Writing in the May edition of Touchstone magazine, senior editor S.M. Hutchens sees all sorts of dangers in contemporary church services that emphasize performers and egocentric lyrics. Hutchens begins his essay, “Please Me, O Lord,” by describing what he witnessed during his return to an evangelical congregation:

On a recent visit to a fairly typical Evangelical church, we were treated to one of its regular features. A handsome young woman, attractively dressed, stood before the congregation with an eight-inch microphone, the head of which she held gently to her lips while she writhed and cooed a song in which she, with closed eyes and beckoning gestures, begged Jesus, as she worked her way toward its climax, to come fill her emptiness. The crowd liked it.

Kenneth Tanner, a friend of this blog commenting on the post “When bad music happens to a good God,” made a similar critique when he cited Marie Barnett’s “Breathe” as “perfectly awful” and “a classic of the new erotic-worship genre.”

Jim Remsen explores the theological tensions of worship wars in a recent feature story for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Remsen mentions the book Give Praise to God, which the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals is using to promote a more systematic approach to worship.

Remsen offers two witty summary paragraphs that get to the heart of the debate:

The alliance extols the approach of the late Rev. James Montgomery Boice, who led Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia — and the alliance — until his death from cancer in 2000. Steady as a metronome, Boice took his worshippers through: call to worship; doxology; psalm reading and responsive song; creedal confession; (lengthy) pastoral prayer; Scripture reading with pastoral explanation; offertory; singing of “the great hymns of the faith” (often derived from psalms); long sermon of “systematic expository preaching” through the books of the Bible; hymn; benediction.

In the feud often called “the worship wars,” critics have called regulative worship outdated, puritanical and chilly as the northern European climes that nurtured it. Michael Horton, an alliance leader, counters that it is “logocentric and theocentric,” whereas much current worship bespeaks consumerism, marketing and “a modern therapeutic orientation in its preaching, liturgy and music.”

In an essay distributed by the alliance, church musician Leonard Payton offers an incisive list of 11 factors for identifying the “worship and praise choruses” that often draw large congregations but also agitate many Christians who long for lyrical depth:

These marks might be 1) small, guitar-based chord vocabulary; 2) slow rate of chord change rather than one chord per melody note; 3) performance by a “worship team,” i.e., several people in front of the congregation leading at the same time; 4) lyrics without multiple stanzas; 5) lyrics that predominantly emphasize the subjective experience; 6) lyrics that can fit on a single overhead folio; 7) a visible claim of copyright; 8) lyrics that speak to God vaguely without a lot of cumbersome detail about his attributes or actions; 9) repetition of the song within the service; 10) people in the congregation closing their eyes, raising their hands, and gently swaying to the music; 11) an induced state of “worshipfulness,” etc., in short, an overall music package that is rather strongly indexed to commercial, American popular music of the last three decades. (In the most extreme cases, some worship services are merely sanitized rock concerts, i.e., no foul language and no cloud of marijuana smoke up at the ceiling.)

Payton’s essay is most striking because of the daring solution he proposes:

In some sense, the minister needs to become a musician and poet. I would add quickly that we are not necessarily talking about years of piano lessons or about aping popular music. No, the post-worship-wars-minister of the Word will be able to write poetry intended for the congregation’s use, will be able to furnish the text with a melody intended for four generations to sing at the same time, and will be able to teach it to the congregation whether or not he has an instrument.

Back in 1999, Michael Hamilton wrote a worship wars cover story for Christianity Today (archive subscription required for full article). In that report, Hamilton mentioned a United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that offers such baby-boomer comfort quilts as the Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright With Me” and a new “Amazing Grace” set to the tune of the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”

Thousands of churches across the nation are making similar musical choices, and to report on it is to step into a river of passions.

Susan Hogan/Albach of the Dallas Morning News, who sports one of the most colorful bylines on the Godbeat, has written the lede and quote of the month.

The topic: The scourge of music piracy among teenagers who “get their praise on” (to paraphrase a wince-inducing phrase from a recent Newsweek report) by listening to contemporary Christian music.

The lede: “Christian teens are stealing Jesus music.” (A six-word masterpiece.)

The quote: “We can’t be like Christina Aguilera and get all attitudy,” said Jaci Velasquez, a platinum-selling singer originally from Texas. “We’re supposed to be like Christ and turn the other cheek.” (It’s worth noting that the non-attitudy Velasquez is among the artists whose music is available through the entirely legal, guilt-free and cross-platform iTunes.)

Hogan/Albach’s story tackles the issue well, mentioning “Thou shalt not steal” by the third paragraph.

Then there’s this nugget of a paraphrased argument: “But not everybody thinks the pirating is a bad thing. After all, some church leaders say, isn’t getting the Gospel out more important than getting paid? How can it be wrong if it saves souls?”

This is the closest example Hogan/Albach cites of a church leader:

“A lot of students think it’s, like, a cheap way to witness to the Gospel,” said Scott Flagg, 22, who belongs to the Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi at the University of North Texas. “They go out and buy a CD, then burn several copies to give away.”

Hogan/Albach also mentions the luscious detail that fans of the CCM group Skillet call themselves Panheads.

This detail-packed story begs for discussion on GetReligion. I propose these questions:

° If you had to fill an 80-minute CD with CCM that was musically hip or designed to save souls (or both), could you do it? Complete playlists are welcome.

° Can you find a direct quote of a church leader who argues that saving souls justifies music piracy? (Bonus points to anyone who cites a church leader with an earned graduate degree. If you find an ethicist who makes this argument, you win a permanent slot in the GetReligion Hall o’ Fame.)

° Can anyone top Panheads as a nickname for fans of a specific CCM band?

° What would members of Beta Upsilon Chi choose to replace such time-honored Greek traditions as hazing, panty raids, keg parties and greedhead networking? Any Beta Upsilon Chi alumni out there with good stories to tell?

° Is Jaci Velasquez a righteous fox, or what? (Thanks to Mark Olsen for coining the phrase and to Blithering Idiot for linking to it.)

Update: I’d like to expand the invitation for discussing what our readers would burn onto an 80-minute CD as good music expressing their beliefs. If I were an Orthodox Jew, for instance, I would recommend the work of Peter Himmelman. The Innocence Mission and Pierce Pettis provide lively expressions of Catholicism. Buddhists might nominate Natalie Merchant or Lama Karta. And surely atheists can do better than Michael Newdow.

We will assume for a moment that GetReligion readers are an educated, modest lot. Thus, the odds are good that you have not heard of Maxim, which is kind of like an Esquire magazine for young males with the attention spans of hummingbirds on cocaine.

Or perhaps it is Cosmo for guys. You get the picture. Actually, you would get lots of pictures since magazines for modern young males contain very few words, at least many in 12-point type and in long sentences. Anyway, Maxim is not Playboy, but it’s certainly not going to get the Focus on the Family seal of approval anytime soon.

Once a year, in an event that makes journalists at cable-TV entertainment channels all a twitter, Maxim publishes its “Hot 100,” a list of the hotties that would top the fantasy list of the typical Maxim guy. This leads straight to VH1 documentaries and the whole works. It’s a sign of what is hot in the California and New York zip codes in which important people decide what is hot and what is not. This is also linked to being cool, or something like that. For more info, click here.

Maxim says all of the women on the list have one thing in common: that their careers promise even greater things to come. . . . “We single out beautiful women whose careers are on fire,” said Maxim Editor-in-Chief Keith Blanchard. “The selection process is top-secret and extremely labor-intensive. We have two interns working fulltime just keeping our wives and girlfriends out of the room.”

Anyway, what does it say that this year’s No. 1 Maxim hottie is Jessica Simpson, a born-again Christian, the daughter of a Baptist youth minister and the blonde bombshell who made headlines by getting married as a virgin? (And No. 2 is Beyonce Knowles, who also talks about her faith from time to time.)

Now, I realize that Jessica and Nick’s Newlyweds reality show is not going to be promoted on Focus on the Family, either. But this is still an interesting development. I don’t know if it means anything in the long run, but it’s interesting. Might romance and marriage become cool? Or even hot?

Jessica is seven notches higher than Paris Hilton, just to give World Wide Web junkies a point of reference. And Jessica is happy about this, quite naturally. It may help sales of her book, “I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding.”

Simpson . . . said of her No. 1 status, “It’s such an honor to be chosen as No. 1 on Maxim’s Hot 100 list. I’m such a girl’s girl, so it’s nice to get the stamp of approval from the boys. It’s way better than being number 101.”

Well, duh.

Kathy Shaidle of relapsed catholic, in noting the death of “Lord of the Dance” composer Sydney Bertram Carter, uses the jocular headline “We’ve missed our chance to kill him.”

Carter’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph includes these revealing details:

The number’s success stems from two elements. It has a lively, catchy tune, adapted from an air of the American Shaker movement. But the optimistic lines “I danced in the morning when the world begun/ and I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun” also contain a hint of paganism which, mixed with Christianity, makes it attractive to those of ambiguous religious beliefs or none at all.

Carter himself genially admitted that he had been partly inspired by the statue of Shiva which sat on his desk; and, whenever he was asked to resolve the contradiction, he would declare that he had never tried to do so.

However, he admitted to being as astonished as anyone by its success. “I did not think the churches would like it at all. I thought many people would find it pretty far flown, probably heretical and anyway dubiously Christian. But in fact people did sing it and, unknown to me, it touched a chord. . .

“Anyway,” Carter would continue, “it’s the sort of Christianity I believe in.”

Perfect.

With considerable chagrin, I remember years from the early 1970s when “Lord of the Dance” was one of the greatest hits of Faith Alive, a laity-led renewal movement in the Episcopal Church. The news of Carter’s death does raise an essential question essential for worshipers: What hymns, whether classic or contemporary, would you prefer never to sing again in this life? (The question mercifully assumes that Heaven will show more wisdom in its choice of music.)

Here are my own nominations, in an effort to prime the comments pump (exercise caution: links lead to sound samples):

• “On Eagle’s Wings”
• “Shout to the Lord” (lyrics)
• “Gift of Finest Wheat” (lyrics)

Send in your nominations — all faiths are welcome, of course — and if you really love us, include links.

Goodbye, Babylon, a boxed six-CD set of music and sermons distributed by a startup called Dust-to-Digital, has led to some remarkably faith-friendly writing in recent months. Here, for instance, is veteran reviewer David Fricke in the Jan. 29 Rolling Stone:

Who says the devil has all the best tunes? Six discs of smashingly great gospel music from the 78-rpm era this fantastic box of holy ruckus is the greatest anthology of antique Southern sacred song and oratory ever assembled.

In 1930′s “Memphis Flu,” Elder Curry and his Mississippi congregation turn local news — a deadly outbreak of influenza — into a galloping lesson on the democracy of God’s wrath.

Goodbye, Babylon also disproves the old rock & roll maxim that the devil has the best tunes: God owned many of them first.

Chris Willman gave Babylon a brief but glowing notice in Entertainment Weekly (subscription or AOL account required):

Races and gospel subgenres mix (the Stanley Brothers pray alongside Blind Willie McTell, to cite a couple fleeting “name” acts), united by a hardscrabble rural existence, dread of sin, and hope of flight. The package too is a thing of beauty, an oversize cedar box that envelops 135 songs and 25 sermons in healthy annotation and actual cotton bolls. If “O Brother” was the “coffee-table album” of its year, “Babylon” feels like the coffee table itself.

The Washington Post goes to great lengths to assure its readers that one needn’t be a fundamentalist to appreciate the musical worth of songs like “The Bible’s True,” “The Bible’s Right” and “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.” (Sample lyric from “The Bible’s True,” performed by Uncle Dave Macon, a “former mule driver and musician from Tennessee known to wield his banjo like a shotgun”: “There ain’t no man from anywhere born make a monkey out of me.”)

In the same article by Eddie Dean, the Post provides a satisfying profile of Lance Ledbetter, a young entrepreneur who had the vision to compile this music and paid for most of the project’s expenses on his own credit card:

A 27-year-old native Georgian, Ledbetter says his model was Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” from 1952; reissued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997, the sprawling, artfully annotated compilation spurred Ledbetter’s interest in race and hillbilly records from the ’20s and ’30s.

With “Goodbye, Babylon,” Ledbetter set out to document the long-neglected gospel scene. As with Smith, his goal wasn’t simply to reissue old records but to resurrect the culture — “the Christ-haunted South,” Flannery O’Connor called it — that gave birth to these religious outpourings.

“I wanted to create a world where you can enter and submerge into and spend some time and come up with different ideas,” he says. “I wanted to produce something on that level where you get lost in it.”

It was nearly five years ago when Ledbetter first “got lost” in the project. As a disc jockey at an Atlanta college radio station, he began to explore old-time sacred music, a far cry from the spirituals he’d heard as a boy in church in northwest Georgia. “I was raised Methodist,” he says. “Very starchy-collared, upright Anglo hymns, really formal, not a lot of expression.” Next to such bland fare, the fiery exhortations of sanctified singers such as Blind Gary Davis and Eddie Head made him a convert, not to the church — Ledbetter remains a lapsed Methodist — but to the artistry and passion of gospel musicians.

Ron Wynn of Nashville City Paper commented on how Babylon proves captivating not only to lapsed Methodists but also to people who have little interest in church:

Even publications that never review gospel are devoting column inches to Goodbye, Babylon. Longtime critical cynics, even avowed agnostics and atheists, are just as captivated and wowed by these tunes as hardcore Christians. No reissue in recent years has better depicted gospel music’s diversity, importance and influence on every idiom in American music circles.

Dust-to-Digital’s simple and elegant website offers links to the diverse media coverage of Goodbye, Babylon. And it offers this spiritually hip (and charmingly self-promoting) blessing to the artists this project honors: “We commend to Almighty God the brothers and sisters on these discs; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to digital. The Lord bless them and keep them, the Lord make his face to shine upon them and be gracious unto them and give them peace. Amen.”