Making a Break with CCM
Mark Joseph
January 1, 1998
Artist/author John Fischer has served for years as curmudgeon-in-chief at CCM Magazine, writing a sometimes irreverent, always questioning monthly column that took no prisoners and spared no sacred cows. In between concert and speaking dates, Fischer has also |managed to write several books including Real Christians Don't Ask Why and Saint Ben. What often characterized Fischer's CCM writings was a strong sense of ambivalence over the path that the genre of music he and a few others had unwittingly started had taken. Like Gorbachev presiding over Communism's final days, introducing the very reforms and thought processes that would ultimately lead to communism's demise, Fischer, along with CCM's editor John Styll, seemed torn between questioning the very existence of Contemporary Christian Music and patting it on the back for the good that it does do. With What On Earth Are We Doing Fischer seems to have made a final break with ccm the industry, although he continues to write for CCM the magazine. While the book is clearly about music and draws on his experience as a recording artist, Fischer —thankfully for the general interest reader—paints on a larger canvas, addressing the root of ccm: the mentality that took the perfectly good noun "Christian" and turned it into an adjective. Pischer's work is crisp and coolly detached as he systematically reveals the bankruptcy of the modern American Christian notion that believers can bless the world by withdrawing from it, beginning with the heart of the problem—a misreading of several important Bible verses: "Nowhere in the New Testament is there any call to believers to form a separate culture from the world," he writes. "We were called to be separate from the world, but never to leave. ...
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