Introduction

The book asks how traditional music, as framed within Moluccan contextual theology, is interrelated with lived religion. The theological idea of the transposition of traditional Moluccan music to the Moluccan Protestant church is traced from its context of development to the religious and musical practices in congregational contexts. The work is embedded in the fields of World Christianity, Contextual Theology, and Ethnomusicology, and uses the approach of material religion. The anthropological methodology consists of fieldwork, participant observation, and interviewing. The concept of ‘the Moluccan traditional’ is introduced to analyze the relation between theology and lived religion regarding traditional church music.