02/18/2006: I received the following e-mail this morning:

Dear Friends,

The Southern Baptist Convention has been infested with what seems to be a virus that may destroy our denomination. Our Bible tells us that we are to receive wise counsel and that there is great wisdom in a multitude of counselors. In a strictly Christian posture, could you disseminate this among your clergy and leadership, perhaps to other Churches as well, and especially to mature and senior adults, asking for critiques to be returned to us. Chuck Colson, a foremost American Christian has, along with thousands of others in Christian leadership, stated that “the new contemporary music” is destroying both our Christian churches and our Christian broadcasting networks as well. To prove the validity of the following article, go to your church rolls, find the names of youth in your church who have made professions of faith in Jesus and have been baptized in the past five years…and find out where they are (in Jesus) today. You will find that almost one hundred percent of them are no longer affiliated with Jesus today! You may indeed help us to save our denomination, and Christianity in America. Though you may be against some, or all that is in the article, please ask some adult friends if sending it to others has merit. May Jesus bless you!

Respectfully yours,

James Stanley Harkins, Sr., Th.D.
Author, The Angry Samaritan Chronicles
http://www.americangospel.org/

To a certain extent I agree: Christian contemporary music–in general–is very shallow, an attempt to marry the Church with the world, to make Christ look hip-hop.

That is not to say that all Christian contemp artists are shallow or married to the world; some (Twila Paris) do not compromise. However, those who do are the rule and not the exception.

Where I disagree with Harkins is this: it’s not the music that is causing the problem; the poor quality of music merely REFLECTS the problem. Declaring war on Christian contemporary music is tantamount to treating the symptom and not the real problem. That’s like saying we should confiscate all guns to combat homicide. What’s wrong with that picture? People were killing one another long before the firearm was ever invented!

Christian contemporary music reflects much of what I see in Christian fiction literature today: very little depth, appealing largely to the emotions without addressing true issues of Christian living. Try to compare any of today’s fiction authors–some of whom I like–with C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, the latter of whom wrote some of the finest Christian classics in the past 100 years. Isn’t it amazing that Hollywood–to make money–had to make a movie out of the C.S. Lewis classic (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) which is about 60 years old? Ditto for the Lord of the Rings series (by Tolkien), which is almost 70 years old.

Francis Schaeffer–one of the finest Christian theologians in the last 100 years–chronicled this degradation of the arts in his writings.

Those are reflective of a larger problem: the Church has been trying to be like the world, and–while this has resulted in a bulge in numbers, it has led to the ordinations of many inept ministers, deacons who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them in the butt, teachers who cannot teach their way out of paper bag, youth leaders who cannot counsel youth as they face the challenges of adolescence, adult teachers who cannot challenge college students–who are being bombarded with secularism and evolution–with the truth.

That’s the price you pay for the brand of Amway Christianity that defines American churches, both within and outside the Southern Baptist Convention.