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This article explores the way in which love is understood and expressed through the original English lyrics of songs by New Creation Church Singapore (NCC) in comparison to the original songs from Hillsong Church Australia (Hillsong) through the period of 2014–2020. While NCC has a multilingual congregation, reflective of the larger Singaporean society, it composes and releases original contemporary congregational songs (CCS) with English lyrics. English is the primary language in Singapore; however, it is shaped by the languages spoken in homes (e.g., Mandarin, Malay, Tamil). Combined with the theological emphases of NCC, its CCS provide a unique lens into English as a common language of worship. This article demonstrates that while the use of English lyrics is a unifying force for multilingual congregational worship, it is also not benign, but actively shaping Christian confession and associated theology and being shaped by wider multilingual contexts.

“Performing” and “performance” are potentially contentious words within the context of contemporary Christian worship. However, performative elements are explicit in the lyrics of contemporary congregational songs (CCS), and in video recordings of CCS, through the actions of those on stage and in the congregation, as well as in the broader context of staging, lighting, projection, production, and video editing. However, to date, there is only a handful of scholarly works that explore performing in contemporary worship or contemporary worship as performance and most of them are ethnomusicological. This paper seeks to address notions of performing and performance through a broader lens of the most-sung CCS globally, examined through the disciplinary fields of performance studies, musicology, media studies and theology. It involves a two-fold complementary textual analysis of the most-sung CCS lyrics and the most-watched ‘live worship’ videos of those songs on YouTube. In so doing, this study identifies how the Christian music industry at large officially portrays and languages performance in worship songs and also identifies how performative elements are enacted in the live worship videos released. These analyses are finally synthesized to identify how performing and performance are understood and actively portrayed to and by the contemporary church.

Translation as a form of music localization does not only occur in diverse cultural or lingual contexts, it also occurs within an ostensibly homogenous culture and language. The global genre of contemporary congregational songs (CCS) is written and performed through a variety of theological lenses. Sometimes a theological position conveyed in, or ascribed to, CCS can be problematic for certain local expressions of the Christian faith to replicate without needing to alter lyrics, and/or musical content, or at least reinterpret those lyrics in a way which aligns with their theological understanding. This article explores popular CCS, as measured by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) which have been either accepted, rejected, reinterpreted, or otherwise altered in order to play their part in defining local (English-speaking) church worship and identity. Translation studies and music semiology are applied to selected CCS to demonstrate this nuanced interpretation of “translation” in the localizing of religious musical practice