On 17th May thousands of Christians young and old took part in Global March For Jesus' Operation A to Z and prayer walked around their neighbourhoods. It was the latest in a long line of initiatives linked to Britain's praise and worship maestro GRAHAM KENDRICK. Ian Boughton met the worship.

Just for a split second, Kendrick's eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline, but he is ready to look for a reason. "You have to define what kind of music it is, and for what purpose: praise and worship music, or contemporary Christian music? I speak for the 'praise and worship' kind, and by definition, that kind of music is for the converted. OK, I might get the odd letter from someone who may have picked up on Christian music from a praise and worship tape, but not in general.

"Let's call this kind of music 'songs for next Sunday', because it's feeding the demand for songs to sing in church. And one of the reasons my first praise and worship albums were successful was because we deliberately arranged them and played them so that people would say:' we can sing this... we can play this!'

"It's the 'we can do that' factor which is so important, and it follows that the most likely music to achieve that is probably going to be a folk style - not in the sense of the folk genre, but in the sense of 'the people's music'. It also follows that this is not going to stand up to the same kind of critical listening as a virtuoso or rock album will... it's a different purpose.

"Now, I myself wouldn't put a praise and worship tape on for listening pleasure, unless I wanted to enter into a 'worship experience' through the music. So, if you pick up a praise and worship album and expect it to be listened to beside your favourite band.... it won't. But contemporary Christian music is intended to compete on that level."

But can it? Not to the mainstream music press, it can't: just a couple of months ago, a guitar magazine largely devoted to the screaming-sustain kind of guitar work, carried a reader's letter protesting that the paper ignored Christian music, and received an acid Editor's comment asking if the letter was a joke.

The letters column included one in their next issue from a Cross Rhythms writer, pointing out that not all CCM was like the nun with the acoustic guitar in Airplane, and that too received a dismissive reply. The third month, there was another letter from a CCM reporter, at which point the editor's replies ceased. But an unpalatable point had been made: Christian music isn't taken seriously.

Kendrick acknowledged with a grin that he is not known for his soaring, head-back guitar solos and having therefore failed to read those papers, shows an impressive tolerance. "I guess it's ignorance of the music, and you'll find this something that's more likely to happen in Britain than in America. In the US, the numbers of people leads to the number of sales that lead to Christian artists appearing in the charts - so I suggest that in America, you wouldn't find that kind of thing appearing.

"But in the UK, we're a cottage industry. Most Christian records are sold through Christian bookshops, and even if they were linked up to the computerised record sales that make up the charts, our sales would register on the low end... it's an indication of how Christian music is, numerically, on the margins of society.

"That explains the ignorance of it. I guess that magazine just hasn't heard any of it... but the real question we would all like answered is, what will they do when they do get to hear it?"

And there is the crux of it. Has the music really got outside those walls? Are CCM recordings seriously promoted to the outside world? Will CCM ever break through? "I think it's going to take one extremely popular band to get critical mass of sales... or, the Christian community has to grow to become a significant purchasing group."

What do we do? Leave it to chance, or is there strategic action to be taken?
"As someone serving the Church in songwriting, it's not in the forefront of my ambitions, and it's not the current issue I'm grappling with... not, strictly speaking, my department.

"But if you believe you have a recorded product that the mainstream market will be interested in, then you can try... but you then get a cottage industry competing in the machinery of 'promotion', which is a multi-million pound industry. There's a science in it, they say."

Conversationally, Graham is told of the record-plugger in the States who remarked to his interviewer that 'by the time a record gets in the top 10 over here, it should have started selling a few'.

"Wow... it gets that far by plugging, without selling any? It shows just how much you have to understand the scale and nature of that kind of business. I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I am interested to see if, perhaps, someone is going to do it, against all the odds. Are Delirious? aiming at something like this?

"It's going to be very interesting to find out, isn't it...!"