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Granted, I am not going to print the words out to this song and prize them as some profound theological statement worthy of comparison to Bonhoeffer, but something about that song on the car radio just touches my heart.

In some mysterious way, it bonds my heart to Jesus and helps me love him more. It does so in a way that theology books rarely do.

What role does this music play in a person's faith?

In my teaching I use faith as the umbrella term and say that two aspects of faith are theology, which can be explained as matters of the head, and piety, which is matters of the heart. I usually call this the prose and poetry of faith. Theology is the prose, and we need good theology to know what it is we believe and know how to articulate what we believe.

Piety is the poetry of faith. In it, we pay less attention to precision than to honest expression. Contemporary Christian music needs to be theologically sound, but its real strength is in the realm of piety. It touches the heart, it's relational, it's empathetic and it's emotional in a way that is completely appropriate for a holistic understanding of faith.

How did you go about discussing the bands in the encyclopedia, and how were they chosen?

This is a critical work, but that doesn't mean negative. I review albums and the music by the artist, but tried in every entry to focus on what they do best and the contributions they made. But I am not averse to pointing out shortcomings.

I have a broader focus than some people in labeling contemporary Christian music. In a narrow sense, it would consist of artists who make music for Christian music fans, who record for companies that are owned by Christian businesses, and whose music gets reviewed by the Christian media.

Of course, I include all those people in this work, but I am also interested in the roots of rock & roll in gospel music. So I have entries on people like Sam Cook, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green.

Other artists have more of a tentative relationship with Christian music and perhaps even with Christianity. So I have entries on Creed, U2, and Collective Soul—bands that have obviously tried to touch on matters of Christian faith.

What all these people have in common is an intersection of Christian faith and popular music that reveals something about the inter-relationship of religion and culture in the last 30 years in America.

I wanted to include everyone I believe made a significant contribution. That was always the question. Did they do something significant for Christ and his church? If so, I put them in my book.

The book includes a lot of bands that many listeners may have never heard of. Why are even the obscure bands important?

My guess is that there are people around today for whom they are still important. They touched lives. You may not have ever heard of this artist before, but there may be people in the church today who would not be if not for this artist or band and what they did. I don't think I included anybody in this book that would not be significant to someone.

In the book you quote a Rolling Stone editor who called Christian music a "parallel universe." Is it?

That is generally accurate, meaning that contemporary Christian music is a world unto itself. Christian music has its own radio stations, its own magazines, its own award shows. It is possible and very common for Christian artists and fans to have very little contact with the general market.

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46