Chandler Moore
Chandler Moore of Maverick City Music shares with Kristian Ponsford how he’s trusted in God’s timing over the years, the CCM and Gospel division, and he dives into tough topics with us: racism and prejudice inside church culture and the events of Summer 2020.
Kristian: Tell us about the church you’re involved in and Maverick City.
Chandler: My church is my priority, man. I believe in seeking and serving first the Lord’s church. We cannot be national or worldly without being locally planted. God has used His local church to rescue me out of some dark pits.
My church is my home. Mav City is my family. I almost get emotional thinking about it — Mav City has become so foundational and familial. The relationships I’ve made have literally changed and supported what God has done in me. The idea wasn’t: “We’re starting Maverick and we’re bringing people to it.” The idea started from the fact that we’ve brought people together through relationship already, and out of that relationship, we’ve become a family that God is using.
Kristian: I read on the Maverick City website that you all are “committed to deconstructing unspoken rules that exist in CCM and the Gospel world.” What are the unspoken rules you’re committed to deconstructing?
Chandler: I think there is a thing in the CCM and Gospel world that separates the music by color. If you’re black, you must be Gospel. If you’re white, you must be CCM. We don’t hold CCM and Gospel music to the truth of actually what type of song it is. That’s one unspoken rule.
The other is very new, that if you want to reach a diverse audience you must have a diverse group of people.
The toxic part of it is if you’re only doing it for the response, if the only reason I’m singing with my white brother or my Indian sister, is that so we can get a bigger audience, we’ve missed the whole point. We’ve missed the entire point of why God loves diversity.
Kristian: I’ve been deeply impacted, like all of us have, by recent events in the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m a white guy here in England who’s questioning how to go from simply being non-racist to anti-racist. How do we become anti-racist in church culture?
Chandler: I think we need to understand that this is an issue of the Gospel. We have to tackle it at the root. Paul was a Jew. And then God called him to people that didn’t look like him.
These issues aren’t new. It gives you more courage to attack it — these things are in the Bible that I believe. A solution to it can be: how did these people then address the issue? How did Paul address these issues? He blatantly and whole-heartedly stood against them.
I think we talk about the grace of Jesus but we don’t talk about the hardcore side of him. We have it laid out in the Bible. Unless you’re willing to lay your life down for it, it’s not going to be solved.