Ryan Rolfe, leader of The World Most Dangerous Praise Band, has a new post on worship music at the Revolution blog. I love Ryan but he does slight the awesomeness of metal, and although he clearly holds a majority opinion, in my opinion, it is darn near an unforgivable sin!
Now, I am certainly biased. I have been a metalhead since roughly 1983! The first album I ever bought was Def Leppard's "Pyromania" followed by Quiet Riot's "Metal Health." Motley Crue's "Shout at the Devil" led me to heavier stuff and by 1987 Metallica and Guns N' Roses made all the hair metal stuff sound girlish.
I then dove headlong into stuff like Pantera and dug deep into the past for stuff like both Ozzy and Dio era Sabbath, Maiden, Priest, Motorhead, etc. All awesome!
After a while I became concerned with the amount of time and money I was putting into my metal collection which included dozens of tee-shirts, festivals and literally thousands of CD's. So, because it was becoming an idolatry issue, I began to sell off my CD collection BUT I still love metal, so what is a Christian metalhead to do? Back in the day the heaviest Christian stuff I could find was Stryper...go ahead and throw up in your mouth, I won't be offended. Luckily, Christian metal has come a long way and you can find pop metalers like Disciple, Pillar, Skillet and nu-metalers like RED and Flyleaf and rap metal like KJ-52 and even Christian metalcore like Living Sacrifice, As I Lay Dying and, of course, Demon Hunter!!!
Now many people do not consider metal "real music." Shame on them. Some of the world's greatest musicians play (or played) metal (i.e., Geezer Butler, Neil Pert, Dimebag Darrell).
Moreover, the reason I never "outgrew" metal is that everything else is so tame! And what I love about Christian metal is that it has stones! Now, we worship a big, mighty, holy God who creates, judges, destroys and all this set to acoustic guitars with soft melodies just don't seem to do it justice.
So, everyone is entitled to an opinion (I guess!) but I will continue to fly the flag for metal because it has real power...like the Almighty!!! However, Revolution services will largely be metal-less. Sad for me.
All that being said, my bro Ryan is a great musician. We are blessed to have him on board and you will dig his post which can be found here:
