My experience with “Christian Pizza”
Note, I’m ridiculously scatterbrained and my thoughts are not entirely cohesive. The topic I start writing about might not really match the topic with which I end this post. But here goes.
I’m a pretty avid follower of Michael Gungor—his music, his musings and ramblings. In general I think I’m more or less on the same wavelength, though I’m obviously not a great musician or songwriter (I’d like to be).
Last year, Gungor posted a blog that dealt with Christian music as a genre, and how it should be declassified as such. You can find the post here: http://gungormusic.com/2012/12/christian-pizza/
I thought I’d write a little reflection of my personal experience with the things he’s saying.
A couple weeks ago I went with members of my church’s worship team to the annual Christian Musicians Summit conference at Overlake Church in Seattle. I’m always looking for ways to improve musically, so this was a good opportunity to learn some new things with the rest of the band. And I did learn a lot of good things from a lot of people that know the field way better than I do. But in the end, this was a conference for Becky.
Becky is the personality described in Gungor’s blog that fits the stereotype targeted by Christian artists and musicians in CCM today. She is looking for a very specific type of music, and creative interpretation of different themes found throughout the Bible and Christianity aren’t of much interest to her unless they are presented in a very palatable, “uplifting” and “safe” format.
Music written for Becky is largely stripped of creativity in favor of better marketing, though I don’t doubt that many Christians who make the music that ends up filling Becky’s ears would write much less “cookie-cutter” music if they were allowed a bit more creative expression by the guys who call the shots.
I’d been asked to collaborate on writing songs for my local church, and I’ve been really hesitant because the things that would come out of my heart as of late would reflect a lot of the doubt I’m dealing with, and the Biblical response to it. I want to write songs of lament and longing, but the church as a whole wants songs of joy and jubilation. There is a place and time for all of these things, but to find the proper place for each, I think we need to look back at the church’s history and its time-tested emphasis on seasons.
Much like we go through seasons in life, the church goes through seasons which each serve a very different purpose. It’s appropriate that I’m writing this today, seeing as it is the second Sunday of Advent—a season dedicated to the lament and longing of the Hebrew people through their days of exile, disapora and defeat, with hope of better things to come. I’m not advocating for a spirit of hopelessness, but it is no sin to cry out to God in times of trouble.
The Bible is a beautiful illustration of heaven crashing into earth, but it is not an entirely positive and uplifting volume with no doubt and despair therein. The prophets of the Hebrew scriptures filled their writings with laments for God’s people, and for the state of the world, and the human heart. Jesus’s cry in the garden before the cross was arguably the ultimate lament of a desperate heart. And yet we’ve buried Lent and Holy week which deal with Jesus’ passion and suffering, and focused solely on Easter and the resurrection.
Jesus walked in our shoes, and we’re supposed to follow in his footsteps. I think that starts by writing music that covers the whole breadth of the “Christian experience” which is really just the human experience. Not just the happy stuff. Not just the singable stuff. Not just the uplifting stuff. Not just the personal stuff.
Here’s what I want to see in church music:
Storytelling
Transcending genre
More interesting chords/time signatures
Thinking outside the box
Different ways of thinking about God
Exploring the whole of the Bible, not just the convenient parts
Desperation/longing/lament/doubt
Music that could be appreciated outside Christian circles for its sheer quality and creativity in spite of its spiritual content, and perhaps partially because of it.
