You’re not making this easy, CCM…

I often get tired of hear­ing peo­ple bash­ing CCM for being shal­low and money-grubbing, inef­fec­tive in its own self-stated pur­pose of “reach­ing the lost.” CCM was a big part of my spir­i­tual for­ma­tion as a “baby Chris­t­ian,” and a lot of its influ­ence still comes out in the music I write today, so you can prob­a­bly under­stand a lit­tle of my defen­sive­ness. Yes, there are prob­lems with it (as with any inter­sec­tion of faith, art, and busi­ness), but it just feels counter-productive to con­stantly whine about how bad it all is, when it’s seem­ingly min­is­ter­ing to lots of people.

Then I read some­thing like this that makes me want to join in the cho­rus of dissent.

Where to begin?

Robert Bee­son, Prov­i­dent Label Group’s sr. vice pres­i­dent of A&R and exec­u­tive pro­ducer for The Christ, elab­o­rates, “It’s a nat­ural and obvi­ous par­al­lel that peo­ple will make between our record and many of the movies com­ing out today that take a look at Chris­tian­ity. We’re not affil­i­ated with any of them, but it is impos­si­ble to take away the impact that these films are going to have on our world, and this is our response to what we believe is going to be a move of God.”

Read: “We wanted to release this to pig­gy­back on the media hype sur­round­ing Mel Gibson’s The Pas­sion of the Christ, but we don’t want you to think we did.”

The project com­prises three instal­la­tions: His Passion-Remembering the Sac­ri­fice, His Birth-Celebrating His Com­ing, and His Life-Embracing the Truth. All con­tain pre­vi­ously recorded City on Hill songs in addi­tion to exclu­sive content.

They needed to push this thing out the door as soon as pos­si­ble, since the movie’s releas­ing soon. Instead of tak­ing the more chal­leng­ing route of mak­ing it pre­dom­i­nantly new mate­r­ial, they’re tak­ing stuff from their last “tril­ogy” of pop­u­lar mod­ern wor­ship CDs, City on a Hill, and re-sequencing it, cut­ting in a few new tracks to make it seem like some­thing new and dif­fer­ent. At least the cover design looks cool.

I’m sure that some­where higher up on the Essen­tial cor­po­rate lad­der, this is a very sin­cere attempt to reach peo­ple, but it just comes off as a bla­tant attempt to fol­low in the Mel Gib­son movie’s wake, and I can’t be the only one who sees it as such.

It’s stuff like this that makes me of two minds when it comes to Chris­t­ian music…

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