I’m under a firm conviction that we should vote our conscious, but voting one way or another on American politics is not in service to the Kingdom of God. I don’t think the way you vote is necessarily indicative of your relationship, or lack of relationship, with God.

I believe we should live according to the witness of scripture, but I don’t think that’s as clear cut as some people would like to make it, so I just say when in doubt, show love and pray that God will give you wisdom to deal with friends and enemies alike.

Like any musical genre, Christian music of any age usually only has a handful of songs that stand up to the test of time. Look at a hymnal from the late 19th century, and you may find only a dozen, at most, that are in today’s. Charles Wesley wrote over 6000 hymns; Isaac Watts wrote over 750; Bach wrote nearly 200 chorales and sacred songs – today, we only regularly hear a handful of the works of these great masters of sacred music. The same will be true of Chris Tomlin, Stuart Townend, Dave Crowder, Rebecca St. James, and the rest of today’s CCM mega-stars.

What makes a sacred song or hymn a “classic”? A lot of things, but, at it’s core, it has to be fundamentally faithful to the Bible, and to the tenents of the Christian faith that have remained the bedrock that the Church has rested on for the past 2000 years. Then you can add in things like singability, metre, rhythm and rhyme, lyricism, etc.

There is a movement out there, lead by the younger folk, back to a much deeper, richer worship experience, not just with music, but also with liturgy. I don’t know what shape it’s going to finally take, but I’m looking forward to watching it grow.

Other questions I would ask that I think answer some of the one’s you posed.
1. How does old music influence new music?
2. If everything is a remix (copy, transform, combine) are there in fact remnants of old music in today’s modern music? If so then are there future classics in our midst right now?
3. Is it the music content, the lyrical content or both that makes “classic” music stick with us for so long?

I think we need modern interpretation of older music. I also think we need people who are trying to express themselves from scratch. Even though deep down they are expressing previous influence, probably from older music…

For instance, I had never heard of Buddy Guy, Doyle Bramhal, or Elmore James until I heard Stevie Ray Vaughn bring their music to life for me. Stevie took older music and interpreted it through a rich modern sound with his precision on the fret board. But, after listening to Stevie I went back and started listening to those other guys, and then realized how much they, and others, influenced today’s blues and rock music.

I don’t think we abandon classics as much as we search for our own identity. We need the classics but we don’t want to be the classics. We need to be something that is unique to ourselves. We have a built in desire to create, our God gave us that gift. So sometimes we want to make something from nothing and for it to be only us who created it. What we realize so often on the way is that we are all created in God’s image and that creation has a common thread that has woven all of it together. In that thread lies millineums of expression that speak to that commonality. Whether it be worship music that speaks to the character of God or a blues song that expresses the pain of heart break. Those things that are core to our humanity will last the test of time and will be expressed forever.

Even as we search for our individualism it is futile to abandon what makes us persons.

Worship music always follows the same pattern: a new style is introduced, career christians in the church resist the new style, the new style is eventually met with reluctant acceptance, and then when enough time has passed the “new” style is used to stifle the growth of newer styles that come up after it.

There isn’t a radio station for “classic christian” music. There isn’t a christian equivalent of KSHE95, and even in the church itself we dont sing songs that congregations from the 1st (or even the 10th) century sang, nor should we. Growth and change is always rooted in the creation and implementation of new ideas and concepts, and any rehash of the way things used to be is just an attempt to “bring back the good old days.” This applies to worship music as well.