Recently, a friend unknowingly introduced me to a site called The Good Christian Music Blog. The name certainly caught my attention mainly because of the bold name it has chosen to present itself. With a lot of scepticism, I went in anyway. I mean who would have the audacity to claim something like that.
What I found there was nothing short of amazing. So many genres of music covered from the usual styles that we are used to in church to some raise-eyebrow entries as well (80s Christian power ballad anyone?). When was the last time you heard a Christian hip-hop song besides Kirk Franklin? Or Christian electronica? Or even a soulful 60s/70s R&B Christian song? There is some really good stuff if you would open your mind about what constitutes a Christian song.
Pretty much all the entries in the blog are easy on the ears even the genres that I don't normally listen too. Things like hip-hop are not something I listen to because of what we are normally used to listening on the radio or on Spotify. Not only that, these songs have content, perhaps not as theologically fulfilling as some of the songs that we sing in church but they do sing of our God. If anything, this has made me more curious of what other people are doing, providing Christian content yet with the same sort of quality like that of the "secular" music.
One of the things that I am constantly amazed at the people in my church is how vast their areas of ministry cover. I remember that when I first came into this church, I heard about a ministry where people reach out to those in the electronic and dance music scene. At first that was strange, but after hearing some of the testimonies of some of the people serving there, it made a lot of sense. There's is this drummer in the band that also DJs at bars and does his own remixes on the side on his SoundCloud account. It further emphasises the church's mission statement, to know Jesus and to make Him known as well as a better understanding of the Great Commission and Romans 10.
Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) to most of us Christians just mean the songs people like Chris Tomlin, Steven Curtis Chapman, Casting Crowns, Ginny Owens, Sara Groves, Third Day etc. dish out and we cover in church as part of the service. CCM should really be called Contemporary Church Music because of this. It is like hymns sung in church in the 1800s. I'm sure that at that time it would be considered contemporary. If we want to use the phrase Contemporary Christian Music, one must be open to a much broader view of Christian music, even if it means that it is not "suitable" to be covered in church.
"Sing to the Lord a new song"
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