Bishop Michael Pitts of Cornerstone Church in Maumee hopes his new album, Heal the World, will help in doing just that.

“I wanted to release a positive message, number one, and over the last couple of years especially, there’s been, it just seems to me, a lot of hostility in the atmosphere, in the environment, in the air. [People] promoting a good message weren’t being heard.”

Heal the World is similar to a Cornerstone worship service, Bishop Pitts said, “but it doesn’t have the live experience on there, and it’s not so much just worship choruses as it is more songs.”

It is available for purchase on music downloading sites, including the iTunes store, and CDs can be bought for $15 at Cornerstone, 1520 Reynolds Rd., Maumee.

Healing the world is important to Bishop Pitts’ theology, he said. “The opening song, ‘Heal the World,’ and the song ‘We Can Change Tomorrow’ have to do with good people believing a good thing.” (He also wrote a book titled Heal the World, but it’s not connected to the album.)

Bishop Pitts wrote or co-wrote all the modern gospel songs for the album, except for two bonus tracks by local musicians Chris Byrd & True Victory and Johnny Rowlett.

Mr. Byrd is the minister of music at the Worship Center, and Mr. Rowlett is a member of Cornerstone Church who sings Christian country and travels as a musical evangelist.

While Bishop Pitts writes music — he has previously had songs recorded by Stephen and Linda Tavani, who are featured on the title song, and Higher Ground — “I’m not a singer, certainly not at that level,” he said.

So he recruited musician friends, including Israel Houghton, who won his sixth Grammy Monday, for Best Gospel Album for Alive in Asia; Argentine singer Lucia Parker; the Katinas, five brothers from American Samoa; Pastor Sheryl Brady; Jacky Brigstock; Jason Bates; and Monica Culp. The Cornerstone choir contributed.

He also enlisted the Tavanis, who bring their WOW Jam through Toledo with Cornerstone; Bishop Pitts and his wife, Pastor Kathi Pitts, are godparents to the Tavanis' children.

And he asked Bryan Popin to produce the recordings and perform. Bishop Pitts is the album’s executive producer.

“When I started putting this together,” Bishop Pitts said, “people around the nation were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, how in the world did you get all those people?’ ... It's based on long-term relationships. I just got on the phone and asked them to do it, and went down to Nashville [for] the Dove Awards and grabbed a few people and pulled them into the studio. Others did it in California, and others did it in Dallas, and we put it all together. I think it's good to promote a good message.”

The album also has about 20 minutes of a sermon, “The Issue Is Worship.”

“We had a lot of space left on the CD,” Bishop Pitts said, so there was room for his pulpit words. It is edited from a longer talk, he said.

“I think worship is the highest call that we have,” he said about the sermon topic. “I think that all things that God creates are created for his pleasure, to worship him, and man is the only creature that has the power of choice when it comes to worship. When all the titles are over and all our accomplishments are over, still the highest call that we have is to be a worshipper, and I think that’s the central issue.”

The album might have been stronger with a more direct 20-minute “heal the world” message than “preaching about us as a church, and the churches in our day,” he says in the sermon, “that the very thing that makes us a people is supposed to be the presence of God, and we lock every other door and we guard everything we hang onto ... but we leave the presence of God alone so that it can be taken by the enemy.”

The CD is a worship item, yes, but the preaching could be closer to the music and the positive message of working in the world for healing on a human level. Pitts’s songs, though, seem to fall solidly in the modern gospel groove.

Contact TK Barger @ tkbarger@theblade.com, 419-724-6278 or on Twitter @TK_Barger.

First Published February 20, 2016, 5:00 a.m.