From "Sent Mail": on contemporary praise and worship music
I am exactly one step away from entering full-on Amos prophetic
mode with contemporary praise and worship songs. It's not that it's bad.
Church music has, parish to parish, congregation to congregation, been bad since time immemorial. It's something else entirely.
The content is so spectacularly, even impressively, vacuous that it it nigh un-Christian. The words are so consistently monosyllabic that one would think the phrases are meant to be understood by kindergartners. The only characters in the songs are the otherwise unnamed pronouns "You" and "I." "You" is, so far as I can tell, generally benign, and makes "I" feel good, but I've yet to figure anything else about him/her/it, or even about "I," except that "I" thinks about "I" a whole lot, especially "I's" emotional well-being.
I am persuaded that the songwriters have together signed a blood-pact never, on principle, to use language that is from, or could be taken by a seeker to be from, the Bible—which is the only possible explanation for the lack of any scriptural terminology, stories, echoes, allusions, personal names, or titles for God. Protestants used to think the pope had a special meeting place in the Vatican for consultations with Satan; I'm convinced some similar bargain has been reached by the lords of CCM. Nothing else except a diabolical conspiracy can make sense of it.
The content is so spectacularly, even impressively, vacuous that it it nigh un-Christian. The words are so consistently monosyllabic that one would think the phrases are meant to be understood by kindergartners. The only characters in the songs are the otherwise unnamed pronouns "You" and "I." "You" is, so far as I can tell, generally benign, and makes "I" feel good, but I've yet to figure anything else about him/her/it, or even about "I," except that "I" thinks about "I" a whole lot, especially "I's" emotional well-being.
I am persuaded that the songwriters have together signed a blood-pact never, on principle, to use language that is from, or could be taken by a seeker to be from, the Bible—which is the only possible explanation for the lack of any scriptural terminology, stories, echoes, allusions, personal names, or titles for God. Protestants used to think the pope had a special meeting place in the Vatican for consultations with Satan; I'm convinced some similar bargain has been reached by the lords of CCM. Nothing else except a diabolical conspiracy can make sense of it.
