50,000 Catholics gathered for the National Eucharistic Congress.
The stadium full of young people, nuns in an array of habits and priests in black and brown faced an altar adorned with four candlesticks and a golden monstrance displaying a consecrated host for Eucharistic adoration.
Then there were the Catholic bishops and other worshippers in the stands, hands raised in worship like Pentecostals, singing “How Great Is Our God,” a megachurch-style worship anthem, as a church rock band played on stage. That song was one of several Protestant-style worship songs sung at the Eucharistic Congress. Others included “Way Maker,” Build My Life,” “Come to the Altar” and “Praise,” the latest hit from Elevation, one of the so-called Big Four megachurches that dominate the worship music charts.
The presence of these songs is one more sign of the triumph of the Big Four churches, whose charismatic-tinged anthems can be found in Christian gatherings of all kinds — from megachurch stages and the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention to youth camps and Eucharistic worship services on Catholic college campuses. But the songs also reveal a new kind of ecumenical liturgical movement — built on friendship, songs and shared experience rather than formal denominational cooperation.
One of the clearest examples of this ecumenical liturgical movement came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when hundreds of virtual choirs from different Christian traditions around the world all recorded versions of “The Blessing,” a hit worship song from Elevation, said worship scholars Sarah Kathleen Johnson and Anneli Loepp Thiessen.
In a 2023 article for the academic journal Worship, Johnson and Thiessen pointed out that the song had been recorded more than 100 times — by Catholics in Singapore, Lutherans in Washington state, an ecumenical virtual choir in Pittsburgh — who all found common meaning in the song.
Johnson, an assistant professor of liturgy and pastoral theology at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Ontario, said she’s been encountering songs like “The Blessing” in unexpected places for a decade — which changed the way she thought about these songs.
These songs, she thought, might be a sign that Christians who are often divided have more in common than they realize. They are singing with more people than they know, she said.
“That led me to wonder, how can this shared music help Christians who struggle to recognize each other, enter into a new kind of relationship through these shared worship practices,” she said.
Thiessen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa who worked with Johnson on a new Mennonite hymnal committee, said Christians have always borrowed songs from one another. And they may not be aware of where those songs come from, she said.
Both Johnson and Thiessen said that in a time when people are divided, even in churches, the ecumenical power of worship songs gives them hope.
