Criticizing Christian Contemporary Music Will Get Us Nowhere

Criticizing Christian Contemporary Music Will Get Us Nowhere February 24, 2017

By Kyle Matthews

It’s become fashionable these days for folks from mainline and traditional churches to decry the shallowness, emotionalism, and entertainment-culture values that Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) has brought to the practice of worship.

Articles like Eight Reasons the Worship Industry is Killing Worship accurately describe those trends and why they are problematic. But criticism is too easy, it’s unproductive, and it’s probably counter-productive as well.  

For 20 years, I spoke out publicly about the deficiencies and dangers of the theology and practice of CCM music, all while remaining a card-carrying, gainfully-employed member of that industry. It didn’t make me popular, but I figured it was better to work for change from within rather than throw stones from a distance.  

The truth is, there is no “CCM headquarters” prescribing the theology to be used or mandating worship practices for the Church. The industry is made up of businesspeople — largely independent contractors — trying to make a living by producing “what sells” in an environment where the customer is always right.

None of my music-industry colleagues would have accepted responsibility for preserving the church music tradition, challenging theological points of view, making great art, or educating their audience about worship. Their careers depended upon being responsive to the values, beliefs and desires of their audience, and the financial rewards confirmed for them the “rightness” of their approach. Were those values, beliefs and desires different, the product— I can assure you— would be different too.

Better qualified people than I have written stacks of books warning about where these worship trends might lead. But all of that did nothing to stem the tide of artless mantras played on CCM radio and sung in megachurches. Educated opinion is a bug on the windshield of popular practice.

It’s not hard to understand why. Worship leaders choose the music that is most accessible, easiest to prepare, and best-liked by the congregation. The ubiquity of CCM radio stations create the impression that those songs are simply the best and most widely-used songs available. The business model works; the industry makes money and then reinvests that money in creating more product.  

Meanwhile, the theologically-trained folks from my tradition have taken the high road to Nowheresville, refusing to invest in alternative artists and composers, disparaging all marketing and money-making as crass and “beneath the dignity of the church,” and ending up with no income with which to re-invest. Can you say “unsustainable”?

If the problem is the content of the music, the solution will be a creative one, which requires investment. We need substantive musical alternatives that by their own excellence create dissatisfaction with the status quo and raise the bar. Those alternatives will not materialize out of thin air. It costs money to invest in the people who compose, record, print, distribute, market and teach others to sustain high standards. But if you want apples, you plant apple trees.  You don’t write articles complaining about how there are no apples.

Consider that the historical period when church music achieved the kind of excellence that gained it universal recognition both within the Church and without was not when the Christian media industry came on the scene, proving it could reach a mass audience. Nor was it when some academic wrote a book criticizing the way people worship, which caused millions of people to suddenly change their opinions and raise their standards.It was that brief time in church history when the Church understood that if we wanted to make our best-possible offering to God, we would have to find and fund those composers who were uniquely gifted to create it, and then both use their work and share it.  

The only thing that is really going to improve worship music is for the church to make the investment in better music, and take responsibility for its proliferation. Here’s hoping we’ll soon get desperate enough to stop complaining and reclaim our once-cherished role as patron of the arts.

Kyle Matthews is a multiple-award winning songwriter and the Minister of Worship Arts at First Baptist Church, Greenville, S.C.

Note: The views expressed here in columns and commentaries are solely those of the authors.

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