Is Christian Contemporary dead?

Here’s an interesting post about the disappearance of CCM magazine. (found via Religious Affections Ministries…a blog I almost never agree with but usually enjoy.)

My answer? Well, I’m not an insider but I have observed this world for awhile now.

I think the CCM of old died about the same time the secular music world died. It was a world of Christian music that lived in parallel (and with similar if not identical mechanisms) as the secular music world. But it’s not really their fault…there wasn’t any other place for it to exist.

Now there is a environment friendly to ‘new’ Christian music…one where it should have existed to begin with. The people of the church.

7-10 years ago I would call churches about coming to their church to play, and it was a new and different thing to have a group come in and play music. Now many churches have bands and expanding approaches to music and they’re much less interested in outsiders coming in. It’s not that they’re uninterested. They’ve kind of broken out of the traditional cultural mode and are doing so themselves. Or they’re a new church and they’re starting it that way.

The big problem I see is that ‘new’ Christian music is still maintaining the pop/Nashville sensibilities sourced in the old CCM environments. Which is to say very safe and very limited and very cookie cutter (in most cases). It’s going to get old sooner or later, especially in places that have chunked all traditional music in favor of new music.

It’s going to be interesting to watch where the next thing develops, and when/how it’s adopted by the church. Ultimately the goal should be that there is no “next thing”. That’s the way the old CCM thought, and while there are still large chunks of the old machinery turning out hits…it’s a losing strategy because the recording industry is not a Biblical model of ministry.

Instead, it should all be about what scripture teaches us about music and the style should ebb and flow around that.