Monday, July 26

A question to the worship leaders out there:

Which may be foolish to ask, seeing as how the vast majority of the hits that this thing is getting is for people searching for ways to cheat in MLB 2K10, but I may as well ask it anyway:

How do you balance volunteer worship leading with paid? Even though I'm still pretty new, I've taken a pretty strict little-to-no volunteer attitude for a number of reasons, but I'm interested in everyone else's opinion.

Thursday, July 8

I hate Christian rock.

First, so that everyone's on the same page, I love Christianity. I love God. I love worship music. I am a music minister who loves to pray with music and connect to God through music. In no way is anything that I'm about to write going to undermine my beliefs in the use of electric guitar to worship God. Keep all that in mind.

Ok. So the back story is this. St. Louis has had a classical music station (Classic 99) for better than 60 years, but recently they sold their station (99.1) to Joy FM, a local Christian music station. There are literally novels that could be written as to how much of a tragedy it is to lose a free source of classical music, but that's another story. Because I now have access to an entire radio station that previously was very static-filled and otherwise not valid, I've gotten to listen to some Christian rock that I'd previously only heard tell of. And let me tell you, I'm not impressed.

What's spurred this recent post is that I just heard a song where the lyrics were "the beauty of Your majesty, the wonder of Your glory". What? Could you possibly pick a set of words that are any less cliche or made any less sense? I mean, I liked that song way better when it was called "Beautiful One" by Jeremy Camp (who is another serious offender...). But seriously though, what do those lyrics even mean? You can't just go "the (adjective) of your (adjective)" and call it a day. It's lazy, and complete nonsense.

I also hate that "Christian Rock" is called thusly because of the presence of electric guitars, but those guitars are being played...boringly? There's no aggression, no edge, no distortion of any kind. Just a generic, inoffensive wall of sound set way back in the mix. How is that rock? Soft rock, maybe, but soft rock sucks. I mean, when I'm real before God, it's pretty damn offensive. I'm a sinful dude. I don't like it, but hey, I am what I am, and by the grace of God, I'm trying to make myself more presentable to God, but no matter how well-dressed I get, He knows me, knows my faults, knows my ways, and knows my heart. I hate that "Christian Rock" is "family friendly". It's just too squeaky clean to be real. And I hate fakes.

And that's why I hate popular Christian music. You're writing music that is, frankly, bad, bland and uninteresting, and it's being sold solely based upon the merits of being "Christian". It's got all of the lyrical depth of a Ke$ha song, but because you're singing about God, it's legitimate music that sells records. That wouldn't fly in literally any other industry, but apparently it's okay for Christian music, because the average Christian likes bad music. And the average Christian feels better about themselves because they're not listening to "that crap on the radio". Come on.

(Pictured: That Crap On The Radio)

I'm with Michael Gungor on this one. If you're making good music, no matter what you're singing about, you're glorifying God. If you're making bad music, no matter what you're singing about, you're not glorifying anything. You might as well be singing about brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack, for all that God cares. Harsh? Music is music, and it's either good, or it's bad. No label or name of a genre will convince me otherwise.