Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com:
With soaring strings and dramatic choruses and hooks, Steven Curtis Chapman knows how to write the Big Pop Song. He appears to have nearly perfected the art on Declaration, his most upbeat and polished effort to date. For example, songs like "Magnificent Obsession" and "God Is God" aren't just pop songs but sweeping mini-epics of faith that are carried along by Chapman's passionate vocals and crashing crescendos. He's also adept at sprinkling modern references to freshen his hard-rock motif, such as the lyrical tip of the hat to news events in 2000 on the opener, "Live Out Loud," and the Nintendo Game Boy sound effects on "See the Glory." Of course, Chapman has long known how to massage those melancholy hearts with such balladry as "Carry You to Jesus" and "Savior." Clearly, Declaration raises a bar that was already beyond reach for most of his contemporaries. Chapman is a brilliant songwriter with a finger on the pulse of what today's Christian music fans want to hear. --Michael Lyttle

Rating : - what kind of flame?
An album of the caliber of Steven Curtis Chapman's DECLARATION worms its way deeper into an appreciative listener's soul with every new pass-through. Its appeal is multi-layered. Each new encounter with this kind of music reveals a new facet, a previously unheard sound, the pleasure of an allusive turn of phrase that had gone undetected.

Chapman winks and nods a fair bit in this CD, a hobby that doesn't distract him from exploring life-and-death themes via some very fine music. The album's opening track--the jaunty, witty, `Live Out Loud' starts the winking in earnest, but you get the idea he's just getting down to business and having a bit of meaningful fun while he arranges his desk.

If that's your first impression, events prove you correct with `This Day', a profoundly theological orientation to *this* day. Like the psalmists in some of their most perceptive moments, Chapman lays his emphasis on the given moment. Though he can sing that `you are the same yesterday, today, and forever', he knows you rarely get to eyeball all that. *Today*, by contrast, is right here, right now. Chapman, like the best practitioners of biblical faith, knows the transparent merger of bedrock confession, on the one hand, and the plea for the capacity to believe, on the other: `Father help me to believe ...', he cries out in imitation of a well-remembered gospel cameo, almost in the same breath as a stunning articulation of what he *does* believe. Such tranparency is in no small measure responsible for the affection Chapman's fans maintain for him. What in other mouths might come across as preaching is in Chapman's music the honest confession of something he is learning to get right without yet having mastered it.

When the CD liner gives three or four biblical texts at the beginning of each song's credits and lyrics, it is not because Chapman went looking for a string of biblical catchwords to tack clumsily to what he had come to by a completely other route. Nor is it because he simply couldn't make up his mind which passage `fit best'. To the contrary, the odd habit of prefacing his artistic work with a constellation of texts represents the fingerprint of a genuine biblical theologian who sings out with exquisite mastery truth what he has considered unhurriedly, quietly, lovingly.

Then follows `Jesus is Life', a winsome declaration of the benignly totalitarian claim of Jesus on one's life. In tracks like this, Chapman allows decency and charm to disarm the embarrassment that often surrounds speculation about `a certain Someone'.

Then, just when you thought it was safe to go outside, Something Big happens. `No Greater Love' changes the tone as an astonishing ode to the stubborn mercy that took the iconic Jim Elliot and four other men to Ecuador to die on the shore of a river with spears stuck in their bodies. This tune, which begs repeated listening, tells the story of one of the Amerindian men who in their ignorance took these men's lives. Tertullian's dictum that `the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church' soars here on a new melody. Rhetorical questions are sometimes the best way to articulate what we know and what we do not know in the face of life's majestic enigmas. Chapman wraps his wonderings about them in such grammar, to magnificent effect.

`God is God' arguably climbs the album's highest peak. It is perhaps the finest recent musical articulation of life's essential anti-idolatrous confession: `God is God and I am not'. Simply put, Chapman gets everything right on this track. From the ominous, strum-over-voice opening to the mid-sentence foundation statement (`... And the pain falls like a curtain // On the things I once called certain // And I have to say the words I fear the most // I just don't know') to the monastic-esque refrain and closing statement, every detail comes together, powered by the force that throbs at the center of Christian faith and the life-altering consciousness that by grace allows many to see things clearly and to realize that until now they had not.

`See the Glory' continues with the same large-ness of soul and note. But even this accomplished track cedes pride of place to the Anthem of The Wise Wo/Man that follows, a song that's become a kind of musical creed in this reviewer's home, to be played on the mornings that more than anything else promise a hard day ahead. Bring it On is an immensely courageous song. Part battle cry, part sung recollection of God's reliability, part self-talk, Chapman has sounded more sober and determined than he does on this potent track.

I didn't come lookin' for trouble
And I don't want to fight needlessly
But I'm not gonna hide in a bubble
If trouble comes for me
I can feel my heart beating faster
I can tell something's coming down
But if it's gonna make me grow stronger then...

Bring it on
Let the lightning flash, let the thunder roll, let the storm winds blow
Bring it on
Let the trouble come, let the hard rain fall, let it make me strong
Bring it on

Now, maybe you're thinkin' I'm crazy
And maybe I need to explain some things
`Cause I know I've got an enemy waiting
Who wants to bring me pain
But what he never seems to remember
What he means for evil God works for good
So I will not retreat or surrender

Now, I don't want to sound like some hero
`Cause it's God alone that my hope is in
But I'm not gonna run from the very things
That would drive me closer to Him
So bring it on

Bring it on
Let the lightning flash, let the thunder roll, let the storm winds blow
Bring it on
Let the trouble come, let it make me fall on the One who's strong
Bring it on
Let the lightning flash, let the thunder roll, let the storm winds blow
Bring it on
Let me be made weak so I'll know the strength of the One who's strong
Bring it on
Bring it on

If more of us were bent on being good instead of nice, there'd be a bit more of this track sung in living rooms, cars, offices, and church washrooms. That alone would improve the world.

Steven Curtis Chapman has grown on this reviewer gradually and mostly through my sons' musical collections. Yet I find myself standing back in quiet awe before this offering in a way that is not so true of this musician's other superb collections collections. In DECLARATION, justice, mercy, worship, music kiss here. Well-balanced friends, each fires the passion and acuity of the other.