Christian

Things You Need To Know About The Christian Music

Definition

Christian Music is one of the music genres where songs and music is composed to express faith and belief in god in the form of hymns and prayers brought together in a song. It is a genre of modern popular music which is lyrically focused on matters concerned with the Christian faith.

It was originally formed as those affected by the 1960s Jesus movement revival began to express themselves in a more contemporary style of music than the hymns, Gospel and Southern gospel music that was prevalent in the church at the time. Today, the term is typically used to refer to various styles of worship.

History

With the growing popularity of Rock and Roll music in the 1950s, it was initially rejected by the church since it was believed to encourage sins. Yet as evangelical churches adapted to appeal to more people, the musical styles used in worship changed as well by adopting the sounds of this popular style. Christian Music genre became known as contemporary Christian music as a result of the Jesus movement revival in the later 1960s and early 1970s and was originally called Jesus music.

By that time many young people from the sixties claimed to have faith in Jesus. Convinced of the bareness of a lifestyle based on drugs and radical politics, most of the hipsters became Jesus people. However, some people felt that Jesus was another trip. It was during the 1970s Jesus movement that Christian music started to become an industry by then. This was started by playing instruments and singing songs about love and peace, which then interpreted into the love of God.

Details

• Christian Music was first mentioned in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible in Genesis 4:20-21 “Adah gave birth to Jabal.
• Instrumental music was used to worship God in the Old Testament in 1 Chronicles 15:16 when the Ark of the Covenant was delivered to the Tabernacle. King David commanded the chiefs of the Levites to appoint their brothers as the singers who should play loudly on musical instruments, on harps and lyres and cymbals, to raise sounds of joy.
• Ambrose of Milan, also known as the “Father of Christian Hymnody” introduced rhymed, acapella hymns that are the basis of the hymns we have today.
• The Gregorian Chant or “plainchant” was the church music of the Roman Catholic Church in the Medieval Ages (5th-15th Century).  A Gregorian chant is church music sung as a single vocal line in free rhythm and a restricted scale (plainsong). It is a style developed for the medieval Latin liturgy.
• Reverend Thomas Dorsey (1899-1993) created Gospel music which is African-American religious music that combined the secular blues genre to sacred Christian texts.
• Larry Norman (1947-2008) is considered the Father of Christian Rock  which married Christian texts to secular rock ‘n’ roll, according to The New York Times.