Design · Culture · Spirituality

One place to find Christian music

I got an email recently that was advertising a Christian version of iTunes. It described itself like this:

The world needs one place to find Christian music and this is going to be it.

Normally, I would delete such an email without giving any thought to it, and go on about my business. With this one, though, it stuck out to me and started a rabbit trail of thoughts.

Christianity in the United States has done a very good (or very bad, depending on your perspective) job of isolating itself from the rest of the culture. Most of the mainstream Christian music industry already has no contact with the outside world. When artists in this mainstream try to venture into having contact with the outside world, they often get all kinds of horrible treatment from the church.

So, the last thing we need is one place to find Christian music. I love that most of my favorite bands tour with bands that are not necessarily made up of followers of Jesus, and that they have large numbers of fans who are not necessarily followers of Jesus. They play at Cornerstone, and they play on Warped Tour. There are music scenes, especially the current hardcore and metalcore scenes, that have done very well at incarnating themselves into the world, and this is how Jesus would have done it.

Post a Comment

Please provide your name, email (will not be published), and a message.

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

About the Designer

Jonathan Stegall is a web designer and emergent / emerging follower of Jesus currently living in Atlanta, seeking to abide in the creative tension between theology, spirituality, design, and justice.

Elsewhere