Heavily inspired by Mumford, Texas’s own Seryn combines tight harmonies with vaguely spiritual lyrics to create a dynamic experience.
The first video is acoustic, the second is electric.
Archives For music
“Every church I’ve ever played for just wanted a Christian Radio cover band.”
I heard this statement at a recent lunch with a local musician. Like many in my city, Austin, he’s a working musician, playing behind artists and with multiple bands. The difference is that his gigs are all at churches and parachurch events.
The sad thing about his statement is that it shows how churches easily divorce music from mission. Like her role model, Jesus, the church is called to have an incarnational presence in its community. That means that the church learns and loves the local culture, and then tries to embody what it means to be a community of Jesus followers in that time and place.
So should your church band sound like a cover band, doing renditions of what ever is popular on the Christian radio station in the area?
Maybe.
If that is incarnational thing to do.
People everywhere love music, but in Austin, music is the lifeblood of the city. Imagine what it would be like if the music on Sunday sounded like the music people those same people listened to the rest of the week?
I asked on Facebook for people to name bands that capture the sound of Austin. You can hear the answers here:
Who would you add? What does your city sound like?
Christian music has shaped Western Civilization. Our modern music theory can be traced back to the chants systematized by Pope Gregory, and the Jewish and early Christian antiphonal songs that proceeded them. For centuries, the church commissioned some of the greatest works ever composed. Rock and Roll, one of the few art forms that the U.S. can take credit for, can easily be traced back through R & B, to gospel to and African American spirituals.
Something changed in the last few decades. When it comes to pop music, the church stopped creating art, and started trying to market knock-offs of mainstream radio.
According to Michael Frost, the church is in exile. It needs “songs of revolution,” music that tells the story of our true home, the world to come. We have to start writing the kind of songs that inspire movements.
The music the church needs will grow out of artists embedded in the church, who are compelled to tell their own story, and dream of God’s kingdom. It will be honest about our fallen nature and the messiness of the world. It will transcend the love songs of the radio and the praise chants of the last generation. It won’t always be clean, and it won’t always sound like something a good Christian should say.
I’ll be honest. There’s very little Christian music I find listenable. Even less of it can be called “songs of revolution,” the type of music, that a truly counter-cultural, missional church will need. Here are 10 songs that I believe are a step in the right direction.
What songs would you add to this list?
(This post is spread over 11 pages. Click the numbers below to move forward.)
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