Has Christian Rock Lost Its Soul?

Shoulder to shoulder with a multitude (15,000 in all), I am listening to White Heart, a contemporary Christian band playing at the Jesus Northwest music festival in Vancouver, Washington. I am standing in what would be a mud puddle if it were not six inches deep in wet sawdust, while all around me youthful bodies bob up and down like coconuts on an ocean swell. In the indigo sky, a sliver of moon has appeared. The stage above me is steaming in artificial purple fog, and music pounds so loud the drum beat threatens cardiac arrest.

The mostly teenage listeners seem deliriously happy. They are waving hands in the air; they are pressing toward the magnetic stage; they are mouthing the words—unintelligible to me—and I can hear a faint backwash of sound from the choir of thousands. As White Heart jumps, whirls, and slams out music like a crowd of dervishes, my memory is stirred. I remember this. This is the feeling you get when you have waited all day for the music; and now, while it booms out loud and wild, you are going to jump and howl and have a good time. This is a rock concert.

In my long-ago college years, I did this kind of thing. I went to Grateful Dead concerts; I heard Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer. Back then I recognized that some people regarded rock music as the low point of sensual irresponsibility—sex, drugs, and thumbing your nose at society. But for me, it was none of those. For me it was just fun. It was an experience—the experience of being young.

Now I am not so sure. I am 43 years old, my beard is mostly gray, and I am a father of a couple of almost-teenagers. I view my rock-and-roll past with some ambivalence. Perhaps the critics had a point.

At my shoulder is a chunky kid in a baseball cap. He is moving to the music but keeping an eye on me. Suddenly he leans over to shout in my ear. “Do you like this music?”

I smile, aware that the notebook I am writing in seems out of place.

The chunky kid is not satisfied with a smile. He leans over and shouts again, a bit hostilely, I think. “What I mean is, do you really like this kind of music?”

“Sure,” I shout back. “I like it.”

After I say it, I realize a more honest response would have been, “Not particularly.” But how do you convey, in one short, shouted sentence, that you think the performance is kind of silly but that you sympathize, that you were once young yourself? I want to convey that I am not a spy from the Anti-Rock Brigade who believes that clapping on the down-beat is prohibited in the Old Testament.

The chunky kid must sense that my response is not honest. Gradually he edges away in the crowd. I understand. It is tough to rock out and have a good time while standing next to an adult taking notes.

I am out of place. As I listen to White Heart, I am not jumping and howling; I am writing observations in my notebook. I am not here for the fun of it. I am trying to find out about the health, mission, and effectiveness of contemporary Christian music.

This crowd of kids—and families, too, though the older members tend to stay seated back in the bleachers 50 yards from the stage—is having a good time. They’ve been listening to one band after another all day, and they want still more. The rockier the band, the more they like it. I wish I could count the number of times musicians have roused them with a cry like, “How many of you believe it is grrrreat to be a Christian?” but I don’t have enough fingers.

All day I have seen no drugs or alcohol, just one cigarette, and not a single halter top. Not one couple has stood before me, kissing passionately in public. This is certainly different from the music festivals of my youth. Otherwise, the atmosphere is remarkably similar. It’s Woodstock for families; it’s county fair and rock concert rolled together. Though the festival offers a number of well-known Christian speakers, and though some of the music groups appeal for a commitment to Jesus (there’s a counseling area roped off on the hillside), the atmosphere is not intensely religious. Music is the core attraction, and that old line from the Rolling Stones would apply: “I know it’s only rock ’n’ roll, but I like it.”

Gyrating teenagers, purple fog, heart-stopping music—and they call it ministry

That’s not enough, however. Jesus Northwest advertises itself as “A Weekend That Lasts a Lifetime.” Brochures refer to a “ministry event” and list as its first ministry goal: “That every person who attends this year, young and old, unsaved and churched, would have a lifechanging experience with Jesus Christ.” Sponsored by a church, the festival draws these crowds with a promise of something distinctively and powerfully Christian.

In a larger sense, contemporary Christian music does, too. The music is supposed to change lives. That I am not so sure of. It is good, clean fun, but is it ministry?

I had asked Rick Florian, White Heart’s lead singer, the same question that afternoon. We talked in the tiny lobby of the Comfort Inn, where all the musicians were staying. Florian has a youthful, all-American-boy appearance, particularly with his abundant hair pulled back into a pony tail and tucked under a baseball cap. (In contemporary Christian music, male musicians either have hair down to their shoulders or as short as a putting green.) Florian is no jaded celebrity. Due to airline problems, he had been put in first class for the first time in his life on the way to this festival, and he was still feeling awed by the service. He kept mentioning the hot rolls they had served.

“My dad is a tool-and-die worker,” Florian said; “that’s how he pays his bills. We are musicians; that’s how we pay our bills. But we do have a unique opportunity. How often do you get thousands of kids standing in front of you who will listen to you share the gospel with them?”

We were joined by Mark Gersmehl, the group’s songwriter and keyboard artist, whose shoulder-length hair was waving free. Both were eager to explain their work, anxious to convey their concern. They said all the right things: that music has a unique ability to touch people’s hearts; that musicians can be treated like stars but in reality are only a small, humble part of the body of Christ; that they admire youth workers, who have the tough and important job of following up the kids White Heart hits on a one-night stand; that there is a discrepancy between the show, with all its glitz and flash, and the message of servanthood they want to convey.

“It’s almost like we’re building up this thing to get them to come, so that we can tear it down before their eyes, to let them know that we are just normal people like they are; we need the grace of God because we are nothing without it,” Florian said. White Heart musicians go out and talk to kids after every concert because they want to break down the distance between themselves and their audience.

I had dinner with other members of the group, riding over to the restaurant in my rental car with a demo tape of White Heart’s latest, yet-unreleased album crashing over us at high volume. (There was some discussion in the back seat over how loud the music should be, ending with, “But Billy, he [meaning me] was listening to classical music.” Billy reassured me that he liked classical music; a lot of the chord changes were the same, he said.) They seemed like good guys, sincere Christians, regular people. But I kept getting canned, correct answers to my questions. The responses seemed genuine, but superficial.

When I saw their act, I understood why. White Heart puts on a good pop show: multicolored lights, fog, lots of leaping and running across the stage. Florian even does back flips. Musically, they are thoroughly professional. But I might as well ask somebody who organizes a Saturday-night dance at the country club to explain the significance of what he does. How deep can you go?

I had better luck talking to Randy Campbell, who organizes Jesus Northwest as a staff member for the People’s Church of Salem, Oregon. (The church has been putting on the festivals for 17 years.) We sat at a picnic table in the food area, where young people gorged themselves on teriyaki sticks, elephant ears, yakisoba noodles, chicken fajitas, burritos, or, of course, hamburgers and french fries. “If I wasn’t employed for this,” Campbell freely admitted, “I wouldn’t attend. I don’t want to camp in a cow pasture.”

Every year, however, his attitude changes when the show gets underway. “It’s sometimes misconstrued as an evangelistic event, but that has always been secondary to ministering to the body of Christ.” Young people, he told me, gain by being part of a larger experience. “We get letters and comments that say things like, ‘I can feel so lost and alone. But just look at all the people who share my beliefs.’ “He spoke of the three-day event as a kind of retreat center, providing relief, restoration, and feeding.

At the same time, it is a commercial venture. Campbell said that attendance was down largely because some of the most popular groups weren’t able to make it. The church decides who to invite based on careful polling of their audience. To make it attractive to families, they opt for popular, mainstream groups over the harder-edged “alternative” or metal music some of their younger audience would prefer.

Campbell’s comments brought to mind the words of a friend, Mike Van Dordrecht, who teaches high-school math. Music is extremely important to young people, he had reminded me, and “contemporary Christian music [CCM] lets a kid be different without being weird.”

Stylistically, CCM is derivative: whether it’s rap or heavy metal or pop, the music is indistinguishable from its secular counterpart, except for the uplifting lyrics. CCM is part of a parallel Christian culture, enabling kids to be normal, blue-jean-wearing, music-loving American teenagers without abandoning their faith. In fact, it enables them to celebrate both their faith and their culture; it is contemporary but not corrosive, devout without being nerdy.

I am pretty sure it would have appealed to me when I was 16. I knew every Top 40 song by heart; I listened to the radio constantly; I treasured certain albums. But it was entirely divorced from my faith. The closest thing to a Christian playing my kind of music was Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary. That didn’t do it—too tame.

I remember feeling great anguish that no such thing as Christian rock existed. When, near the end of my college years, I heard my first real Christian rock artist—Randy Stonehill—I felt tremendous relief. Shortly thereafter, however, I left school and rock behind. I never got to try bringing my faith and my music together.

It so happened that I ran into an old friend of mine, Bob Fogal, at Jesus Northwest. Fogal’s teenage infatuation with music makes mine look inert. While barely out of high school, he became a DJ for a big California Top-40 radio station. Years later, after converting to Christianity, he determined to launch a station playing contemporary Christian music. He now runs Spirit Radio in Portland, just over the river from Jesus Northwest. That is why he was manning a booth in the festival’s commercial building, where, in addition to learning about his station you could acquire T-shirts, tapes, bumper stickers (“Stop Abortion—Don’t Add Murder to the Sin of Fornication”), rubber stamps, Norm Geisler’s apologetics tapes, paintings of demons fighting angels, or “Touch of Heaven” mugs and water bottles.

“The challenge is,” Fogal said of his station, “how do you present an entertaining radio format and still present the offense of the Cross?” He applied the same issue to the whole music “industry”: how does one combine profit-making entertainment with serious disciple-making? “What interests me,” Fogal said, “is the mix between spirituality and hype. A promotional letter from a music company will say something like, ‘Read the lyrics, see how they will bless your listeners as we take it to number one!’ “

As musician Rich Mullins told me, “The goal of the record companies is to make money, and if you have a great ministry, that doesn’t bother them at all.” The church does not have much history with a profit-first, ministry-second hybrid—unless you want to think back to the sale of indulgences.

Fogal worries that “the industry”—the term is used without any sense of irony—will compromise its mission. It troubles him that Christian stations, which once played only music with Christian lyrics, now play romantic music if it’s recorded by a known Christian. (Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” is the prime example.) He recognizes that CCM mixes in a lot of glitz with the gospel. Nonetheless, he believes CCM’s strengths far outweigh its problems.

When I asked him what kids get out of it, he said, “What are kids getting out of school these days? You’re throwing a lot of stuff against the wall and hoping that some of it sticks—that they’ll know something about adding and subtracting and multiplication and division.”

A lot of CCM’s message does stick, he’s sure. “My daughter has listened to contemporary Christian music from the womb. As a result, she has a ton of Scripture in her head. We used to have a game we played, where she’d say a verse, then I’d say a verse, and we’d go until somebody got stuck. I don’t think I’d play with her any more. She’d kill me.”

Contemporary Christian music dates from the Jesus movement of the 1970s. That outburst of youthful Christianity was universally accompanied by guitar. Some professionals were involved, but most of the music started from a deeply felt, amateur urge to communicate faith in a comfortable musical idiom. Chancel choirs didn’t do it.

The original Southern California Jesus-people church, Calvary Chapel, had a group called Love Song. Another Southern Californian, Larry Norman, pushed the musical boundaries with a hard-rock song, “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” Norman had borrowed the line from William Booth, who scandalized the church in his time by using brass bands and borrowing secular tunes.

Booth did not launch a brass-band industry, however; he founded the Salvation Army. Jesus musicians were not planning on an industry, either. Bob Hartman is a founding member of Petra, one of the few CCM groups dating from that period. “When Petra started,” he told me, “there wasn’t any reason to do it other than that you were called to do it. There wasn’t any glamor in it. There wasn’t any money in it. Sometimes we would pay to play, if the church’s offering wasn’t enough to cover traveling expenses.”

That slowly changed, as CCM became a business headquartered in Nashville. The free spirits of the Jesus movement merged with the well-honed commercial talents of the professional music industry—Nashville already being nerve center for country-and-western and Southern gospel music.

There is no doubt something was gained through commercialism. Hartman remembers “a time when recording budgets were so small it was impossible to make a record that was on par with secular records.” Now, he says, CCM recordings stand up to their secular counterparts.

“On the negative side,” he continues, “some of the root callings of people in the early days, the passion for nothing more than ministry, is sometimes being lost.”

Money does tend to corrupt, and one of my questions was how much it has corrupted CCM. As Bob Fogal pointed out to me, however, the mix of hype and spirituality makes corruption difficult to pin down. Musician Margaret Becker talked plainly about it one night while throwing her clothes into a suitcase for a redeye back home to Nashville. “If you say Jesus a lot,” she said, “you’ll definitely sell more albums.”

That’s nothing new, of course. Since the first century, we have had phony ministers, saying the right things for the wrong reasons. CCM is not immune. There have been scandals. In 1985, the lead singer of White Heart was convicted on charges of statutory rape. That’s how Rick Florian became lead singer: he was part of the road crew when the bad news broke, and the band, after some soul searching, decided to go on.

More recently, exposes of Christian comedian Mike Warnke—who is accused of inventing a past in Satanism and making a profitable career out of it—have raised questions about whether Christian recording companies will hold anybody responsible for anything (apart from a profit margin).

How widespread are such abuses? I asked virtually everyone I met how they assessed the situation. Here is what they told me, uniformly: There are some CCM musicians plagued with overactive egos, by messy marriages, and various other “personal problems.” As John Styll, editor for industry magazine CCM, put it, “Pride and greed are still there. They’re tolerated if you sell enough records.”

That’s no surprise. The same assessment could be made of pastors of large churches. What is heartening, though, is the more positive feedback I received of the industry’s sincerity.

Petra’s Hartman tells of visiting Nashville in his early days as a musician. He talked to a prominent person in the music industry, who told one horrendous story after another about Southern gospel musicians. Shocked, the idealistic Hartman asked, “Are there many people in gospel music who aren’t sincere?” The man thought and then said, “I don’t know any who are sincere.”

“That had a tremendous effect on me,” Hartman says. “I said, ‘I’m going to be sincere or I’m not going to do this.’ “Apparently other musicians made the same commitment. While many of them have problems, Hartman said, he doesn’t know one person in the industry who is insincere in his or her faith. Others said the same thing: they don’t know a single phony.

Several people mentioned Steven Curtis Chapman as a prime example of a musician who is sincere and unspoiled by success. The headliner for the last night of Jesus Northwest, Chapman is thought by many to be the next great crossover success.

“Crossover” is when Christian musicians like Amy Grant or Michael W. Smith get played on secular radio and promoted through the general media. It’s the biggest buzz in the industry right now. According to Styll, contemporary Christian music probably comprises only 5 or 6 percent of all music sales in America, nearly all of it selling through Christian bookstores. Surveys consistently show, however, that “the rank and file pew sitter knows nothing about [CCM], and when exposed to it they tend to like it.”

Styll says that secular companies, noting that 40 percent of America attends church, are betting a lot more Christian recordings can be sold. Amy Grant has opened their eyes: her Heart in Motion album sold five million copies, a million in Target discount stores alone.

Consequently, there has been a rash of record-company buyouts, with most major Christian companies now either owned by or working very closely with a secular organization. Chapman’s recording company, Sparrow, was bought by EMI, one of the world’s largest. The way he describes his interactions with EMI executives, they seem to have big plans for him.

I got to Chapman an hour before he went to his concert. Though tired from a long day of travel, he could not have been more helpful. Chapman is blond and handsome in a baby-faced way, and incredibly nice. He speaks in a classic Nashville drawl and looks the age of some of his fans. He took any question I asked on a long, period-deficient circle of words that eventually trailed into space. Hardly anything he said was quotable—a single sentence would take half a page—but he seemed so unpretentious and obliging he made me glad to be there.

For my final question, I described two teenage boys I had met that afternoon in the food area. They had come to the festival with their (separate) youth groups. One was a pudgy kid who listened to a lot of Christian music and especially liked the Newsboys, an Australian group best known for having their drummer hooked up to a hydraulic device that enables him to play while being whirled upside down. The other boy, slender and dark, said he never listened to Christian music, but his father was the pastor of his church so, “I pretty much had to be here, don’t you think?”

I asked Chapman what he hoped would happen to those boys when they heard him sing. He only had a half a minute to answer: he was supposed to hop onto the van that would take him to the fairgrounds.

“I hope what happens,” drawled Chapman, “is what happened to me when I went to Dallas Holm concerts, or when I went to Andrae Crouch or Imperials concerts. It—” he paused, searching for words. “It challenged me. I always walked away saying, ‘Man, I want to live my life like he’s singing about.’

“I talk about how life in the light of God’s grace is a great adventure. It’s not a bunch of rules and regulations; it’s not suck the fun out of life; it’s not take all the problems out of life; it’s life with all its problems, the mountains, the valleys; it’s an adventure.”

Actually, Chapman said a lot more, but that is the kernel of it.

I went from the Comfort Inn to the concert. It was nearly 9:00, and the last light was fading over the hillside littered with multicolored tents and RVs. In the distance were blue Washington hills; in front of the grandstand, boys were meeting girls, and little kids were playing with paper airplanes. I squeezed my way as close to the stage as I could get, wedged in with fans. I had left my notebook in the car, deliberately. Chapman came out and sang the opening tune from his latest album, which went gold this year (which means it sold half a million copies).

The title song is “The Great Adventure,” and it speaks of saddling horses, blazing trails, and following “our leader into the glorious unknown.” All of it punctuated with oh and yeah.

The crowd loved it. After a while, I did too. It doesn’t read like much, but it’s a catchy tune. I looked around at the surging, shouting, happy audience and wondered if the concert would have the effect Chapman hoped. Would, for example, that pastor’s kid who was there by command, who maybe wasn’t sure where he stood in regard to Jesus, would he listen to Chapman and think: maybe God’s grace is, or should be, a great adventure?

It struck me as possible. At least, it seemed more plausible than if the same message were conveyed by a gospel quartet.

Driving back to my motel after the concert, I put The Great Adventure cassette on the car stereo, and like (I assume) many others driving on the same freeway from the same concert, I was soon transported.

Rock music goes with cars; surely that is what is meant by a driving beat. I was singing along; I was pounding the steering wheel to the beat. I had to smile at myself. I’d not only left my notebook behind, I’d lost my professional distance. Music will do that to you.

John Styll said something interesting that pertains. He said, “There’s a whole generation of people who have found a cultural anchor for their lives. It’s made Christianity relevant to today for them. Christian music is viable for the other six days of the week, not just Sunday morning. A 20-year-old doesn’t put on a tape of organ music in his car.”

There is a danger in that, of course: the possibility that in getting so close to our culture, degraded and commercial as it is, Christians will lose their souls. I am willing to bet, however, that when you put the Spirit of Christ and the spirit of the age in the same room, the Spirit of Christ will manage to get his work done.

At any rate, contemporary Christian music is not about to disappear—no matter what I think of it. Bob Fogal said to me, when I asked him where the contemporary Christian music industry is going, “People will continue to wake up in the middle of the night with a light bulb over their heads saying, ‘I’ve got it—fax evangelism!’ “

In other words, culture and technology will keep on changing, and Christians will keep on coming up with bright, creative (and sometimes stupid) ways to use it for their faith. They did it with television, and with radio before that, and with the printing press before that. They’ve done it with music through the ages. When the process stops, we’ll be dead.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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