08/02/2026
We are to be a separated people unto the Lord. Not to be mixed with the ways of the world.
Walk into thousands of churches this Sunday morning and tell me what you see.
The auditorium is dark; the lights are down.
The walls are covered in LED screens.
Haze from smoke machines hangs in the air.
The bass rumbles through the floor.
If you blind folded someone and walked them into the building, they could not tell whether they were in a church, a concert, or a nightclub.
And that is not an accident. That is the design.
The darkened room, the stage production, the pulsing rhythm… none of it came from Scripture.
It came from the concert industry. It was built for rock and roll and secular music.
And the church adopted it wholesale, because the music sung demanded the atmosphere that goes with it.
But God never told His church to look like the world. He said the opposite.
"Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord" (2 Corinthians 6:17).
"Holiness becometh thine house, O LORD, for ever" (Psalm 93:5).
Holiness becometh thine house.
Not haze.
Not a light show.
Not an atmosphere borrowed from the bar scene.
The church was never called to compete with the world's entertainment.
She was called to be "a peculiar people" (1 Peter 2:9).
Set apart. Distinct. Different by design.
So why the nightclub treatment? Because CCM is the world's music, and the world's music does what it has always done: it feeds the flesh.
The darkness lowers inhibition.
The rhythm moves the body before the mind ever weighs a word.
It produces an experience the flesh can enjoy without a single confrontation with sin.
But "they that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Romans 8:8).
"Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?" (James 4:4)
You cannot blend the world with the church.
When the sanctuary starts looking like the club, the world did not get converted.
The church did.
In my upcoming book, The Leaven of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) we document the history behind where this movement started, how it got in, and where it is headed.