If Larry Norman Were Alive Today He'd Ask, "Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music"?

In 1969 Christian rocker Larry Norman wrote a song to the church asking, "Why should the devil have all the good music?" 

I think he'd ask it again today of the average church worship team and leader inside their sound reinforced walls.

What do most Christians listen to outside of church? Not the unofficial "hymnal" of CCLI that gets distributed to hundreds of thousands of churches. Oh yes, some do. But most have their Spotify seeded with pop, country, indy, hip hop or other genres.  And those songs are talking about LIFE and doing it with some artistry and poetry. Or at least maybe trying to.

We have left the marketplace ministry and now only the world addresses those themes with any specifics via music. They tell gripping personal stories, but then resolve them....not always with God's best.

Contemporary Christian music style eventually moved into the churches en masse. Yet I think he'd ask the very same question today of these churches: Why are you sticking to bland, safe, congregational music only and no one is writing great Christian songs with artistry, poetry, fantastic guitar riffs, and hitting life issues everyone faces--yet with a Christian and biblical perspective.  

The few that are doing that never ever get played in church. Why not? Because "the congretation can't sing it" or "it's ME focused, not God" focused and sinful. Yep. Actually goes that far sometimes. "It would just inflate the soloist ego and take eyes off of GOD."  (Of course the preacher can do his "solo" and talk about his own life issues and it's OK.)

The Day the Music Died. Well actually it took a number of years. Once "contemporary" was cool inside the church walls, along with the Internet and CCLI to vet and poll the "popular songs," it became the steady paycheck for Christian artists vs. all that hard work.

But values unthinkingly followed form and now we are asked "should we even have someone perform a great but more personal Christian song in church?" It doesn't poll on CCLI and the criticism is the congregation is passive (yeah, like that 35-40 minutes when the preacher is preaching you mean?).  No, let's keep it all God focused and congregational. Mention "trials" only generally if you must. And throw in some "lion lungs" for good measure. "Yeah! That's poetry baby!"

 Too bad the Psalmists didn't get that memo. They wrote plenty of the Psalms from a first person perspecive, talking about a specific life indecent and what God did and they learned. And get this: they "performed them solo" by reading their Psalm to everyone as they were making an offering. 

Check out Psalm 73 for starters. In that psalm, Asaph (a worship leader) wrote about how he got a bad attitude that would not go away when he looked at how the evil people were getting rich and living large, while he suffered. "In vain I have kept my hands pure," he complained to God. That is, "until I came into the sanctuary" and God changed his perspective completely! 

But not in our contemporary churches today via music. Oh sure the preacher can share all of that as "personal illustrations" and you can even do a "testimony video" to promote something like a marriage ministry or other. But let someone SING about it? No way! Only the Devil sings about life issues. Godly people let the preacher do it or use videos with the person seated and with a coffee cup on the table--and b roll to show them doing something beside sitting with an empty coffee cup.

Larry Norman's “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” was pushing against essentially that same confusion. The issue wasn't simply putting a rock beat underneath explicitly Christian words. It was the proposition that Christians ought to be capable of participating seriously in the musical language of their own culture—writing about the human condition from within a Christian understanding of reality.

God has a lot to say about life not just inside the sound reinforced church walls but also out there in the world, on Spotify, reaching the 1 instead of just singing to the 99 about "lion lungs." 

And when we present a truly great Christian artist musical number in church we give people something like Psalm 73 and support Christians writing more than just "Tin Pan Alley" worship pieces that Chat GPT could crank out lyrically.