Religious music for less than devout

I'm not a big church goer but a friend said try City Church in Redmond and I went a couple times. First time the band came out to play I thought oh no here we go but then was really pleasantly surprised. Impressed, even. Quality musicianship, quality performance. Even the sound quality was quite good. This in a church with probably several hundred in attendance. Packed. 

As I say I don't go much and so the next time I went was more than a year later. The church had outgrown and moved to the valley where there was a lot of land by the golf course. The parking lot was so big they had shuttle buses. The church was so big they had three giant TV screens each one a good 20 feet high and from where we were you needed the screen. The place felt more like a sports coliseum or concert hall than a church. I mean it was huge. And packed. 

Its not a phase. The phase if anything would appear to be the time of thinking eternal truths will go away simply because you turn your back on them.

There was a time when religion was so revered by so many there was no higher achievement than to pay holy reverence to God almighty in as grand a scale as possible. All the best most productive people devoted their lives to it. Kind of like today they do it figuring out new ways to create money out of nothing and move it around with computers. Back then they built cathedrals, painted the Sistine Chapel, and wrote the Messiah. 

This comes up a couple times in the movie Margin Call. First its the kid who was trained as a rocket scientist, but finance pays better. Then it was the engineer who built one bridge that saved millions of man-hours, but then he went into finance and now realizes the awful waste of what could have been.

Anyway, this thread subject made me realize. Recently scanning the radio dial I came across some really interesting and quite good pop music. Took me a while at first, because it was so good, but gradually it dawned on me this was a Christian station. Every single song was Glory to God. It gets a little boring after a while, like if every song was like REO Heard it From A Friend. You know, all breakup songs. 

But the thing of it is, there was a time when this kind of religious music was universally awful. Unimaginative. Cliche. Now it is getting quite good. 

What this tells me, there's more interest, its becoming more widely admired, and its attracting more and greater talent. 

Good.

Janice Ian Breaking Silence has several songs with religious themes. Hard to beat Breaking Silence, on any level. Same with Jennifer Warnes The Well. Two bona-fide audiophile classics. The religious themes are in there, here and there, but always in the background never in your face. Perfect. In so many ways.