Stand Up! Stand Up for...terrible music

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Horatio Spafford wrote the hymn It Is Well With My Soul after losing four daughters in a horrific naval accident.  The second verse reads: 

                                    "Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,

                                    Let this blest assurance control,

                                    That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,

                                    And hath shed His own blood for my soul."

Alternatively, here's a verse from a popular worship song called Resurrecting, by the group Elevation Worship:

                                    "By Your spirit I will rise
                                    From the ashes of defeat
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    In Your name I come alive
                                    To declare Your victory
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    By Your spirit I will rise
                                    From the ashes of defeat
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    In Your name I come alive
                                    To declare Your victory (c'mon!)
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    By Your spirit I will rise
                                    From the ashes of defeat
                                    The resurrected King, is resurrecting me
                                    In Your name I come alive
                                    To declare Your victory
                                    The resurrected king, is resurrecting me"

Some friends and I had a conversation this past week, not our first such conversation, about current Christian music in churches and how...different...some of it is.  And I thought these two examples would highlight that difference better than my own words could.

Maybe before I say anything else though I should mention that I actually quite like a lot of modern Christian music.  My car radio station is tuned to the three Christian stations I can get en route to the grocery store and I hear a lot of it and most of it is not awful.  It isn't all my style necessarily, but I can see past that and to the essential merit of the song itself.  And alternatively, I can see the merit in more traditional songs that are also not my style.

There are certainly reasons to dislike some contemporary Christian music, but style shouldn't be one of them from a purely detached viewpoint.

Here's something you can't sweep under the rug, though.  That second piece of music up there is complete rubbish.  It might be catchy, it might be upbeat, but it is categorically bad music.  It's stupidly repetitive, badly written, and theologically inaccurate.  In fact, it sounds like prosperity gospel set to a high school battle of the bands ditty that Todd figured out on the bass in his garage.

But...but WHY is this the case with more and more modern Christian music?  Well, I have a theory, which I haven't really researched or anything so feel free to disagree with me about, and it goes a little something like this:  Purpose.  What's the purpose of you writing or singing this song anyway?  And for a lot of these bands the purpose is commercialism covered in a thin veneer of Jesus culture. 
Beyond the pat standard Christian musician answers of 'glorifying God', what is the purpose behind these songs?  Does "The resurrected King is resurrecting me" bring glory to God?  No, of course not, it brings all the focus right back to numero uno.  Not to mention sounding utterly ridiculous because no, Jesus is not resurrecting you currently.  No he isn't, Todd.  

And if you're rolling your eyes at my nit picking well, I shall leave you to study your Bible and come back to me about the verse where Christ says "And verily I say unto you, you shall never be defeated or anything at all because by my spirit I shall make everything great!"

The thing is, if you live in the Western Christian world you are one of the wealthiest, most fortunate people on Earth.  You probably have food, you probably have some kind of shelter, you probably have access to education.  Four of your children are unlikely to die in a naval accident en route to England.  You aren't a sailor on slave trade vessels and so you could never write, as John Newton did:

                                         "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

                                         That saved a wretch like me.

                                          I once was lost, and now am found

                                        Was blind, but now I see."

Because you probably don't think of yourself as a complete wretch, even if you are one.  And maybe that sort of horribleness is what makes the great Christian hymns, well, great.  Not necessarily to everyone's musical tastes, of course, understandably, but still very much The Great Music.  You might not listen to Beethoven, but you're certainly not going to say he wrote bad music if you want to be taken at all seriously.  You might not enjoy reading Tolstoy, but he was an author of great and lasting importance and that's just all there is to it.

So maybe Elevation Worship and the like are writing from where they are - writing from their world of Big Southern U.S. Western Church Life.  And that's what they can write, because that's what they know.  I don't know and I'm not going to waste my time digging through the biographies of the band members because the point isn't that one particular song, which just happened to be one that struck me, but the problem of bad Christian music in general.  Maybe the question isn't 'shouldn't we aim for a higher standard?' but 'can we even write well anymore, now that we're so comfortable?'