Jesus Music That Doesn’t Suck

My first foray into church leadership came after my freshman year of college, when I began learning how to play guitar at my church’s contemporary service. I knew only a little about worship music at that point, having spent most of my teenage years pounding out the rhythmic power chords of punk music. So I picked up a few CDs at the local Christian bookstore to dig in (the early ’00s were very weird). The exercise was, to put it mildly, hit and miss. Matt Redman was OK enough, but the others definitely weren’t going to make it into my sun visor CD holder. The melodies were too simple, the lyrics too banal, the instrumentation too easy listening. It’s hard to go from the full throttle of Green Day’s American Idiot to repackaged Bible verses set to music designed to be inoffensive to church elders raised on “How Great Thou Art.”

There’s no official rule out there that says songs about God have to be boring or trite. But contemporary Christian music has rarely been on the cutting edge of much of anything. It exists in its own world, a captive audience of paying customers and gatekeeping executives who rely on standard formulas for success. Risk averse is probably an apt description of the genre. Lyrics can’t push the bounds of the familiar when heresy charges lurk behind every negative review. And the music itself seems to lag a step or two behind cultural acceptability. There’s only so much that can be done when churches are the typical venue for concerts.

By summer’s end, a revelation came in the form of David Crowder’s mind-bogglingly refreshing Illuminate. It had synth loops, record scratching, spoken word samples, and genres spanning folk, jazz, rock, and even punk. This Jesus music didn’t suck. Life-changing is probably too melodramatic a term, but I was hooked. What stuck out most to me was Crowder’s unclichéd vulnerability. To him, God wasn’t an abstract doctrine of vague reassurances for unspoken pain. God was someone for whom he yearned. Someone he needed every waking moment. For a solid six months, that album never left my car’s CD player. It was another two years before it cycled out of my regular rotation.

That was over twenty years ago now. I wish I could say that Crowder’s Illuminate led to a new wave of innovations in worship. It did in some measures — mostly by way of mimicry — but the distance between church music and driving music remained vast. At least it did for my less-than-shiny aesthetic sensibilities.

The best worship music bleeds, in more ways than one. It bleeds with the pain of this world and the struggles of life that make it difficult to get out of bed. Songs written not for the choir but the feeble follower walking on broken glass to find rest for their soul on a hard wooden pew. She won’t — no, can’t — raise her arms in praise with songs that offer her little more than a holy pep talk. She needs songs that bleed of desperation with lyrics that catch her off guard. More than that, she needs songs that bleed of a divine grace revealed on a blood-soaked cross. Not an idea of grace cribbed from an intro to systematic theology textbook or a fuzzy love that confuses repetition for profundity — but the real thing, put into words you always secretly wished might be true, with unexpected melodies that get stuck in your heart.

Where lyrical candor is valued more than market appeal, musical creativity comes in spades. Worship music that bleeds is rarely the fine-tuned perfection of synthetic editing and consumer preferences. How can it be shiny when it leads with despair? What it lacks in glory, however, it makes up for in a weakness that can’t help but be universal.

David Crowder’s Illuminate was the first worship album I played on repeat. John Van Deusen’s As Long as I Am in the Tent of This Body … Pt. One has become the next (2025 really was a banner year for original devotional music).

Last summer, David Zahl sent me the lead single, “Jesus of Nazareth,” and from the moment I heard the double kick drum I was hooked. The album still hasn’t left the top of my Spotify homepage.

[Suffice it to say, I’m thrilled Van Deusen is leading worship — and performing a special concert! — at the upcoming Mbird NYC Conference. I couldn’t think of a more Mbird anthem than “Anything Other Than What I Am Right Now.”]

There are plenty of reasons why As Long As I Am in the Tent of this Body … is going to be my most listened to album for two consecutive years. It has genre-spanning musical brilliance with just enough rock to get my toe tapping. Just when you think you’ve figured out a song, Van Deusen pulls off something unexpected: three-part vocal harmonies with arpeggiating strings, a dash of screamo over the final chorus, or a bridge that explodes what was otherwise a contemplative song. And I laughed out loud at the Weezer-esque ballad about being led to quiet waters.

But what stands out the most is the music’s honesty. In interviews, Van Deusen has spoken about the unyielding presence of depression while recording. These are songs he needs to sing and hear himself: “Answer me God. Where is the strength when I am weak?” “These shaky hands could never hold / the weight of this broken world.” But next to these bleak confessions are intrusions of grace: “You split the Red Sea within me. My savior made a way,” “I know I could never earn your love.” Almost every one of Van Deusen’s songs follow this stepwise pattern without feeling like he’s retreating to a formula. Along the way, the listener is swept up from the mire of life into the luminous love of God.

This is Jesus music that definitely doesn’t suck. It bleeds with pain and hope, anguish and joy, death and resurrection.