In this post I will be exploring the realms in which the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and Praise & Worship (P&W) music of the 1990’s were a new innovation in its operation, its theology, and its music structure within Church Music. To begin, it is important to state the difference between these two styles of music and to identify where you might find them. P&W, also known as Contemporary Worship Music, is music designed to be sung and performed in the church service itself. It is for the sole purpose of worshiping God as a community. Many of the lyrics will derive directly from scripture. CCM is a branch that came off of P&W music. CMM is performed outside of church. CCM hit the stage focusing on evangelism and outreach to bring people close in relationship to God. CCM is performed all over the place, from television, to radio, to coffee shops, to eight track tapes and cassette tapes, and all the way around the world on tour through the music industry.
Much like many other Millennials and Gen X, I was well exposed to the contemporary music of Evangelical Christians in my youth. Before I was on the path to ordination in the United Church of Christ, I was on a very different path. I became what everyone knew as a “Jesus Freak.” I identified most with the 1960’s “Jesus People” idealism of “youth culture primed in Evangelicalism, including its music.”(1) Though most people would sing along to the music of Maranatha!, a long-term Christian music distributor in agreement with EMI/CMG, I was singing along to music of the 1960’s as well as some of the 1990’s Christian hits:
Lord I Lift Your Name on High by Rick Founds
Do You Know What You are Getting Yourself Into? By Relient K
Dandelions by Five Iron Frenzy
There are so many more I could add to this list. Even though Contemporary music is no longer my “go to” choice of Christian music anymore, there is something to be said about the CMM and P&W music scene.
The British invasion, Rock and Roll, Gospel, Broadway, the invigoration of the youth, and of course technological advances have changed the face of Christian music in the twentieth century in the Western world like no other capacity. By the 1990’s, the technological advances in the church changed the way that people were worshiping in the church and outside the church.
It was described by composer Libby Larson as a “sound revolution” to see the electronic realities of our technological age, and sees it as the end of the Romantic era, and a dawning of a new era of “manipulating sound, carrying it in headsets, listening to others manufacture it, or allowing groups with microphones and mixers to give the impression that a large group is singing.”(2) This is a rather large statement. This is implying that the church no longer needs the big sound of the choir with numerous voices, as it has for centuries, and is now in exchange for some technology to allow a few people to allow the same amount of volume.
This revolutionary change allowed for a flourishing of the music of the contemporary church to reach out onto the radio, television, magazines, books, revivals, and to even go on tour. This opened up the doors for CCM to make the push in the ‘90’s from selling out big with an album or a church organization, like it had prior from the 1960’s-1980’s, to instead sell out big with single hit songs and solo singers.
The P&W music scene in the church, on the other hand, was more than just adding in a new sound system, οr yet another instrument to the praise band (guitar, bass, drums, keys, vocals, and miscellaneous). They started popping up all over the country. They started arriving in little Methodist churches in a rural area that were usually filled with 60-year-olds to try and bring in more youth. P&W was showing up in many urban churches. The people who had an interest in P&W was not a part of any specific economic class or ethnicity. It was naturally flourishing in its own right for what it was: the modern vernacular of Sacred Music.
P&W also growing in number by developing more mega churches with numbers in the thousands. Large mega churches, which created business practices in the 1970’s and started booming in greater numbers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, started developing magazines and evangelist television programs (televangelism). These magazines such as, “The Psalmist Magazine,” would give resources on conferences, revivals, concerts, and music to listen to from other churches.(3) By the mid-1990’s, revivals were happening frequently, showing how widespread P&W had become. The Toronto Airport Vineyard Church’s revival of January 1994 was so popular it caught the attention of the media: massive amounts of people were falling to the ground “slain by the Spirit,” others were making animal sounds, many were shaking their bodies vigorously, and numerous more were laughing.(4)
It was adjusting away from the typical pentecostal theological approach of revival evangelism and pentecostalism to an even harder turn: the musicians were now being recognized as worship leaders in P&W music within the church.
“With the theological system and liturgical practices firmly in place, this period saw an explosion of teaching resources and opportunities to train musicians in the techniques required to help a congregation in P&W. Between theology and training, the role of a chief musician as worship leader became a well established, recognized position. Worship leaders bore responsibility for a period of congregational singing intended to facilitate the worshiper’s experience of the presence of God.”(5)
As opposed to the liturgical order of worship, I drank the kool-aid of the Evangelical movement in my early teenage years. The chapel services I would attend outside of my home church (UCC), were made up of singing P&W music and listening to a sermon. These types of services are not the rule, but are certainly a common factor in evangelical services that play P&W music.
It began in the eighteenth century with its roots in the revivalist movement led by George Whitfield. Whitfield moved from England to minister seven times to the U.S. colonies starting in 1738.(6) Raised Anglican, he worked hand in hand with the Wesley brothers, and “founded a religious diversity at a time when freedom of religion was the subject of considerable debate.”(7) He made open air preaching a popular ideal, adopted from the Welsh, which John Wesley eventually adopted from him.
The nineteenth century with the “Pioneers such as William Booth of the Salvation Army and outreach duo Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey used music in distinctly non liturgical ways.”(8) William Booth was a traveling evangelist from the Methodist tradition in the nineteenth century.(9) His ministry of the Salvation Army was centered around the poor and the outcast, modeled after the British army. He encouraged people to sing frequently, believing there was no time for professional choirs. Instead there should be tunes that are easy for the public to learn with plenty of rhythm, repetition, and life, in which people may learn these songs by heart.(10)
Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey were a music duo of the mid to late nineteenth century taking English, evangelical-revivalist church services, and making them, as the kids say these days, “lit.” Sankey composed music, and wrote a total of 739 hymns, compiling a Gospel Hymns book, popularizing the Gospel genre in England.(11) Of course, no Gospel writing has had more influence on CCM and P&W music than Fanny Crosby, who is amongst the most important gospel hymn writers, writing 8,500 Gospel Hymns in her life.(12)
“Music was the bait to bring in unbelievers and prepare them for an evangelistic sermon. Indeed this song/sermon pattern became the new liturgy of Evangelical worship for years to come.”(13) It is no surprise that this type of liturgical style became popular with the youth, and especially in recruiting the youth. Youth culture with a new focus on youth groups and outreach organizations became a big focus in the 1960’s.(14)
It was recruitment that made this movement so large. I agree, the music had a lot to do with it. I once spoke to a friend of mine, about the age of 45, who attends a mega church. She told me, “It is like attending a rock concert every week and then I sit and learn about Jesus.” That seems to appeal to a lot of people. They certainly appealed to many people in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s who are now grown with children of their own, making those mega churches even bigger and even more family friendly.
Why is this style of worship so appealing to so many people? Well many say it is because it is lacking in liturgical affirmations, community dynamics, a loss of hierarchical dynamics of priests and pastors mediating between congregant and God, and a lack in regular participation of the Eucharist. Theologically speaking, it is out of the ordinary. Perhaps that is why it is so popular. The Church’s liturgical lifestyle has its own vernacular, its own culture, and for many people it lacks engagement between parishioners and those conducting the service. It also created boundaries for people who wanted to get out of the pew, dance, speak, sing, and engage with God in a more robust care-free manner. Contemporary Praise and Worship Music secularized the Church. Much like Martin Luther allowing for the German vernacular to enter into the Mass, now Rock n’ Roll, Soul, R&B, and other genres of music were able to enter into the Church’s musical vernacular.
The Contemporary Christian Music scene of the 1990’s was a huge focal point in the development of CMM to our current modern age of music. Today in the 2020’s, you will see in your typical mega churches, and other churches with evangelical undertones, a variety of modern technology being utilized for convenience. I know of many churches in the greater Pittsburgh area that use:
- videos of a pre-recorded sermon,
- a screen to present the words of the P&W song or hymn, thus allowing the use of the internet to find any music desired to sing without the limitation of a songbook,
- a praise band that utilizes the most recent technology in speakers, microphones, mixers, and new instrumentation of drum machines,
- online services to reach the greater community, such as pre-recorded bible studies.
To those of you who remember listening to this music in the 1990’s, I hope you look at them like I do. I look at it with the thought of me sitting in my brother’s van in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, listening to a Five Iron Frenzy CD and just having a good time with my brother, thinking to myself, “God is good. God is love.”
Until next time,
Keep praying,
Keep practicing.
Suzie
Notes:
1. Mark A. Lamport, Benjamin K. Forrest, & Vernon M. Whaley, “Hymns and Hymnody: Historical and Theological Introductions,” Vol. 3, Cascade Books: (Eugene, OR, 2019), 284.
2. Westermeyer, Te Deum, 303.
3.Lester Ruth, Lim Swee Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshaped the Protestant Church, Baker Academic Publishing Group: Grand Rapids, MI, 2021, 148.
4. Ruth, Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship, 157.
5.Ruth, Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship, 313.
6.Jessica M. Parr, Inventing George Whitfield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon, University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, Mississippi, 2015, 11.
7.Parr, Inventing George Whitfield, 18.
8. Lamport, Forrest, Whaley, Hymns and Hymnary, 283.
9. Paul Westermeyer, Te Deum: The Church and Music, Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, 1998, 287.
10. Westermeyer, Te Deum, 287.
11. Westermeyer, Te Deum, 268.
12. Westermeyer, Te Deum, 269.
13. Lamport, Forrest, Whaley, Hymns and Hymnary, 283.
14. Lamport, Forrest, Whaley, Hymns and Hymnary, 284.
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