If you’re in a majority-white American church, singing global songs like “Siyahamba” brings up questions like — “Is singing this cultural appropriation or ethnotourism?” and “What is the relationship between global song and the universal Church?”
In her research with music directors and church members in mainline Protestant churches, ethnomusicologist Dr. Marissa Glynias Moore, a Lecturer at Yale University, finds that by singing global songs, directors intend to express their beliefs about hospitality and what the universal Church is. For them, “the point of singing” global song “is to sing this music so much that it stops feeling Other.”
