Re: Christian Music
Now that I’m more involved with teens and christian music, this chart is perfect:
You KNOW you’ve thought the same thing about Sonic Flood’s In the Secret.
h/t Graph Jam (via Blake Huggins)
About
Rev. Jeremy Smith
Musings from a United Methodist Pastor who is also a technology nerd. It's funny how often the two intertwine.
Hacking Christianity began in March 2008 and since then has been highlighted on NPR, UMC.org, and the UM Reporter.
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From the Internets- From the Methoblogs
Absolutely!
This one's unfortunately true, too:
http://graphjam.com/2009/07/15/song-chart-memes-carry-bus/
Haha!
A fairly recent addition to this category is Matthew Wests "The Motions"
This might hurt
It’s not safe
But I know that I’ve gotta make a change
I don’t care
If I break
At least I’ll be feeling something
‘Cause just ok
Is not enough
Help me fight through the nothingness of life
I don’t wanna go through the motions
I don’t wanna go one more day
Without Your all consuming passion inside of me
I don’t wanna spend my whole life asking
What if I had given everything?
Instead of going through the motions
No regrets
Not this time
I’m gonna let my heart defeat my mind
Let Your love
Make me whole
I think I’m finally feeling something
Take me all the way
Take me all the way
Take me all the way
On a recent trip my wife and I were listening through a collection recently released by LifeWay Worship of P&W music for youth choirs. When their arrangement of "The Motions" came on, my 20 year old daughter home from college and in the back seat reading asked, "Why did you turn on 103X (the local smut music station)? Unable to see the two capital "Y's" in the music indicating only to those of us who read and speak "Churchese," she had no idea this was supposedly a Christian text. Leading me to this questions.
Why do we assume the unchurched kids in our groups won't hear this the same way my daughter did? Why don't we feel more of a responsibility to be VERY specific with those we claim to minister to?
Yeah, there's a lot of songs out there which either deliberately or out of laziness are ambiguous as to whether they are about God or about a romantic partner. But that ambiguity is not exclusively a modern phenomenon. A lot of classic hymns could be secular love songs if you took out a key word or two. For example, "In the Garden" could be about someone's boyfriend if not for the words "Son of God" at the end of the first verse.
Also, I remember as a kid looking through hymn books with friends and adding "under the sheets" to hymn titles.
I'm not kidding– at Conference we sang a song called "his way with thee," which was about how sweet 'tis to let Jesus have his way with thee. Oh my.
Have you seen the South Park episode where Cartman decides he's going to make lots of money by becoming a Christian music artist, which he determines involves taking secular love/sex songs and adding or replacing "Jesus"?
Charles, that song is amazing, and your question is good. If these songs are supposed to be reaching unchurched (young) people, I do not think they mean what we think they mean. If you know what I mean.