In my 2014 survey, I asked choir leaders whether their choir used what I called auxiliary enhanced singers, specific individuals with their own microphones who sang with the choir on every anthem, regardless of whether the score called for a soloist. Their job wasn’t really to shine. It was functional, providing guide vocals that helped the rest of the choir land pitches and parts with more confidence. Only 14.5 percent of the choirs in my study used singers this way.
When I looked at why leaders auxiliary enhanced their choirs, the answers were almost entirely practical. Two thirds said it was to enhance and support the singers by providing guide vocals for the choir members. Others mentioned filling up a large worship space or supporting a thin vocal section. Two thirds of these leaders served churches running 500 or more in worship attendance, but their actual choirs tended to be mid sized, twenty six to fifty voices for over half of them, and none larger than seventy six. A smaller choir in a big room, in other words, often needed some kind of reinforcement just to be heard.
These choirs also tended to have some orchestra involved, which tracks with what I remembered. What actually varies more than whether an orchestra was present is how much they leaned on it week to week. Some churches ran the orchestra every Sunday. Others brought it in occasionally and used piano or tracks the rest of the time. Either way, room size and a choir that’s smaller than the instrumental forces behind it seem to be the real drivers behind needing guide vocals, not simply whether there’s an orchestra in the building at all.
I’d assumed, going in, that this practice would show a clear tension with intergenerational philosophy. If you’re placing certain singers on microphones every week regardless of the music, you’re elevating specific voices over the whole choir, which seems like the opposite of an intergenerational we’re all in this together mindset. That’s actually why I built this question into the survey in the first place.
What I found surprised me. Almost 89 percent of these same leaders had intentionally sought to learn more about intergenerational ministry, and they reported that their choir members understood the value of singing in an intergenerational choir just as much as anyone else in the study. I went in expecting auxiliary enhancement to correlate with a weaker intergenerational philosophy. It didn’t. These leaders had found a practical solution to a real acoustic problem without it seeming to cost them anything philosophically, sort of like using training wheels without ever forgetting you’re still teaching someone to ride the whole bike.
Paul’s picture of the body still matters here. Our bodies don’t have just one part; they have many parts. God has put all the parts of the body together in the way that he decided is best. 1 Corinthians 12:14, 18 (CEV). I think what this data actually shows is that a leader can make a practical decision like this without losing sight of that truth, as long as the philosophy is being taught and lived out everywhere else.
I’d still love to see this researched further, comparing how often auxiliary enhancement shows up in genuinely intergenerational churches versus churches running multiple separate styles of worship. My guess going in was that the numbers would tell a discouraging story. This particular dataset didn’t back that guess up, and I think that’s worth being honest about.
Does your choir use anything like guide vocals, and if so, has it ever felt at odds with the rest of your philosophy?
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