Want a Case of the Blahs? Go to the Local 'Family Christian Store'

After a doctor's visit yesterday, I went to get a prescription filled and because I had twenty minutes to kill before it was ready, I walked over to my local Family Book Store. What a depressing experience!

First, I went through the CDs. At one time, I was an aficionado of Christian contemporary music. There were musicians actually doing stuff that was both faithful to Christ and artistically interesting. You could hear edgy sounds and clever, meaningful lyrics in a variety of genres: rock, altrock, rap, ska. It was fun!

But now the whole thing has gotten homogenized. It probably started a few years ago, when someone had the idea of issuing a "praise and worship" CD. It was successful and after that, it seems everybody in the industry was doing the same thing. Most of the music referred to as "praise and worship" these days can be boiled down to variations of, "I love You, Jesus" repeated twenty-seven million times. "Just check your brain in at the church door," this music seems to tell us. "Let's all get goosebumps." This stuff is less adoration than it is addiction.

This play-it-safe approach has become so endemic to Christian music that you see the same 50 to 100 praise and worship tunes being covered over and over again. It's something that the Gospel should never be: Boring!

A quick survey of what music was being made available to the public at the store I visited yesterday revealed two sparsely-stocked racks of rock, another two equally-sparsely-stocked racks of rap, four jam-packed racks of Southern Gospel, two well-stocked racks of "Gaither," something like six racks full of Contemporary Pop, and about twelve plentiful racks of Praise and Worship.

I suppose the argument can be made that as good businesspeople, the folks in the Christian music industry know what sells and are simply feeding their primary market. But where is the passion to reach beyond the Christian ghetto? Not to mention to reach those young people raised in the Church who see Christianity receding into irrelevance because, unlike Jesus or Paul, we've forgotten how to convey the Bible's good news in the languages and cultural idioms of the world?

After taking a grim saunter through the music section, I moved on to the books. The first depressing note there was struck when I saw, prominently displayed, a book by Joel Osteen. "I thought that this was a Christian book store!" I wanted to scream. Osteen's got no cross, no repentance, and really, no Jesus.

And while one could find some really solid Christian material in the book section, you could also spot lots of things meant only to justify a domesticated, materialistic Christianity...and they were the best-sellers.

There were many books that hawked a prescriptive, proscriptive version of Christianity that seemed less about Jesus than about various human-invented agendas.

I couldn't help wondering how many tables Jesus would overturn there if He showed up at the store...and how I could explain my presence there to Him.

Yesterday, Jan at TheViewfromHer, talked about a new book from an evangelical Christian publishing house. In it, a married woman "makes a case against singleness, calling it unbiblical." As Jan points out, this would come as a surprise to Jesus and Paul.

But the deeper point is that a book like this bespeaks a grave problem in Christian media: It's the mouthpiece for an increasingly legalistic form of evangelical Christianity that seeks to defend its preferred status quo.

Paul talked about the importance of being all things to all people with the goal of reaching some with Christ. Much of evangelical Christianity seems to have forgotten all about the mission of reaching, fostering, and accepting a diverse community of believers. That's depressing.

[Thanks to Rick Moore of Holy Coast for linking to this post. I really appreciate it!]