I can't stand CCM music, almost all of it.
David Bazan, who, after writing songs about things like
being caught up in the "Rapture" while in the very act of adultery, lost his faith (see CT article linked) is a very interesting case. Also an interesting man, and musician.
In terms of "Worship music" I'm much more into things like this:
The
liturgical music, mostly in Latin, a few in English, that I could recommend to you could go on more or less endlessly.
This the mass in memory of Pope Marcellus, one of the greatest jewels of choral music; HH Marcelus who was only 22 days on the Chair of St Peter (1567) and the music composed a few years later by Giovanni Palestrina, who also provided a choral setting for
the Song of Songs.
And there are songs like this going back to the very early Church (earliest surviving actual ones that we can be sure of the dating are from the ca. 5-6th centuries, obviously apart from singing Psalms and Canticles from the Bible, but we have musical nation for
Gregorian chants like these, going back a literal thousand years or more, like
Dies iræ, dies illa / solvet sæclum in favilla; translated, this sounds like some pretty hardcore apocalyptic metal "Day of Wrath, on that Day, when the world dissolves in glowing ashes ..." But it is actually a beautiful, but sombre and serious funeral hymn which does not deny that there is judgment after death (as so many funerals do.) There are dozens of beautiful settings of the
Te Deum,
Magnificat,
Nunc Dimittis, etc., not to speak of the shorter text of the
Ave, etc. You cold just start listening on YouTube and beautiful stuff would just keep coming all day.
Contemporary "worship music," not so much, although
Our God is an Awesome God is actually a pretty good song, but IMO Michael W Smith was a bit of a one hit wonder with that in my mind at least in spirit of not literally in the charts, plus there are over 9000 other versions and some Evangelical types even sing it in church. Amy Grant and various others are not bad pop artists (to digress anecdotally, Amy Grant, of course, is really quite good looking, as almost all of the other Christian female pop singers, as are almost all other female pop singers in general, but I remember her getting a lot of shit from the Evangelical press about, well, being too obvious about being hot, or something, not that I can ever recall her dressing in a genuinely provocative fashion by contemporary standards, and I find it ironic, not to say hypocritical, that while she can write a decent song and has an OK voice her looks were obviously part of furthering her career/getting label attention/etc and yet became grounds for some of the same people giving her a hard time) and singer/songwriters considering the constrictions of genre, but I've never found most of them, individually, to be particularly strong vocally. CCM, again, is not my thing; especially not in Church. Pretty much I prefer everything in Church to be sung with minimal or organ accompaniment and in Latin (although that doesn't mean ancient/medieval,
Adeste Fideles/Come All Ye Faithful as a Christmas hymn is pretty new.)
There are of course the Christian works of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. They are definitely worth checking out. Some of the Dylan stuff gets, well, weird and Dylanesque, but both of these enormously-otherwise-artistically-and-commercially successful artists went through phases of expressing genuine faith through their music often to pretty good results.
There was the post-hippie "Jesus people" movement (which by a convoluted path emerged as Calvary Chapel and some related ecclesiastical organizations some of which have had or retain some troubling practices) had it's own music, of course, which was mostly forgettable. I think some people still sing
I Wish We'd All Been Ready (a rather presumptous song written from the point of view of someone in Heaven after the rapture looking down at his "unsaved" family and friends and Earth.)
However, there are loads of fairly interesting kind of indie-acoustic Christian singer-songwriter types, but they often don't get into the mainstream even on the Christian charts which are full of the same formulaic soft-soaring-soft "worship music" and music that rather creepily reads like Jesus is the singer's boyfriend (not in an allegorical way.) But almost all of the commercial crap is, well, crap. In my Evangelical days I used to get these collection CDs in the mail with various Christian artists nobody had or probably has heard of since, but they would reliably have one or two good songs on them. One particular song, and artist, to see what he's done in the past 15 years or so, I'm desperately trying to recall the name of ... it could be Brandon Heath, who has has decent songs.
