Commentary: Why black gospel music still matters despite the rise of contemporary Christian music

White evangelical churches have a music problem, and I fear it's getting worse.

This year, the National Museum of Gospel Music is slated to open in Chicago. It will rise from the site of the historic Pilgrim Baptist Church, where the "father of gospel music," Thomas Andrew Dorsey, laid the foundation for a robust tradition of black sacred singing. This is a tradition informed stylistically by the blues and theologically by the promise and peril of black creativity in the hostile sociopolitical environment of the 1930s. The museum's