For those of us schooled in the Pentecostal and Southern Baptist conventions dancing and rock music, for instance, was taboo in any form so the youth of my day felt they needed a substitute. The ultra conservative “Holiness” sects would argue that even innocuous substitutes for raunchy dancing and, by extension, even roller skating was just as sinful and viewed as a gateway to Hell.
Shoot, in modern churches dance teams Rock-n-roll bands are very common in worship; my, how times have changed. I recently attended a church youth presentation of a mainline denomination that featured fast paced dancing to secular popular music accompaniment with no pretense of using a Christian alternative. Funny how even the churches are becoming more politically correct, omitting Christ when convenient. Those kids knew nothing of the restrictions I grew up with so I took no offense, especially considering the current rueful tone of Christian music.
Winning the “lost” teens of my day involved using our generation's happier gospel music set to a modern beat. As I have noted in a previous post; I briefly moonlighted as DJ on Christian skate nights. The pairing of Southern Gospel and skates has always been surreal to me. I never thought the genre was compatible. So in 1984 I jumped at the opportunity to spin rock derived Contemporary Christian music (CCM) for the attending youth groups each week at the Savannah Skate Inn on Saturdays . The tunes were fast paced and skate-able, freedom for our otherwise restricted youth. Not so in today's more bland homogeneous and bleak themed CCM. Christian skate night simply would not work for the present generation.
It was hard enough selling the idea of rolling to gospel music in my day when CCM was generally better, stylistically. The unchurched scoffed; we were preaching to the choir of those who attended (maybe a few invited their “unsaved” friends.) The ultra conservative simply weren't allowed or came without the knowledge of their pastor. It was a wholesome activity, I figured, so why did it fail? It might just boil down to a fickle public that summer. Who knows?
My passion was reaching my peers. In some ways I was successful. My 2 years of persistent argument finally broke down the tradition machine that was my radio employer. They allowed us CCM six hours in the afternoon where I had been playing mostly Southern Gospel. Previously one or two CCM selections would sneak through unnoticed. Because of my commitment to the music, I finally got up enough courage and did a whole unauthorized contemporary show early one Saturday morning with the same record collection featured in the skating parties. Listener response, although small, was mostly favorable.
It seemed that management was afraid of the CCM genre due to the possible backlash from our bread and butter religious brokered programs until we broke the ice with a few experiments. Spooked by the possibility of financial ruin they never totally committed; most of the conservative local preachers were on mid-day, but I believe the station would have reached more listeners with an all day consistent format of more modern sounds. That has been a purely hypothetical idea, of course. My second radio home was 100% Contemporary Christian weekdays and they never lost a brokered program because of music format, go figure.
Stay Tuned
© 2009 The Peanut Whistle. All rights reserved.
