For more than fifty years now, ever since I first put down musical roots in 1968, I have listened to the chorus of critics circling what came to be called Contemporary Christian Music. I still smile, grateful and a little bemused, whenever I see my name stitched into its earliest history. Yet gratitude does not cancel honesty. The distance between the music a small handful of us once made and the polished creature it eventually became is wide enough to deserve more than nostalgia. It deserves lament, conversation, and perhaps confession..
In the beginning, Jesus music was never meant to build an industry. It was a back-alley branch of rock ’n’ roll, rough-boned and street-bound, fashioned less for sanctuaries than for sidewalks. It was evangelistic at heart, a music meant to lean into the noise of the world and speak the Gospel where people actually lived. No one I knew imagined it would one day be marched into church buildings to evict the hymns of Christendom, yet that sorrowful exchange is one of the tragedies of the years between then and now.
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Before long, the untamed sound born in bands like Agape and the All Saved Freak Band met the early gatekeepers of a newly forming CCM establishment. By the early 1970s, men with vision such as Ralph Carmichael and Billie Ray Hearn, joined by gifted artists like Andraé Crouch, Keith Green, and the Talbot brothers, began to set the course of the emerging movement. But somewhere along that road, the fire shifted. The evangelistic urgency that had once burned at the center no longer seemed to be the engine driving the machine.
As the young genre was reshaped to appear more acceptable to Christian communities, the edges were sanded down. Risk became suspect. A harder rock sound was judged too worldly, too suggestive of a line blurred between sacred and secular. Lyrics with teeth, thoughts that challenged, disturbed, or threatened to upset the furniture, no longer fit the approved mold. Even the musicians themselves had to change. The scruffy, barefoot, hippie-looking witnesses who first showed up with guitars and conviction no longer matched the sleek suburban image the gatekeepers preferred to frame and sell.
And so, instead of sharpening ourselves against the best music, the best thought, the best spiritual depth, we made the fatal mistake of measuring ourselves by ourselves. We built our own radio stations, then our own labels, then our own award shows, until at last we had erected a whole shining empire around music that had once been gloriously unruly. It was our own institutionalized undoing. The daring imagination that launched the movement seemed to vanish the moment calling became career. What had been meant as a means of carrying the Gospel slowly became a machine for carrying itself.
Between 1967 and 1973, the FM dial was a wild river of creativity. Wherever you turned it, the air crackled with invention. If Jesus music was going to find a place in that world, alongside everyone from the Allman Brothers to Frank Zappa, it had to bring something real. It had to have muscle, honesty, craft, and soul. And for a little while, it did. But when the music was tucked into its own carefully labeled category in the mid-1970s, the whole adventure began to lose its nerve. It was not the radical claims of the Gospel that kept secular stations from playing CCM. More often, it was the musical baby food produced by this safer, blander, middle-of-the-road vision.
What once existed to gather the lost, to draw spiritually hungry people into a living encounter with God, now often feels reduced to slogan and branding. Much of today’s CCM seems content merely to reassure the already convinced, to recycle familiar truths into choruses fit for believers to sing on cue under sanctuary lights. There is too little anguish for the lost, too little burden for the broken lives beyond the reach of a thirty-dollar ticket, a twenty-dollar CD, or a fifteen-dollar T-shirt sold by the same band that has already charged too much for too little.
Joe Markko
Being named among the earliest pioneers of this music leaves me wondering whether Contemporary Christian Music has not, like an old tattoo gone pale and awkward, outlived the inspiration that first gave it meaning. Perhaps what deserves to remain after the fading of CCM is not the machinery, not the market, not the mythology, but only the songs themselves when they are born of the gentle urgings of God and shaped into something capable of reaching desperate souls.
What will they call that, I wonder?
Whatever name it bears, if the future music of believers can carry us beyond taste, tribe, vanity, and celebrity—if it can lead us somewhere kinder, truer, nearer the heart of God and nearer the ache of needy people—then perhaps we will at last have outgrown our long addiction to elitism, class envy, and the glitter of borrowed stardom. Perhaps then we may hear again the memorable choruses of a purer music: God in the moment, breathed through art, mercy set to melody.
And what, after all, could ever be wrong with that?
