FRONT OF HOUSE
HOW DID WE GET HERE AND WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT? | Kent Morris
Photo by Rob Simmons on Unsplash
Much of what we now experience in corporate worship settings is a result of the merging of traditional Protestant liturgy with pop culture sensibilities from the Jesus Movement. When the Maranatha Praise Band, through years of Worship Leader Workshop training events and the associated Promise Keepers movement, codified what had been a localized Calvary Chapel experience into a structure for churches of all stripes, the benefits and detriments of this singularity moved across diverse denominations and churches with every conceivable background.
Later, Integrity Music took up the banner through Seminars4Worship and moved the concepts into the SBC, UMC, and Pentecostal mainstream. What followed then was predictable and inevitable. In essence, Paul Baloche just wanted to be a more effective leader at his small home church, Community Christian Fellowship in Lindale, Texas. He never intended his website, leadworship. com, to be the template for what happens across the nation every Sunday, but to some extent, it did. Thanks to Time-Life’ s Songs4Worship TV ad campaign that saw sales of 25 million units, churches saw Paul and friends leading worship and set about doing the same in their own space. The choir, organ, and piano were put out to pasture and their adherents were miffed.
In the late 1990s. praise bands became the norm in worship music with sales of Taylor 812CEs guitars and NORD keyboards exploding. Churches added contemporary services and then blended services. Worship conferences proliferated with sessions on audio mixing, bass and drum interplay, and vocal harmony structure. Those of us who lived that era firsthand found ourselves in demand and set about delivering training on every aspect of contemporary production.
A decade later, the CCM juggernaut, built on artists like Amy Grant, SCC, Stryper, etc., which had been the driving force in the religious music industry for years, began to wane while“ worship music”, once derided as provincial, came into its own. To regain sales, worship services became monetized and moved from sanctuaries to arenas with Elevation, Bethel, and Hillsong essentially taking church service on the road, for a fee. Local congregations had to find a way to emulate that experience in their own rooms or be left out in the cold. New audio, video, and lighting systems were installed at a frantic pace and House Of Worship( HOW) became the number one vertical segment in pro audio.
Everything that follows in this reader’ s narrative is a known outcome based on the proposition of the Maranatha / Integrity and later Bethel / Elevation playbook: platform renders band which delivers known songs in designated
84 July 2026 Subscribe for Free...