christian music reconsidered

There is a great post over at Colossians Three Sixteen about the Christian music scene, as Danny Barnes visits a CCM conference for the first time and lives to tell about it. As a man coming from the secular music scene, he was nicely surprised by the non-self centeredness of the conference.

He speaks about the uplifting times of centering the focus on Jesus instead one’s self-promotion. He describes the general difference in focus:

So I guess the main difference I saw was people working on “how can I serve the lord and tell people about Jesus?” instead of “how can I get people to pay to see me and how can I tell them how great I am?”

Also he enjoyed the classes offered a lot more than the ‘business of music’ classes of the secular conferences. He felt people were really trying to help others be better musicians. He offers a few of the gems that he heard:

One thing I heard in particular that I liked, Paul Jackson Jr. said, at a master guitar class “the more you can do, the more you learn, the more places God can use you.” I really took that to heart and felt like that was a good message. At another workshop I heard the teacher say “if you try to do this for the wrong reasons, God will take you out into the desert for a long time.” The same person also said, “don’t despise the days of little things.” This seemed like information and ideas that would actually help someone in the arts. Another teacher said emphatically “the great American disease of materialism will keep you from doing a lot of things!”

His last statement of the post seems very different from the CCM that I have experienced, well maybe the same CCM but very diferent interpretations:

It’s very cool how there is a context for musicians in the Christian world. This realm is growing instead of shrinking. There’s lots of people writing songs, there’s lots of radio stations, there’s lots of worship teams [church bands], lots of places to play, magazines, gear, labels, in short there’s a healthy environment, a good scene, as it were, a healthy mainstream and a healthy underground.

It is good to hear someone excited about the christian music culture, but I have to wonder if much of this is some sort of optimism about it. I fear what a lot of the Jesus praising could very easily be false humility, when it seems they are very dissimilar from the secular world in so many other ways. His words neglect other aspects such as, the attempt of the CCM to copy secular music culture and putting some vague God stamp on it and calling it Holy and relevant. Not to mention the copy of the secular music business model; not the open source wiki style free gift which it seems close to the gospel but the buy my cd t-shirt poster special devotional chewing gum sell my soul in the process marketing.