I don’t mean to stir up the worship wars again. I’m just reporting.
Of the 38 most popular praise songs–those that made the Top 25 charts for that category (yes, there is such a thing) between 2010 and 2020–36 came from only four megachurches. Those are:
(1) Bethel Community Church (Redding, CA)
(2) Hillsong (Australia, with campuses throughout the world, including the U.S.)
(3) Passion City Church (Atlanta, GA)
(4) Elevation (Charlotte, North Carolina, with campuses in other states)
The study was sponsored by WorshipLeaderResearch.com, a site devoted to contemporary Christian worship. The findings were reported and discussed by Bob Smietana, writing for the Religious News Service. His article is entitled “There’s a reason every hit worship song sounds the same,” with the deck, “A new study found that the most popular worship songs come from a handful of megachurches with a knack for writing pop songs about what God will do for you.”
The title comes from a quotation from the study’s authors:
“If you have ever felt like most worship music sounds the same,” the study’s authors wrote, “it may be because the worship music you are most likely to hear in many churches is written by just a handful of songwriters from a handful of churches.”
These four churches are all Pentecostal, except for Elevation, which is Southern Baptist. And in their theology music plays a central role.
Adam Perez, assistant professor of worship studies at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, said the four most influential megachurches all come from the charismatic tradition of Protestant churches. All of them, he said, have a spirituality that believes God becomes present in a “meaningful and powerful way” when the congregation sings a particular style of worship song.
Those songs become one of the primary ways of connecting with God — rather than prayer or sacraments or other rituals. Because of their market success, these churches have changed the spiritual practices and sometimes even the theology of congregations from many traditions.
“The industry itself becomes this invisible hand,” he said. “We don’t name the theology of praise and worship — we just assume it. And we use this kind of song repertoire to reinforce it.”
In the earlier days of the contemporary worship movement, before 2010, says Smietana, praise songs came from a variety of sources, and the emphasis was on the songwriter rather than the worship leaders of particular churches.
Today’s practice reflects the homogenization of contemporary worship, as not only megachurches but smaller congregations from a wide range of Christian traditions all use the same basic worship and musical templates, despite their specific theological origin.
As for their theological content, Baylor postdoctoral fellow Shannan Baker, who participated in the study, observes that,
The study did not look specifically at the lyrics of the most popular songs. Baker did say she’s looking at those lyrics for a different project and found a few trends. For example, she said, few of the most popular songs talk about the cross or salvation.
“A lot of it is, what is God doing for me now? And what has God promised to do for me in the future?” she said.
Certainly, charismatic congregations have the right to worship, sing, and believe any way they please, though I would question their theology. But congregations that are not pentecostalist, do not believe in the prosperity gospel, do not believe that singing as opposed to Word and Sacrament is how we connect with God’s true presence, and do believe in emphasizing the Gospel and the Theology of the Cross should attend to what they are singing and how they are worshipping.
Photo: Hillsong London by Sidebart, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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