Christian "Contemporary" music is in an inherently strange place in the world.
That a form of anything by found to be contemporary, it must needs fit some manner of normal.
This in spite of the fact that the music which really makes it in terms of overall dollar amounts is that which is new and different.
Which could indeed lead back into the argument of music as art vs. music as business, but that's neither here nor there, at the moment.
The majority of accepted CCM falls within the range of popular music (or "pop"), with edges of gospel. This music form has engendered the term JPM, i.e., mentions of Jesus per minute, precisely because "true" Christian music seems to mention the name of God, or His son, and various Christianese terms with fair regularity, as if to prove to the listener that yes, even though this has a decent beat and a nice sound, it's still Christian in intent, and thus is okay to listen to.
CCM generally ranges in sound from somewhere near Steve Green and Michael Card, (easy listening to pop) to the Imperials in their later years, which is more of a pop rock sound.
There is also Christian Rock, Christian Metal (and Christian Death Metal, which is an oddly mismatched appelation at best), Christian Industrial, Christian ska, etc. Each of these have a certain audience, likely much narrower than the widely accepted "vanilla CCM" market.
As art clashes with marketability (for indeed, many of the major labels behind CCM have been proven to be far more interested in creating a marketable sound for this new niche than actually creating meaningful music aimed at any Godly purpose) there are a growing number of bands that either drop out of the Christian music scene, or become individual enough (i.e, dropping their JPM rate in favor of meaningful lyrics which assume you're intelligent enough to know that they're talking about God) that Dobson and co. demand that they be banned from the shelves of appropriate Christian music stores across the land. This has happened to bands such as Jars of Clay, who have seen widespread acceptance by the secular crowd of their songs, and thus have become more and more unpopular with the hardliner Christian crowd.
There are also bands such as Lifehouse who, for whatever reasons, reject the Christian label entirely (whether for marketability or direction) and present themselves as a secular band, but still with very sound lyrics (such as the very popular "Hanging by a Moment" which is currently all over the radio, sung by people everywhere, who don't really realize that it's a worship song because it's actually written well).
This leads us back into the issue that makes CCM a shakey issue at best among Christianity: Any cultural movement of a Christian manner is always generations behind the current trends. At least, if it is to be acceptable.
Christianity by it's nature demands a more traditional perspective. It's basis is found in writings that are thousands of years old, and in traditions that were established by God at the beginning of time. Thus there is often an intrinsic movement among Christians (especially of a more fundamental sort) to stick to "what was good enough for our fathers...".
So at it's time, the work of Mozart and Bach was racy and dangerous. As was jazz, and blues, and, in it's own time, gospel...not to mention pop, rock, etc.
So now, in the year 2001, it's okay for Christian artists to begin to use disco in their music (a la the Newsboys). And Christianity had it's own Glam Rock movement (via Petra and Guardian, and various others). Christianity certainly has it's own satirists (Mark Lowry and Steve Taylor).
But churches everywhere are still splitting and fighting over whether to use hymns or choruses (which is what Tiefling's post is really about), whether to use an organ and a piano, vs. a band, or recorded music (gasp) or synthesizer...
As it turns out, very little is "normal" for the Christian crowd. Between attempting, at various points, to cling to the past and tradition by their fingernails, and approaching creation of "perfect, Godly music" (as opposed to the worldly, fallen, demonic kind), Christians are constantly at war with themselves in an effort to find something acceptable here on earth, that more than five of them can agree upon at once.
And getting Christians to agree on anything for any definite period of time could, in fact, be the greatest problem of all.