In any case, I’m formerly from a charismatic church with lots of loaded music with dancing and sometimes I can’t distinguish it from a rock concert. Heh.

I want to commend you for the courage to write so objectively. Yes, one could see that passion was present but so be it.

As one who travels the globe in mission work, I am appalled at the seeming tide of P&W which has run like a tsunami into every culture. The tragic reality is that this wears thin and soon they are asking organizations like ours to come and teach them the Bible and true theology. Yes, the externally focused soon loses its glamour if one is truly interested in the truth.

As Ravi Zacharias commented recently in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, our current approach to P&W has cut off a whole generation at the knees. In other words with the wholesale adoption of P&W as WORSHIP, much is excluded! Including many who have followed the Lord for years and have hungered for the preached Word. In addition, we are raising a generation who knows little of the depth of biblical theology because the songs are such rank self-promotion. Seldom is there anything sung which has the concept of denial, putting others before ourselves.

I hope that many will hear and listen to what you have written! Right on!

David

I went to her concert, where she was singing the genre of the period. She spotted me and there in public stated that she got nothing from my song that morning, after which she crooned what a really spiritual song should be!

Soon after my wife and I had sung a duet, Mendelssohn’s “I Waited on the Lord,” again straight from Scripture. We were stopped after the service by a new member of our Sunday School Department and, of course, we expected to get a compliment, but not a left-handed one. He said, “You two have such beautiful voices, it’s a shame you’re not singing in the Holy Spirit!”

The P&W fanatics have been with us a long time, they are just growing in number.

I must confess you are more balanced than I am. I am so weirded out by what I used to be part of that I cannot even listen to most “Christian” music (What? Did the song profess faith and receive salvation?) without cringing. That’s not to say there isn’t some really good music out there, including contemporary stuff. Style is not the issue to me; the goofy theology is.

Thanks for summing this up so well.

One point that you made about P&W music ministering to this generation is all too often the pragmatic justification behind much of what goes on in seeker churches. “Music” has become practically equal to “worship” in many people’s minds. We have jettisoned much of the other aspects of worship and are communicating a false God to people.

Everything we do in worship teaches us about God. Or another way of saying it, our theology about God, how we think about God, comes out in our worship.

I sang in a choir in college that did some incredible pieces and I, at any rate, felt God speak to me through the discipline of learning to sing the music and some of my relatives said the choir I was in was good but not annointed. It was infuriating to hear this, especially when two years later the relatives heard the pieces AGAIN and decided the music was annointed after all! I liked Messiaen’s O Sacrum Convivium the FIRST time around.

This is a tangent, I know, but I’ve noticed over the years that there are Christian musicians whose work even unbelievers appreciate. There are plenty of atheists who like listening to Bach or Mahalia Jackson or Blind Willie Johnson who would rather puncture their eardrums than listen to Amy Grant, Steve Camp, or Michael Card. The only grudging respect paid to anything like CCM my brother found in Rolling Stone’s archives was Keith Green, something like “We don’t like this guy’s music but at least he sounds like a real,living human being.”

I think the situation would be helped if there were better music programs in the school systems, or even within the church. I know how to use music to produce emotional reactions, but I’m pretty sure that’s what music is about.

I was watching the Goo Goo Dolls live DVD with a couple friends one evening, and one of them said, “Do you ever hear music, even secular music, that just makes you want to worship God?”

I almost launched into definitions, but I realized the question deserved some thought. When I answered, it was something like this: “When the music is beautiful, it makes me think of how awesome God is, no matter what the lyrics are about.”

I think this is the problem with the P&W scene. Rather than realizing that music is affecting their emotions, and then turning their minds toward God, people assume God is playing with their emotions and that he has anointed the music that is being played. I remember the time I spent in those circles… at the supercharged emotional services, I focused on God(?) as the source of my heightened emotions, rather than on God who sent Jesus to the cross.

I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love

Matt Smyczynksi–I think you are dead on with this. Music affects our emotions, and I’d even go so far as to say that maybe having our emotions tweaked could sometimes help us focus on God. The problem is that we then begin to associate this emotional response and the music that creates it with God; and, if we’re not careful, the music and corresponding emotions become our substitute for Him.