New music and the ‘evangelical style’ in the Church of England, c.1958-1991

This paper examines the role played in perceptions of evangelical identity by the use of popular music styles for worship. It argues that, for a short period in the 1950s and 1960s a long-standing identification of evangelicals with such church music was broken, as the initiative in experimentation was taken by figures on the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. With the advent of the charismatic movement in the 1970s, the lead in such experimentation was taken by evangelicals once again, and the style of music cemented as part of perceptions of evangelical identity.