ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book suggests that Hillsong’s branding is a powerful organizational and communicative tool that leverages the vernacular of the consumer culture to ‘add value’ to both the church and to the experiences of its participant stakeholders. It focuses on the role of music in Hillsong’s branding process. Hillsong’s brand and worship music, then, are infused with transcendent and transgressive potential because they articulate faith in ‘the contested spaces of the modern world’. Hillsong’s brand is ‘powerful’ because it is the medium through which its stakeholders instrumentalize the logics of the transcendent and transgressive and, in doing so, connect the poles of the sacred, profane, and mundane that demarcate the experience of worship. Hillsong’s brand is a medium that instrumentalizes the familiar communicative practices and logics of consumer culture to afford participants ways to actively engage in sacred experiences.
