Have Praise Teams Replaced Black Church Choirs
Black Protestant churches across the United States are seeing their choirs shrink or disappear, replaced by smaller praise teams. Music directors and scholars say the shift reflects declining attendance, changing musical tastes, and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nathan Glasper Jr. directs the gospel choir at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The ensemble has more than 100 members and has been part of the university for 38 years. But when Glasper was a worship pastor at a Church of God in Christ congregation during the COVID-19 pandemic, his church choir never came back after lockdowns ended.
That pattern is playing out across Black Protestant churches in the United States. Choirs that once defined Sunday worship are shrinking or disappearing, replaced by smaller praise teams of three to five singers backed by tracks and contemporary music.
Glasper says no single explanation covers the decline. Church attendance among Black Protestants fell during the pandemic and has not fully recovered. Younger musicians grow up in churches with praise teams and never learn choral ministry. Prerecorded tracks fill gaps that once required a full choir. And the music itself has changed, fusing gospel with R&B and hip-hop in ways that favor smaller, more flexible ensembles.
The shift has been building for decades. The late gospel scholar James Abbington noted the decline in choirs more than ten years before the pandemic. "In many Black churches, the choir has been totally eliminated, reduced to very limited singing responsibilities, or replaced by praise teams," he wrote.
Large Black churches in the South still sustain choirs. Northern churches, which have always had smaller congregations, are more vulnerable. Some musicians worry that as choirs disappear from churches, a tradition rooted in the Black American experience will lose its primary home.
But gospel music is finding new audiences elsewhere. Glasper has traveled to Poland twice this year to work with a Central European community choir whose members want to learn Black gospel performance. Similar groups have grown across the UK and Europe for more than a decade. College gospel choirs remain strong. Arrangements of spirituals appear in school choral programs worldwide.
Glasper sees opportunity in the spread of gospel beyond church walls, but he worries about losing the story behind the music. "You can learn 'Precious Lord, Take My Hand,' but do you know the story behind it?" he said. He argues that gospel's message of perseverance and hope can reach people anywhere, as long as its history travels with it.
