I simply ask us to consider how much our white Christian worship, and our practice of faith in general, is more akin to the framing of the concert hall experience than of the jazz performance. Too often, it seems to me, our worship is oriented to the isolated individual's private relationship with God and set apart from the world around us. We order and arrange it so that worshipers are mere auditors, focused as passive and inert spectators on the preacher's words or the singer's solo performance. Jazz as a model would have us recognize the importance of everyone's participation in worship and see the constitution of a social body—not one-on-One relationships with God—as vital to Christian spiritual formation and witness.
I am a huge jazz fan having played in high school and college and this is a great article looking at how jazz can help white Christianity and its heresies. Long article but well worth the read.
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