ABSTRACT
Watching the red sunset over the horizon at Sunset Strip on Ibiza, listening to the chill-out music played by a DJ at Café del Mar, I was spending time with my team members on the first evening of our mission. It was chilled and relaxing, but then here came the exciting part of the schedule. Doing prayer walk in the dark alleys with my members and striking up conversations about meaning of life with clubbers in a pre-club bar in San Antonio, The Bull Bar were both challenging for a Hong Kong Chinese who was researching the use of popular music in a Christian context. However, these activities were an essential part of the mission schedule.
Praying for strangers at three in the morning using my second language and engaging with someone in a deep, meaningful conversation against the backdrop of electronic dance music played by the mission team’s DJs were the most interesting and yet difficult tasks I had ever been given. In hindsight, however, these experiences helped me see the functional role of music in social interaction. I still remember how I started conversations with a number of British tourists in The Bull Bar by asking a simple question, ‘Hey, how do you find the music tonight?’ The conversation would then go on and on until we both touched upon deeper issues in life, like purpose of living, faith in God, doubts towards religion and so on. On the other hand, I also observed how the sonic qualities of music could conjure up different religious emotions on the dance floor while I was witnessing the blissful looks on my team members’ faces in their ‘club worship’. Later in my interviews with them, I also found that Christian worship was something more than singing songs filled with religious lyrics; it was an expression of joy for being who they were in their Creator through the act of dancing. David refers to dance as a form of worship in some of his Psalms in the Bible (e.g. Psalm 149:3, Psalm 150:4). For the respondents in this case study, they can ‘worship outside the box’ through dancing at a club on Ibiza.
