Directory of Contemporary Worship Musicians - Way of Life Literature

Stryper’s first album, e Yellow and Black Attack, sold150,000 copies. e second, Soldiers Under Command, soldmore than 280,000 copies. eir 1986 album, To Hell with theDevil, was even more popular. To date they have sold morethan eight million records.It was obvious that the Christian world at large, which hadlargely rejected hard “Christian” rock music in the 1970s, wasready for it by the mid-1980s.is reminds us of the slippery slope of spiritualcompromise. e devil didn’t need to try to introduce “glamrock” into Christian homes and churches the 1970s. Itwouldn’t have been successful. All he had to do was introduce“so rock,” and the rest is history.is was the scheme that worked to break down allbarriers to rock & roll in evangelical churches from the 1970sto the 1990s, and the same scheme is at work today in“fundamentalist” churches, which is something I didn’tbelieve would happen even twenty years ago.But it happens gradually, and once a church accepts a bit ofso rock, a bit of beat anticipation, the sensual appetite iscreated that will almost always lead to full blown rock andfull blown contemporary worship, with its accompanying“live and let live, judge not, ecumenical” one-world churchbuilding philosophy. Once a church starts borrowing fromthe waters of contemporary worship music, it builds bridgesthat will be crossed by the next generation, and it usuallyhappens quickly.Stryper was so worldly that its music and videos wereaccepted by MTV, the major venue for rock & roll filth. evideo for “To Hell with the Devil” was the number one mostrequested video on MTV in May 1987 (Jeff Godwin, Dancingwith Demons, p. 274).“Speak of the Devil/ He’s no friend of mine/ to turn from him/is what we’ve got in mind/ To hell with the Devil/ To hell withthe Devil.337