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I love to get into the discussions as to why Southern Gospel Music is struggling so much. Of course we all have our explanations of why our concert attendance is so low. Some say it's poor quality, but I was watching Nashville Star the other night, and after hearing that talent, I am not worried about the talent in SG at all. Some say it's because there is too much entertainment involved and others say there isn't enough entertainment involved. Some say it's because we have let the Country sound infiltrate our "pure" SG sound. Some say it's because we want to stick to close to the "quartet" sounds. Everybody has a reason for why SG isn't growing as fast as we would like.

I have an idea I'd like to throw out for your consideration. Just what if, what if, it's .......... the message. There I said it. Before you stone me here let's think about it for just a minute. Where was the Nation when SG was raging in our fair land. What were we doing? As I look back at the history of our great genre, I see that the Nation was living in hard times. We had just come through the Great Depression, a couple of World Wars, money was tight, the great Industrial Revolution hadn't really gotten a hold on us. We still had to grow a lot of our own food, rely on family for our needs, our fun, and our inspiration. We still had to depend on God as a Nation. There was no thought of taking God out of the classroom, no thought of four letter, offensive words being used in the movies we were watching, and we still had very good attendance at church every Sunday,

Ah, I just hit part of my evaluation, Church attendance was still growing. As a Nation we were still very dependent on our Faith and our God. Today we are much different. We are very independent. We don't seem to need family, we don't seem to need church, and most important we, as a Nation, don't seem to need God. Now to my point. It's our message. It's not that our message isn't still true, or not still important, or that it's not even still needed. The problem is that much of America doesn't realize that they still need the message we have to offer. If you think back to September 11, 2001, for a brief moment in our history, our Nation turned to God in desperation. In fact for a six month period of time, church attendance and even CD sales of all Christian music rose sharply. We, for a brief moment, saw again our need for God, religion, church, family, and a lot of other things we had seemingly forgotten about. Now, as often happens, as a Nation, we have drifted back into that feeling of independence and our need for God, church, etc, has been hidden in the back of our mind again.

So, what has happened to church attendance, Southern Gospel concert attendance and CD sales? They have again plummeted and we have again reverted to our reasoning that SG is failing because of quality or any of those other reasons I discussed earlier. The fact is that it's our message. We have the message that our Nation and the world needs, but they just aren't interested in listening to it.