songs and salvation
songs and salvation
SONGS AND SALVATION
August 8, 2026
I should probably admit something before writing about Christian music: I rarely listen to Christian radio anymore.
That hasn’t been a deliberate protest. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that Christian music was bad, and there are Christian artists whose music I deeply love. Some of their songs have accompanied me through important seasons of my life and faith.
But somewhere along the way, I just stopped listening very much.
My own musical tastes have always wandered outside the usual boundaries of Christian music. Give me Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Glen Campbell, or a good old folk or country song that tells a story. I love songs about ordinary life—love and loss, getting older, making mistakes, going home, missing someone, laughing at yourself, wondering what might have been, and hoping tomorrow turns out a little better than today.
Those are also the kinds of songs I enjoy performing.
And interestingly, I don’t feel as though I’m leaving my faith behind when I sing them.
I’m a Christian before I pick up the guitar, while I’m holding it, and after I put it back in the case. My faith inevitably shapes what I find beautiful, what I find meaningful, which stories I want to tell, and even which songs written by other people resonate with me.
Sometimes that means singing a song explicitly about Jesus.
Sometimes it means singing about a marriage that has survived a lot of years.
Sometimes it means singing about regret.
Sometimes it’s a song about an old road, a hometown, a broken heart, or somebody trying to figure out where life went.
And sometimes a song is just fun.
I’ve increasingly found myself uncomfortable with the idea that Christian musicians need to occupy a separate musical universe—or that every song we perform needs to contain an explicitly Christian message to somehow justify our being there.
Maybe that’s part of why Christian radio gradually stopped being where I discovered most of the music I loved.
I don’t say that as an indictment of Christian radio. There are wonderful artists making wonderful music there. But much of it simply stopped sounding like the music I naturally reached for. I found myself drawn toward songs that felt earthy, human, imperfect, and honest—songs willing to sit with questions for a while without necessarily resolving everything before the final chorus.
And that has affected the kind of musician I want to be.
I’d rather carry my faith into the whole wide world of music than feel obligated to create a smaller musical world where everything has to be explicitly labeled Christian.
That’s why an old observation from Larry Norman caught my attention recently.
Norman was one of the pioneers of Christian rock, but he also had a complicated relationship with the Christian music industry that grew up around it. His criticism was more nuanced than one quotation can capture. He wasn’t arguing that Christians shouldn’t make music for Christians, nor that explicitly Christian songs don’t have tremendous value.
But he did ask a question that I think is still worth asking.
Who are we singing to?
In an interview with rock journalist Robert Thoreaux, Norman put the problem rather provocatively:
“The sad irony of almost all Christian music is that it preaches salvation to people who already have it, while the people who need the message usually don’t hear it.”
That one has been rattling around in my head.
Some of the artists who have influenced me most deeply are Christian artists.
Rich Mullins comes immediately to mind. So do Andrew Peterson and Steven Curtis Chapman. Their songs have encouraged my faith, challenged me, shaped the way I think, and sometimes given words to things I didn’t know how to say.
There is absolutely a place for that.
There is a place for worship music. There is a place for music that strengthens Christians. There is a place for songs that explicitly proclaim Jesus.
I’m a pastor, for goodness’ sake. I spend a significant portion of my life inside the church!
But I wonder if somewhere along the way we began to assume that if a Christian makes music, the music itself needs to stay primarily inside Christian spaces.
That’s where Norman’s criticism gets interesting.
Larry Norman famously asked:
“Why should the devil have all the good music?”
There’s humor in that line, but there’s also a serious idea underneath it.
Music doesn’t belong to the devil.
Neither does storytelling.
Neither does poetry.
Neither does beauty.
Neither do humor, grief, romance, disappointment, friendship, family, work, aging, regret, or hope.
Those are human things.
And Christians are human beings living right in the middle of all of them.
Norman watched as what began as Christians making contemporary music gradually developed into an entire Christian music industry—with Christian record labels, Christian radio stations, Christian bookstores, Christian charts, Christian festivals, and Christian marketing categories.
None of those things are inherently bad. Many of them have done tremendous good.
But they can have an unintended consequence.
We can spend most of our creative energy talking to ourselves.
And that’s where Norman’s observation still has some bite:
“…it preaches salvation to people who already have it, while the people who need the message usually don’t hear it.”
If the purpose of a particular song is worship or encouraging the church, there’s nothing wrong with Christians being its audience.
But if part of our hope as Christian artists is to connect with people beyond the church, eventually we have to go where those people actually are.
This has become increasingly important to me in thinking about my own music.
I’m a pastor. I love Jesus. Christianity isn’t a compartment of my life that I turn on Sunday morning and shut off when I pick up a guitar.
It shapes the way I see everything.
But that doesn’t mean every song I sing needs to explain the gospel in three verses and a bridge.
Sometimes a song can be about marriage.
Sometimes it can be about getting older.
Sometimes it can be about mistakes.
Sometimes it can be about a gravel road, an old guitar, a broken heart, a good friend, or a place you haven’t seen in thirty years.
Sometimes it can even just make you laugh.
And because I’m a Christian, my faith will inevitably find its way into the stories I tell—not necessarily because I’ve inserted the correct Christian vocabulary, but because Christ is shaping the person telling them.
Faith might appear in a song as hope.
Or grace.
Forgiveness.
Longing.
Beauty.
Regret.
Redemption.
The conviction that our failures don’t have to be the final chapter.
Or simply the quiet hope that someone is watching over us when we can’t see the road ahead.
I don’t think a song necessarily needs to say “Jesus” to be shaped by a person who follows Jesus.
So where does that leave me?
Probably with a guitar in some places where you wouldn’t normally expect to find a pastor.
And I think I’m okay with that.
I want to play coffee shops. Festivals. Restaurants. The occasional bar. Online streams. Wherever people gather and there’s room for a guy with an acoustic guitar and some stories.
I want to sing Gordon Lightfoot and James Taylor.
I want to sing some Rich Mullins and Andrew Peterson too.
I want to sing my own songs about faith and family, mistakes and second chances, love and loss, hope and getting older.
And I want to sing some songs simply because they’re great songs.
I don’t feel the need to divide those things into separate worlds anymore.
I’m not interested in hiding my faith when I perform outside the church. Quite the opposite. Jesus has shaped my story too deeply for that.
But neither do I want every interaction with someone outside the church to feel like I’m waiting for an opportunity to turn the conversation into a sermon.
Sometimes I’d rather listen.
Sometimes I’d rather laugh.
Sometimes I’d rather tell a story.
Sometimes I’d rather play a song.
And perhaps somewhere in all of that, people get to know the person holding the guitar—and eventually something about the faith, hope, and grace that have shaped his life.
I don’t think Larry Norman’s criticism means Christian radio should disappear or that Christians should stop making explicitly Christian music.
I certainly hope they don’t.
But I do think he identified a temptation that remains with us: we can become so good at creating Christian culture for Christians that we rarely venture outside of it.
Maybe Christian artists don’t always need to create Christian art.
Maybe sometimes we simply need Christians creating good art—honest, beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, hopeful, complicated art about what it means to be human.
And then take it somewhere people can actually hear it.
Larry Norman famously asked:
“Why should the devil have all the good music?”
Maybe there’s another question worth asking.
Why should the church have all the Christian musicians?
Some of us might be supposed to take our guitars and go where everybody else is.
_
Mike