I grew up with ’90s and ’10s Christian Contemporary Music (CCM). At one point I truly believed WOW Hits 2005 was the pinnacle of Christian music. (I don’t listen to that album much anymore, though).

I have music by 4Him, Avalon, Amy Grant, Bebo Norman, Big Daddy Weave, Chris Rice (meep), Chris Tomlin, David Crowder*Band, Gateway Worship, FFH, Jars of Clay, Kutless, Mark Schultz, Maranatha, Michael W. Smith, Newsboys, Newsong, Nichole Nordeman, Point of Grace, Ray Boltz, Relient K, Rich Mullins, Sandi Patty, Selah, Sonicflood, Steve Green, Steven Curtis Chapman, Third Day, Todd Agnew, Twila Paris, Wayne Watson, and a lot more. (This is probably the first time I’ve admitted to all that).

That music was formational for me.

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Artists as diverse as the Gaithers and Rich Mullins have said they intend their music to be for entertainment, but I believe songs can be more formational for spirituality than sermons, and many churches sing those songs. The Celebration Hymnal features nineteen songs by Bill and/or Gloria Gaither.

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Ligonier Baptist

My spiritual autobiography weaves through music. I still remember discovering “People Need the Lord” in the purple paperback Maranatha praise chorus book used by Ligonier Baptist Chapel and thinking it was one of the greatest things to have ever been written. I probably requested that on hymn sing nights so much they could see it coming.

It was night and day from the generally boring, stodgy old hymns in the 1975 Baptist Hymnal.¹ It felt new and fresh and I loved it.

I also have a core memory of my dad talking about how we shouldn’t sing things we don’t believe.

Covenant Church of Pittsburgh

My family started attending Covenant Church of Pittsburgh when I was about 12 years old. The music was unlike anything I had ever seen before. All the songs were new, or most of them. It was one of those industrial-chic megachurches with black ceilings and lights and maybe a fog machine, and even its own standard scent².

I recognized a few of the songs, of course –

Pastor Joseph Garlington seared Graham Kendrick’s “Knowing You” into my soul. I don’t know if I can explain what it was like watching a pastor sing a song he clearly believed in the depths of his soul.

The CCOP choir was lit.³ I still remember my otherwise-not-particularly-prone-to-that-kind-of-emotion dad⁴ standing up during “We Have Come to Worship Jesus“⁵ with tears running down his face. It was powerful. As good as the cover in the link (not CCOP) sounds over computer speakers, the sheer force of being in that space experiencing that song was incredible. To say nothing of “I Will Praise Thee” by Combs and Hilliard, which so embedded itself in my memory that I still remember it twenty-five years later, or “The Power of Your Love.”

The musicians at CCOP, too – When my sister was in the hospital, I asked singer Denise Graves for her autograph for her, and Clarence Grant was so utterly good on the piano…

Then a few years later, we left CCOP and went to other churches that didn’t have as good of a music scene. Most don’t. That’s a big-budget thing.

Christian Radio

We used to tune in to WORD FM every Saturday and Sunday for their Christian Contemporary Music selections. Many people from my generation have fond memories of requesting a song and waiting by the radio to hit record on a cassette tape. For me, that was exclusive to WORD’s weekend Christian music.

That’s where I discovered Phillips, Craig, and Dean, and Michael W. Smith, and David Crowder, and, well, you get the idea.

When my generation was ordering their BMG pop hit CDs from the catalog, I was ordering CCM.

When I got older, I moved out of my parents house and into range of a K-LOVE affiliate radio station, which brought me so much joy. I think that might be where I first heard Rich Mullins’ song “Hold Me Jesus,” which I realized a few months ago is probably the song I hold closer to my heart than any other.

Later Churches, Camp, and College

I started going to Word of Life in Greensburg, PA at the encouragement of my sister. I hadn’t been going anywhere in particular, but I decided to visit because Tom Walters’ sermons made me think and seemed to be impacting my life, and I stuck around because Pastor Henry Tulercio (may light perpetual shine upon him) preached sermons to the young adult group on Wednesday night that felt real and raw and true.

And the music.

There’s a sense that you’re supposed to have live music for worship, and lots of digital and probably physical ink has been spilled on that topic, but they just played master tracks of popular worship music and… it moved me. I was invested.

I particularly remember when “Amazing Grace / My Chains are Gone” by Chris Tomlin became my song, at a time when I felt I had been freed from something I believed at the time was particularly sinful.

I found my way to VLC by way of a prayer group, and they were also singing that modern worship music. At one point I attended the WOL Wednesday Young Adult group, the Sunday morning service at VLC, and the late service at Word of Life. It was broadly the same songs – early to mid 2000’s praise and worship music.

I got an iPod when I worked at Apple, and put music on it from my Aunt Linda (may light perpetual shine upon her), and I listened to a lot of Christian music in my early 20s. Then I got a summer job at a Christian camp and retreat center, and it was in range of a K-LOVE affiliate. I knew every song that came on by heart.⁶

At Jumonville, I joined the worship band and was delighted by David Crowder*Band’s cover of “All Creatures #2” and “Glory Be to Our Great God.” We sang “Shout to the Lord” at our weekly meeting.

After that first summer, I went off to college at Huntington University. They sang contemporary Christian music in chapel, but it was all… strange. Unfamiliar. And I felt alone and isolated, seven hours away from my family and all the friends I’d made at camp and churches (having been homeschooled and made practically no friends anywhere else).

And in worship at chapel they kept playing “How He Loves Us” (IT’S SLOPPY WET, NOT UNFORESEEN!!!!)⁷ (seriously, so many, many times) and it bugged me and I kept thinking “When are they going to stop playing this dumb song?” and then one night when I felt particularly alone “He loves us, oh how he loves us, how he loves us, oh” hit me in the heart and I fell on my face in the auditorium of the Merillat Centre for the Arts and cried because OH, GOD LOVES US.

Christian Music Gets Complicated

When I was about 25, around 2010, or maybe a little thereafter, I started a journey of deconstruction.⁸ This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.⁹ It’s where God called me, though, and I didn’t feel like I had much choice in the matter.

Because I ended up changing my ideas about hell, Penal Substitutionary Atonement, immigration, Israel, America, evolution, and the Bible in general, the churches I had been going to before I went to college, and the ones I was still attracted to, no longer fit me.

But deconstruction not only broke my relationship with evangelical churches. It broke my relationship with evangelical music.

At one point, I stopped attending the regular chapel services at Huntington and began attending the “Divine Hours” service, a quieter, more contemplative service focused on prayer and meditation. There was no band – I don’t even think there was any music. But there were no jagged edges in the music for my soul to get caught on.

When Kristen and I got married, we moved to Colorado Springs and I tried all the local megachurches. Nothing worked. I really wanted it to work. One church sent me into a crisis of faith; another had books about compromisers who believed in evolution. At a third, the pastor said the United Methodist Church was basically godless and I wanted to hit him.

New Life Colorado Springs had fog machines and lights and things seemed to be going okay until I went to the bathroom on a “Please come be with us Jesus” song and I came back and they were still singing it, and then the next song was about “Thank you for being here Jesus” and I just went… “Did Jesus show up while I was gone?” The whole thing felt super-manipulative. Kristen had issues with the way the colors of the lights were manipulating us.

So we ended up at a Presbyterian (PC(USA)) church.

Presbyterian Music

The music was… fine. It was really fine. The choir sang songs I didn’t know with words I couldn’t understand, and there weren’t lyrics and I didn’t have data service in the sanctuary to google the song lyrics. Our pastor, Tom Trinidad, had been on the committee that selected hymns for the then-brand-new Presbyterian Glory to God hymnal.

Lyrically, Glory to God plays it pretty safe. It was published before they discovered David Haas’s misdeeds, so several of his songs are still in there, and “Abuser, abused, with room to forgive” is still in “For Everyone Born” because Avery Arden had not yet published their much-needed updates.

There was a big, heavily-argued disagreement about “In Christ Alone” because the Celebrating Grace Hymnal, published by a group closely affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, had changed “The wrath of God was satisfied” to “The love of God was magnified.” When the Presbyterians, famous for doing things decently and in good order, asked Keith Getty and Stuart Townend for permission to change the lyrics, they said no.

When they asked “Then why’d you let the Baptists do it,” the answer was “They didn’t ask.”

The unmodified “In Christ Alone” didn’t make the Presbyterian Hymnal, which I think was the right choice.

After I went to seminary and got ordained, I attended a series of two CREDO conferences. The first year, the worship just… didn’t connect with me like I hoped it would. I really wanted it to, but it didn’t.

The second year, I discovered that I had changed. Worship felt more meaningful. And as I’ve continued to be in Presbyterian spaces, I’ve slowly found the music more and more meaningful.

Yet my heart still yearns for the evangelical music.

Few things I’ve felt with our hymns have ever made me feel anywhere close to how I felt in my teens at Covenant Church and my young adult years at Word of Life and Victorious Life Church. It’s good, but it’s not exciting.

Pruning my CCM Collection

Over the years, I’ve gone through my music every so often and found that it doesn’t fit what I believe anymore. The Newsboys have some catchy songs but they don’t really work for me anymore, even though I bought their Greatest Hits album. I have a playlist on my phone called “remove from circulation” featuring

• Everything I have by Chris Rice (because of the allegations)
• Big Daddy Weave’s “In Christ” and the Gaither Vocal Band’s “On the Authority” (because of the Christian exclusivism of believing that the Christian faith results in me having the answers)
• Avalon’s “For Freedom” and “I Pledge My Allegiance” by the Gaither Vocal Band (because of the Christian Nationalism)
• Casting Crowns self-titled album (because of the judgmental attitude toward the church – I already harbor enough of that in my own heart to last a lifetime, thanks)

I keep thinking I need to find more and better Christian worship music and CCM. And I have. Some of the music on my “Songs that feed my soul” playlist:

• “Hold Me, Jesus” by Amy Grant
• Whole albums by Andrew Peterson
• “Beyond These Shores” by Iona

And I haven’t really gotten that far in separating the sheep from the goats because of parenting and adulting and pastoring.

I’ve bought less music lately, but what I’ve bought has been so good, like

• “Your Peace Will Make Us One” by Audrey Assad
• “Plowhare Prayer” by Spencer LaJoye
• “I Believe Most People are Good” by Luke Bryan.¹⁰
• “Goodness of God” by CeCe Winans¹¹

And I’ve been meaning to buy a few songs by Carrie Newcomer, like “Great, Wild Mercy” and especially “Holy as a Day is Spent.” (More on that later.)

A Rubric for Music in Worship

When I was in the process of discerning what my next call would be, I planned a conversation I would have with the director of music at whatever call I came to. Upon arriving, I had that conversation.

Instant Vetoes or Calls for Rewrites

• Does this song portray God as punishing Jesus for human sins?
• Does this song envision heaven as somewhere far away?
• Does this song speak of God being “in control” of everything? (e.g., “God is in Control”)
• Does this song contain racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, or otherwise discriminate against groups of people, including unbelievers or people of other faiths?
• Does it imagine Christians in heaven and non-Christians in hell?
• Was this song written by someone who it was later discovered was a perpetrator of abuse (e.g., David Haas) or otherwise deeply problematic?
• Does this song glorify violence or imagine Christianity militarily? (e.g., “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho”)
• Implies a connection between obedience to God and positive outcomes (e.g., “Trust and Obey”.)

Points of Concern

• Does this song contain language implying that people are required to forgive without placing responsibility for repentance on those who engaged in abuse?
• Does it glorify America in particular in ways that are unhealthy?
• Would a line from this song make a teenager giggle? (e.g., “Come, Now is the Time to Worship”, “Come, Lord Jesus, Come”)

It’s been good. Stylistically it’s not what I miss, but so so many of the songs whose vibes I miss violate at least one point of my rubric.

Overcharged with Meaning

A couple years ago, I came across this article from Rolling Stone that I had open in a tab for a long time, because it was a critique of what I missed most about evangelical music: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/evangelical-christians-1370190/ It’s an interview with Charles Marsh by Alex Morris. This quote grabbed me and stuck with me:

The world of the evangelical is really overcharged with meaning. I mean, there is nothing more associative than the evangelical mind at first blossom. It’s a psychedelic kind of world that you inhabit. In those times when you are in worship and celebration and repentance and in the deep community of evangelical fellowship, you feel that you are right in the center of the metaphysical whirlwind, and you have been invested with a divine, almost superhuman destiny. That excess of emotion and feeling and energy leaves its mark. (Emphasis mine)

And it made me wonder whether there was anything real about it.

Rediscovering Modern Worship Music

Almost every time I’ve found myself in the context of modern worship music since deconstruction, I have felt uncomfortable.

A year ago, I was spending some time with friends who are still in the evangelical worship music space. It felt… off, to me.

It felt like an ingrown spirituality.

One example was “Overcome,” by Jeremy Camp, these lyrics in particular:

Seated above, enthroned in the Father’s love
Destined to die, poured out for all mankind
God’s only son perfect and spotless one
He never sinned, but suffered as if He did

I wrote of it at the time:

…maybe I’m overthinking this but… I just wanted more. I wanted more than songs about the death and resurrection of Jesus, particularly about the suffering of Jesus. There’s nothing wrong with those songs, but I wanted more. I wanted a more expansive spirituality.

I want a faith that’s not stuck in the first century on the cross. I think it’s right to visit, but… God calls us beyond there. What is it to love God today? What is it to love our neighbors today?

Later that day, I turned on Carrie Newcomer’s song “Holy As a Day is Spent.”

Holy is the dish and drain
The soap and sink and the cup and plate
Warm wool socks and the cold white tile

Shower heads and good dry towels
And frying eggs sound like psalms
With bits of salt measured in my palm
It’s all a part of a sacrament
As holy as a day is spent

And it felt… expansive. Bigger, somehow, than the throne of God and Jesus suffering as if he did the bad things.

The modern worship music felt like a broken record, playing the same thing over and over and over and over, as if we must be forever stuck meditating on the death of Christ and our wicked sinfulness and God’s great love, and unable to reach escape velocity from the suffering of Jesus 2000 years ago so we could live today and enjoy those things all the songs claim God bought for us, free to love God and our neighbors.

I don’t know; I’m still thinking this through. This isn’t systematic theology; I’m not saying never talk about Jesus’ death and resurrection; I’m just wondering if there are more ways to love God than to perpetually focus exclusively on that.

It feels ingrown, that’s all.

Other Worshiping Experiences

I attended the Calvin Symposium on Worship earlier this year at Calvin College. I went to a workshop about “Auditing the CCLI Top 100,” which was very helpful because the idea was to carefully examine music in the CCLI’s top 100 list and see if it aligned with a given church’s beliefs, rather than just jumping into the most popular songs.

I got home yesterday from participating in the Presbyterian Youth Triennium in Louisville, Kentucky with youth and pastors and youth workers and other adult advisors from my presbytery. (Presbytery is our “mid-council”).

It was my first time at Triennium. I came with expectations that the music would be more like the music in our hymnals. That I would be somewhat disappointed by it, but disappointed in a formational way.¹² Maybe new words to familiar old tunes, or gentle new hymns. Maybe I would continue to grow along this path of slowly appreciating music and worshiping spaces that weren’t like what I grew up with, weren’t like the kind of songs that had moved me most in the past.

It was not like that at all.

There were colorful lights. There were fog machines. There was clapping.¹³ There were energizers. There were songs that weren’t particularly Christian during the energizers.¹⁴

After the energizers, we rolled into something more recognizable as a Presbyterian liturgy, with a call to worship and confession of sins and assurance of pardon and all that… but I didn’t know probably at least half of the songs. The ones I recognized were older worship music.

Several rubbed me the wrong way, like lines in certain songs identifying humans primarily as sinners, and masculine language for the Divine, despite a breakout session specifically talking about inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, and LGBTQ-supporting t-shirts.

In general, it felt like a safe worshiping space, but I would’ve changed the songs… but I don’t know what to.

The other thing I thought I noticed, between this week and another time I recently experienced modern worship music, is how it seemed like a significant portion of modern worship music features songs that are very atomized, songs about my individual, inward, personal relationship with God, rather than our relationship with God, rather than our call to do God’s work in the world and love God and love our neighbors.

EDIT August 4, 2025: I’m no longer sure that’s what my issue is. END EDIT.

I don’t think it’s bad to focus on one’s inward walk of faith, I really don’t. I just find it interesting that it feels kind of exclusively “Me and God” when we worship as a community.

This was more of a vibe based on a very small sample size, and I want to do more research to see if it’s a real phenomenon that the songs we sing at Jackson’s First Presbyterian Church are less individualistic than the CCLI top 100, or not… but I have my suspicions.

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When I started writing this post, I meant to do some digging into the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Glory to God hymnal vs. the CCLI Top 100 about individualism and whether it feels “this-worldly,” to borrow a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

If you’ve read this far, thanks! And watch this space for whether my ADHD allows me to put together that list or not 😉 If so, that will be my next post.

Footnotes

1. How do I know it was the 1975 edition? It’s the only one with “It Is Well With My Soul” on page 339. That number was burned into my soul when the mom of one of the boys my age from Ligonier Baptist Chapel died. It was her favorite song, and aside from “People Need the Lord,” probably my number one pick as long as we went there, in memory of her, and I will probably remember 339 as the number for that hymn until the day I die. ↩︎
2. Seriously, they sprayed it in the bathrooms and I’ve never smelled it anywhere else. ↩︎
3. Sorry, Gens Z and Alpha, that’s the only word that comes to mind, except for “Fire,” which is probably not at all less cringe. ↩︎
4. We did not sway in church. We did not dance. I personally took great pride in not letting the music move me. ↩︎
5. I’m pretty sure that was it; CCOP doesn’t have a version so that’s from a different church. The CCOP choir was no slouchers either. ↩︎
6. Seriously, I think they must’ve been shuffling only about 50 songs or so. ↩︎
7. If you know, you know. ↩︎
8. Ok fine, it started a little earlier when my first girlfriend broke up with me and I decided God wasn’t really in control anymore. ↩︎
9. I thought it was a good move… but thanks, Douglas Adams. ↩︎
10. Yes, that’s a country song and not a religious one, but it’s load-bearing. ↩︎
11. I have issues with the “I surrender” language. (That link is 16 years old, so read it with a grain of salt, but it probably provides helpful context). ↩︎
12. Now that’s a weird sentence. ↩︎
13. Seriously, after the prayer of confession and assurance of pardon, the room burst into applause. One of the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. ↩︎
14. ↩︎