Sound Experiment
Thanks to Sarah Bentley Allred for reproducing her Roots & Wings Community post in Building Faith’s June 10, 2025 post: Intergenerational Worship: The Sound Factor.
Bentley Allred writes, ‘While I have heard people comment on ‘how distracting’ it is when someone’s cell phone goes off in church, people seem to have a much. more sustained and emotional response to the sounds children make during worship. I wonder why.’
Join Sarah in this wonder!
She conducted her own sound experiment: jotting down what one hears during the sermon. Her own cell phone notes are shown in the accompanying image:
- Reading of lesson
- Whispering of kids
- Rustling of paper
- Crunch of crackers
- Foot steps
- A child talking
- Cough
- A cell phone timer
- …
Bentley Allred invites leaders to engage the same practice some Sunday.
Her full post is available here.
Once you have done so, I encourage you to invite key members of your worship team, choir, seniors group, or another appropriate small group to do the same. Do not make this an ‘everyone’ practice, and please do not announce that this is happening! If everyone is in on it, behaviors will change and drastically change the experience/experiment.
Gather those invited into the experiment to reflect together:
- What did they hear?
- What emotions did they attach to those sounds?
- Why might some sounds provoke one set of emotions while other sounds provoke very different emotions?
You might read the reflections Bentley Allred received via email, included in her post.
- Do these other reflections inform or reshape your group’s responses/reflections?
Once personal experience and emotions have been processed, wonder together:
- How might this experiment inform the worship culture of your congregation?
- How might this experiment help to shift worship cultures that are not hospitable toward children?
You might:
- Invite the whole worshiping body into the experiment, one group at a time.
- Invite the kids into the experiment as one of those smaller groups.
- Encourage regular feedback on ‘the sounds of worship’, to help people regulate and process their own hopes and expectations.
- Focus on the sounds of worship for several weeks in a row or one Sunday a month – throughout the summer – to help people notice their emotional capacities with regard to different sounds.
- Share hopes and dreams about children and youth in worship – and how this will change the soundscape of a worship service.
- Regularly invite people to share backstories for noises they need to make or how they experience noises: special medical, neurological, or mental health needs, etc. Hearing peoples’ stories develops awareness and understanding and can help develop acceptance of additional ‘new’ or ‘disruptive’ sounds, making them less emotionally charged.
Read Sarah Bentley Allred’s full post here.
