Contemporary Christian Music and Christian Religious Education

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to analyses the popular culture which is focused on Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), and to explore some possibilities for Christian religious education. For more details, this paper follows three issues about CCM which are in debates. First of all, the researcher tries to clarify the definitions of popular culture as well as contemporary Christian music in terms of what culture means by signifying practices. Based on such definitions of popular culture, CCM would be categorized into three models: worship and praise model, communio sanctorum model, and neighborhood mission model. Secondly, this paper argues that CCM could be theologically interpreted by three-folded theological praxes, i.e., liberating praxis, hermeneutical praxis, and spiritual praxis. Thirdly, following the above results, researcher tries to reconstruct the Christian religious education. Thus, this paper suggests to re-conceptualize Christian religious education as Christian cultural education rather than evangelization in postmodern cultural society, and to develop the new religious curriculum based on Christian popular cultures as soon as possible.