Why The Scripture to Music Collective?

I know I've mentioned something called The Scripture to Music Collective here on this site quite a bit.  But what is it exactly, and what's the purpose of it anyway?

It all started when I made a personal goal this year of writing a song for every book of the Bible by 11/11/11.  I wanted to do this project for several reasons, but a big reason is because I wanted to begin to tell God's Story - the whole story - book by book.  Even the hairy, messy parts.

But then I thought, why would I keep this project to myself?  If more songwriters joined in, if this were a collective project instead of an individual one, we could tell the Story more thoroughly and more vividly.

If you listen to popular Christian music, you won't hear very many songs that come straight from specific narratives and passages in Scripture.  Sure, you'll hear lots of songs that draw from Scripture - one verse here and one verse there.  There are also several musicians out there who write music for Scripture - word for word - to help with Scripture memorization.  There is nothing wrong with these approaches, but The Scripture to Music Collective aims to do something very different.

The point is NOT to rewrite or even enhance Scripture, but to engage with all of Scripture and to encourage the Church to engage with it as well.  It is about keeping the truths of Scripture as of primary importance, but allowing the songwriter to take these truths and "riff" a little bit, if you will, using perspective, feeling, and context.

The video below illustrates what I think The Scripture to Music Collective could be.  The people at the Johnny Cash Project have created this beautiful music video using one of Cash's songs and images from thousands of artists all over the world. If you watch the video, you'll see that the song and the images are cohesive and consistent, and yet the artists' renditions of the individual frames are unique and so evocative.  The artists are all telling the same story, but the story is richer and more vivid for the efforts of the individual artists. That's what I think The Scripture to Music Collective is about!