In my quest to find new and good church music, I made my regular visit to the CCLI website. This weeks theme for our worship service is “Walking in Maturity.” A few hymns immediately came to mind: BE THOU MY VISION, MAY THE MIND OF CHRIST MY SAVIOR, I WANT TO BE LIKE JESUS, NEARER MY GOD TO THEE. Unfortunately I could not think of any contemporary songs that address this idea of spiritual maturity. So, I went to the CCLI site to try to find some. I set up the search, clicked ’search,’ and this happened….NOTHING!!! Nothing, there were NO songs that came up! So, I tried an ‘advanced search,’ and the same thing! I tried ‘maturity,’ and I tried ’spiritual maturity.’ Nothing. ‘No songs were found with your search criteria.’ I found this to be profoundly discouraging and depressing.
So then I thought I would try a similar search with different wording. Perhaps I just need to change my wording! So, I tried ‘be like Christ;’ nothing. ‘Imitate Christ;’ nothing. ‘Live like Christ;’ nothing. Finally I tried something very simple: ‘growth.’ FINALLY, several pages were available, but only a few songs actually had the music available for viewing and download. The texts that I found were more about ‘give me more of your power’ then ‘help me love my God and my neighbor.’ As frustrated and disappointed I was, I can’t say I was surprised.
I have maintained for a long time that church music today is extremely shallow and having almost no teaching value. If there are no songs coming out that talk about becoming more like the God we supposedly worship, how can we possibly be on the right track? Kyrie Eleison….
