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TechnoratiHistorically, the magazine’s goal has been to take the heart of the Christian artists and be a bridge between the artists and the fans. We’re still very much about that. What’s changed is the way we’re going about doing that, and I can definitely discuss that when we talk about the upcoming redesign of the magazine.
CP: So you’re going to be redesigning the magazine, and the issue is coming out on May 1st.
Swartzendruber: Exactly, it’s going to be our inaugural redesign issue.
CP: You said that you are going to be modifying the name of CCM a little bit. Can you explain how you’re changing it, and why?
Swartzendruber: We are actually going to keep the same name. It’s still going to be CCM Magazine. As I was kind of foreshadowing earlier, the name from how we understand “contemporary Christian” is kind of dated. When that happened, the publishers started distancing themselves from that label. So CCM frankly became more of an ambiguous kind of name.
A lot of the long-time Christian music fans still read the magazine. But we have gotten so many letters repeatedly in the past years from readers asking, “What does CCM stand for?” since we hadn’t been featuring “contemporary Christian music” in the magazine. We felt that there were really a couple things going on: the evolution of how the artists have approached music and the other thing is the technology and how media is introduced in technology. Those two things are what instigated our change in direction to a degree.
We really wanted to bring a clear definition to what CCM means, and we wanted it to hold long into the future. Keeping the same acronym, we changed what the letters stand for. The first letter stands for “Christ,” the second for “community,” and the third would stand for “music.”
The way we came to that was that the two greatest commandments in the Bible are about relationships. The first relationship that Jesus talked about was “to love your God with all your heart and all your soul,” and it was that, if we are going to put the cards on the table and talk about what this magazine is about, first and foremost, this magazine is about “Christ.” That’s who we are called to exalt; that’s who were called to champion.
In the next verse, he says that second greatest commandment is “to love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s about relationships. It’s about God relating to the son, and relationships with your neighbor, other people – “community.” So it’s a very philosophical name to replace myth … and the “music” of course.
Community is going to have a broad practical application in today’s technological world. What we’re doing there is – I said that this magazine is about connecting fans to their artists. We’ve launched a medium and social networking site called “MyCCM,” and to my knowledge, it’s the only Christian networking site that uses music as its cornerstone. We’re doing that, and we’ve quickly gotten over 5,000 members, and we’re going to be incorporating those members into the magazine, where dialogue is going to be taking place. We’re going to be talking to the community, they’re going to be giving us feedback on the articles throughout the magazine, and so it’s going to be a really unusual thing. I’ve never seen it where there’s been so much reader-generated content in a magazine, because it’s going to be several pages, frankly. Continue »
