Blake Williams
Examine why the El Reno prisoners sang without instrumental accompaniment and how the manuscript connects that practice to their Scripture-first approach.
Start With Their Rule
The worship question in the Blake Williams story cannot be separated from the method the prisoners had already adopted.
At El Reno, the manuscript repeatedly emphasizes that they were trying to work from the biblical text itself rather than importing a denominational system.
That meant each practice had to survive a basic question: what do we actually find the New Testament church being instructed to do?
When they came to music in worship, they found Christians commanded to sing.
The Text They Saw
Ephesians 5:19 tells believers to speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in the heart to the Lord.
Colossians 3:16 similarly joins teaching and admonishing with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
James tells the cheerful person to sing praise.
Hebrews describes the sacrifice of praise as the fruit of lips that confess God’s name.
The manuscript’s argument is not that music itself is evil. Its narrower claim is that the apostolic instruction given to the church specifies singing.
Believers are told to address one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with the heart.
Teaching and admonishing one another are joined directly to singing with gratitude to God.
A Prison Removes the Extras
A prison congregation had none of the cultural equipment normally associated with modern worship.
There was no worship band, organ, choir program, or inherited musical tradition to defend.
That stripped the decision down to the text itself.
The prisoners sang because singing was the action they believed the New Testament actually gave them.
Participation
The manuscript says the men rotated responsibilities in prayer, preaching, singing, leading, and other parts of the gathering.
That description matters because congregational singing is not presented as a performance delivered to passive listeners.
It is something the gathered Christians do together.
Colossians 3:16 even describes singing as a means by which believers teach and admonish one another.
Not Merely Because They Were Prisoners
It would be easy to assume the men sang without instruments simply because prison conditions made instruments unavailable.
But that is not how the larger Blake Williams account frames the practice.
The site’s manuscript-based account says they chose unaccompanied singing because the New Testament passages they were following said to sing.
In other words, the absence of instruments became part of the same Scripture-first logic governing baptism, communion, teaching, prayer, and congregational organization.
The Larger Question
This is where the prison story connects to one of the book’s larger authority arguments.
Who Changed the Church? repeatedly asks whether Christians are free to add religious practices simply because Scripture does not explicitly forbid every possible alternative.
The manuscript appeals to the principle of remaining within the revealed pattern rather than assuming that silence creates authorization.
The prisoners’ singing becomes a simple real-world example of that hermeneutic.
Why the Story Matters
The significance of the El Reno congregation is not that every prison circumstance should be copied.
It is that men without a denominational worship manual believed they could identify the basic practices of a New Testament assembly directly from Scripture.
Singing was one of those practices.
The book therefore uses the story to press a larger question: when modern worship differs from the apostolic description, who changed the pattern?
The prison removed many assumptions. What remained was the question the entire book keeps asking: what does the apostolic text actually authorize?
Why It Matters
The El Reno prisoners sang without instrumental accompaniment because, in the manuscript’s telling, they were intentionally building their worship from practices they found in the New Testament. They found Christians instructed to sing, teach one another through song, praise God with their lips, pray, preach, remember Christ at the Lord’s table, and serve one another. Their a cappella worship is therefore not treated as an isolated preference. It is one piece of the book’s broader argument that the church’s practices should arise from the apostolic pattern rather than later religious custom.