Gospel According To The GMA
January 9, 2009 by Rudy Sanchez
Filed under Music Talk
Inside Radio and M Street Corp Publications reports that Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is now the second most popular music radio format in the country.
According to Christian Post reporter Kevin P. Donovan, his unnamed sources offer this explanation for CCM’s increased popularity: “they feature songs about people’s personal relationships with Jesus. For some, especially the unchurched, that individual message resonates.”
Oh, come on now.
CCM has been so watered down that it can now mean virtually anything. It stands to reason that as CCM becomes more secularized, it will have greater appeal to the world and the “unchurched”.
(Incidentally, if Jesus is the bridegroom and the church is His bride, who are the unchurched wed to?)
To illustrate how we got to this point, let’s look at the history of the Gospel Music Association (GMA), founded in 1964, and whose slogan is: “To expose, promote and celebrate the gospel through music”. In 1969 they established the Dove Awards to honor and recognize gospel music. But CCM lyrics devolved to the point where in 1998 the GMA, for the first time in their history, created lyrics criteria for the eligibility of Dove Awards.
Unfortunately for the GMA, this had the unintended consequence of disqualifying 13 songs from the Dove Awards in 1998, including mega-hits like “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer and “Love Me Good” by Michael W. Smith. So the GMA revised their lyrics criteria the following year, and the new criteria remain substantially the same today:
Notice what they cut out- worship of God or praise for His works, and testimony of a relationship with God through Christ.
Also notice that where it first read “obviously prompted and informed by a Christian worldview”, the word obviously was replaced with apparently. That really clears things up, doesn’t it?
As the lyrics of hit songs have become devoid of the actual gospel, the GMA’s bar has been progressively lowered. Now, any song that is “apparently” prompted by a Christian worldview meets their criteria.
Gee, I always thought gospel music was music about the gospel!
Christian music is big business these days, and with all of the “promoting of the gospel through music” happening at the GMA, I have to wonder: which gospel are they promoting?
Links To Background Material:
• Christianpost.com: Christian contemporary radio stations continue steady growth
*Note: Links to content outside ChristianEar.com usually are broken over time.
