I have led worship in church since I was a teenager, and I love it. I want to say that first, because what follows is often heard as a complaint about the church and it is not one.
But somewhere in twenty-odd years of service I noticed something about the songs I was being given. They were not built around a room. They were centred on true heart worship, not dependent on congregations, or on music co-ordinated cleanly. They were songs for one person and God, and they worked best in that setting because that is the setting they came out of.
So I stopped trying to earn my ranks in a church setting. Not out of grievance. Because after two decades I understood it was not my call, and continuing to chase it was keeping me from the thing that was.
That decision has a price, and I want to be precise about what the price is, because most writing on this subject is either bitter or evasive. It costs money, and I will show you the arithmetic. It costs visibility, in a market where the church is the distribution system. And it costs the particular satisfaction of standing in front of people who know your name.
What I get instead is testimonies. A message from somebody who played a song in a hospital car park. Somebody who had it on in the kitchen when something finally broke open. I hear a handful of those. There are many more I will never hear, and I have made my peace with that. It is the arrangement, not a disappointment in it.
By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me – a prayer to the God of my life.
Psalm 42:8, NIVUK
At night his song is with me. Not on Sunday. Not with the band. At night, alone, which is where a great many people actually meet God and where almost nobody is writing for them.
What is the difference between worship music and listening music?
One is a tool and the other is a letter. A congregational song has to be singable by untrained people in a room together, and its success is measured in rooms. A listening song does not need you to sing along and does not need anybody to lead you, and it can go where the first kind cannot.
Confusing those two jobs is the source of most of the argument in this field.
The first job is to be sung. A congregational song has to sit in a range untrained people can manage, repeat enough to be learnable, and belong to everybody in the room by the second chorus. I wrote a whole article on how that craft actually works, because it is a real discipline and I respect it.
The second job is to be heard. A listening song is a letter. It can go into a commute, a night shift, a waiting room, a pair of headphones at 2am.
The record producer T-Bone Burnett drew the distinction better than anyone. In Bill Flanagan's Written in My Soul, he put it like this: "I learned early on that if you believe Jesus is the Light of the World there are two songs you can write about. You can write songs about the Light, or about what you see by the Light." Both are faithful. They are not the same job. The line circulates in more than one wording, and the accounts disagree about whether the interview was in 1982 or later, so take the Flanagan version as the sourced one.
Our Father is the clearest example I have of the second job. It is the Lord's Prayer as techno house, and I wrote it for a dancefloor. Nobody is going to lead a congregation in it, and it was never asked to do that work.
Free downloadMP33:58
Our Father
The Lord’s Prayer as techno house, and the note he wrote about it contains the plainest statement of what this entire catalogue is for.
No email, no account, no catch. Yours to keep, and yours to play to a congregation.
Almost every institution in Christian music is built for the first job. Which brings us to the money.
How do Christian songwriters actually get paid?
Overwhelmingly by churches singing the song, not by anybody listening to it. On one top-of-market worship catalogue that sold at auction, CCLI licensing accounted for 65% of a year's royalties and everything else combined, streaming, mechanical, performance and sync, made up the other 35%.
This is the part nobody puts in writing, so here it is.
In November 2020 a music catalogue containing "The Lion and the Lamb" sold at auction for $900,000. Its royalties over the preceding twelve months came to $156,393, and the split is the education:
| Where the money came from | Share |
|---|---|
| CCLI, churches singing it | 65% |
| Streaming and every other source combined | 35% |
| Share of the catalogue's income from the one song | nearly 80% |
The lead song had over 73 million Spotify plays across all its versions. And it still earned close to twice as much from congregations singing it as from streaming, mechanicals, performance and sync put together. CCLI alone paid that catalogue over $100,000 a year across 2017 to 2019, described in the listing as notably stable year over year.
Read that as a songwriter and it is stark. In that catalogue's case, around two thirds of the income came from congregations singing the song rather than from anybody listening to it.
One catalogue is not a law, and I want to be careful not to turn it into one. This is a song at the very top of the CCLI market, which is not where most writers live, and nearly four fifths of that catalogue's income came from the single song, so it is one hit rather than a portfolio. But it shows plainly where the money in this system sits. CCLI licenses songs to nearly 230,000 churches and organisations worldwide, and churches pay for songs they sing. There is no equivalent mechanism anywhere that pays you when somebody weeps in a car park.
The visibility cost is the same shape. Capitol Christian Music Group, owned by Universal, claimed as of 2022 around 60% of the top ten worship songs used in churches. Worship Leader Research reported in November 2024 that three publishers, Capitol CMG, Essential Music and Integrity Music, between them administer almost 80% of the CCLI Top 100. Chris Juby, a Resound Worship songwriter and director of worship, media and arts at King's Church Durham, puts the consequence plainly: "the range of [music] that could ever be successful via those channels is so much narrower than the range of what the church should be singing."
Michael Gungor, whose criticism of the industry, along with his public musings on Genesis as poem rather than history, is described by Religion News Service as having led to his exclusion from the Christian music business in 2014 rather than a departure from it, put where you land afterwards like this: "It's this kind of no man's land, algorithmically." I should not enlist him as a fellow volunteer. On that account, he was pushed.
I should be careful here. The evidence shows the congregational channel is narrow, concentrated and lucrative. It does not show there is no other road, because plainly there is, and I am on it. But anybody telling you the choice is free is not telling you the truth.
And one more honesty: the congregational route only pays like that at the very top. Chris Juby again, on the ordinary songwriter's experience: "You'll get your first royalty check, and maybe you'll be able to take your wife out for coffee. You know you've made it when the check covers a nice dinner."
Which Christian artists have given their music away?
Keith Green sold records at no set price from 1980. Rich Mullins had his earnings capped at an average wage and gave the rest away. Josh Garrels released an album free for a full year in 2011. I did not invent any of this, and several of them went considerably further than I have.
Keith Green stopped charging for records
In 1979 Keith Green asked Sparrow Records to release him from a contract he had recently signed. The signing bonus had been a grand piano, and Billy Ray Hearn let him go anyway; Hearn's own account is that "when God's telling somebody to do something, I'm not going to stand in the way." On 7 May 1980 Green released So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt on his own label, by mail order and at concerts, for a price the buyer decided. He and his wife Melody mortgaged their home to pay for it.
By May 1982 he had shipped more than 200,000 copies, often for a few dollars each, plus 61,000 given away entirely free.
What matters for this article is that he did it as a conviction rather than a marketing tactic, and he said so in public at the time. Christianity Today covered it in February 1981 under the heading "Making the Gospel Free."
Rich Mullins wrote a congregational standard and never aimed at one
Awesome God has been sung by congregations across the world for nearly forty years. CCM Magazine ranked it the third greatest contemporary Christian song in 1998; the song itself is from 1988. And the man who wrote it was, by the account of Michael Blanton, then head of Reunion Records, not writing for churches at all. Mullins "never thought about doing something for church music," Blanton said. He was writing instead for "the ragamuffin, the guy out there that loves avant-garde music."
Mullins was blunt about the song himself, in a 1996 interview: "the thing I like about Awesome God is that it's one of the worst-written songs that I ever wrote; it's just poorly crafted." The commentary that has grown up around that quote reads more into it, about triumphalism and weak verses, than he actually said. What he said was that it was badly made and he liked it anyway.
He is also the extreme case on money. He had his earnings sent to the elders of his church, who paid him an average American working wage and gave the rest away. That reaches us through Reed Arvin recounting a conversation rather than from Mullins directly, so treat it as reported; the words inside it are Mullins', including the reason: "If I knew how much it was, it'd be so much harder to give it away."
In 1995 he moved to a Navajo reservation at Tse Bonito, New Mexico, lived in a hogan, and taught music to Navajo children until he died in September 1997. Asked at a festival in 1996 whether he had gone to convert anybody, his answer was: "No. I think I just got tired of a White, Evangelical, middle class perspective on God, and I thought I would have more luck finding Christ among the Pagan Navajos. I'm teaching music." I quote the whole answer because the "No" at the front and the "I'm teaching music" at the back are the parts that tell you who he was, and both usually get trimmed off.
Josh Garrels gave away an album for a year
The closest modern parallel to what I am doing, and much braver.
On 15 June 2011 Josh Garrels released Love & War & The Sea In Between on his own label and made the whole record free for exactly one year, which he called a year of jubilee. By his own account that produced about 125,000 free album downloads and raised around $40,000 for nonprofits and other musicians. Christianity Today named it their Album of the Year.
The detail I like most is his own admission about the decision: "I always feel the need to say it wasn't my idea and I didn't like the idea."
I understand that completely. Giving away work you paid for does not feel noble while you are doing it. It feels like a mistake you have agreed to.
And the two who said it plainest are African and British
Limoblaze, the Nigerian artist, said the whole thesis of this article in one sentence:
"I don't do a lot of church events because I'm very aware that what God has called me to do is more of an outreach than an in-reach."
Outreach rather than in-reach. That is it exactly, and it means something to me that it was a Nigerian who put it that way. He is not embarrassed about the category either. He says plainly, "I make gospel music. I am a Gospel Artist." You can aim outside the church without disowning what you are.
And Guvna B, the British rapper whose parents came to England from Ghana, told Premier Christianity he had once been "too grimy for the church but too churchy for the grime scene." Anybody who has taken this road recognises that sentence immediately.
Who listens to Christian music outside church?
A large and growing number of people, on ordinary weekdays. Christian and gospel on-demand streaming in the US grew 18.5% in 2025 over 2024, on Luminate's year-end figures, against 6.4% for rock and 5.2% for Latin.
Here is the encouraging half.
That 18.5% is a year-end, whole-catalogue number. Separately, Luminate's midyear report found that streams of new music, meaning music released in the previous eighteen months, were slightly down year on year in the US, while new Christian and gospel music went the other way. Those are two different measurements and it is worth not welding them into one story.
Worth adding a second caveat, because this figure gets waved about. Luminate's Jaime Marconette named rock, not Christian music, as the year's largest growth genre: "Rock is the largest growth genre this year, meaning it grew its share of the streaming pie the most." Christian music grew faster in percentage terms off a much smaller base. The 18.5% is real, and it is not the whole picture.
More telling than the growth is when people listen. The church-software company Tithe.ly, writing up Luminate's midyear data in August 2025, described engagement concentrated on Mondays, during commutes, at the gym, and in the background while making dinner, and called the shift a move from church music to "life music."
Mondays. Commutes. The gym. Making dinner. That is the congregation nobody is writing for, and it is enormous.
I want to be honest about the sourcing on that last part, because it is the most quotable thing on this page and the weakest thing on it. The growth figures come from Luminate. The Monday-and-commute detail and the "life music" phrase are Tithe.ly's own framing of Luminate's data; I could not find either in Luminate's published material. Treat the first as solid and the second as one company's reading.
Here is the song of mine that has travelled furthest outside all of this, without a church service anywhere in the chain. It is a conversational prayer that turned into a song, and it goes wherever it goes.
Free downloadMP34:00
HERE
A conversational prayer that turned into an argument — against worship as leverage, and for staying in the room.
No email, no account, no catch. Yours to keep, and yours to play to a congregation.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Matthew 6:6, NIVUK
The room with the door shut is not a lesser place than the sanctuary. Jesus recommends it, and there is no worship leader in there. I take that as a principle rather than a proof text. The passage is about prayer and not about music, and I am applying it rather than quoting it at you.
The case against me, put properly
I would not trust this article if it did not include the strongest argument on the other side, so here it is without softening.
Keith Getty, who has written some of the most-sung modern hymns in the world, argues that the church's music is congregational by definition. "The sound of the church's music is the sound of the congregation singing together and that's what we want to get back to," he says, and he calls the modern industry's obsession with the leader rather than the congregation "a dangerous thing." He goes further elsewhere: "I believe that the modern worship movement is a movement for cultural relevance. It's a de-Christianizing of God's people. It's utterly dangerous."
I should be fair to him about scope. Getty's stated targets are the commercial worship industry, performance-centred church music, and shallow song content. His own comparison is that over 75% of what he calls the great hymns of the faith deal with eternity, heaven, hell and having peace with God, against fewer than 5% of modern worship songs that deal with eternity; the two halves of that are not measuring quite the same list, which is worth knowing before repeating it. His complaint about cultural relevance may well reach further than the industry, and I have not found him addressing music written for listeners outside the church either way. But his definition, if you accept it, means my work is not the church's music, and that is a real claim I have to answer.
Michael Horton makes the theological version, and it lands directly on me: "it is the content of the biblical record, and not the content of your own personal spiritual odyssey, that should shape the communal worship of God." A listening song is, more or less by definition, a personal spiritual odyssey. I should be straight that Horton says "communal worship" in that very sentence and does not extend the argument to private listening. Stretching it to cover what I do is my extrapolation, not his claim.
T. David Gordon goes further still, arguing in Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns that form cannot be separated from content, and that the popular-music form itself, the form I work in, is unfit for congregational song whatever the words say. Reviewers quote him compressing the idea to "we make tools and tools make us," which is itself a descendant of Marshall McLuhan by way of John Culkin, so I would not hand him the coinage. His subject is the hymnal rather than the headphones, so I should not pretend he has aimed at me; but if he is right about form, the point travels.
Here is my answer, and you can weigh it.
They are right that the gathered church's song is congregational, and I am not proposing a substitute for it. I am not asking anybody to replace Sunday with a playlist. What I dispute is the assumption underneath the objection: that music which is not for the congregation is therefore not for God. A song sung by one person in a car is not a diminished version of a hymn. It is a different act. Scripture is full of both, the assembly and the individual, the temple and the room with the door shut, the great congregation and the man on his bed at night.
Horton is right that my own odyssey should not shape communal worship. That is exactly why I stopped trying to make my songs into communal worship.
Why is my whole catalogue free to download?
Because I have already stepped outside the mechanism that pays two thirds of the money, so the remaining question is not how to monetise a listening song. It is whether the song reaches the person it was written for, and a price is a wall.
Twenty-six tracks across sixteen releases, on the downloads page, free. No email, no account, no payment. A few older records, Uncensored Worship among them, are listed but not offered as downloads. Everything on that page is yours.
These songs were written across more than two decades. They came out of hundreds of hours of scripture study, a great many scribbles, tonnes of discarded lines, fact-checking, prayer, and tens of thousands of pounds of production cost, most of it mine. I am not pretending it cost nothing.
Freely you have received; freely give.
Matthew 10:8, NIVUK
Freely was I given. Freely I give, unreserved.
All I ask of every download is three things. Listen to it. Pray with it. Pass it on to somebody. That is the whole price and none of it comes to me.
If you want the legal detail, what you may do with these files, and where else free and lawful Christian music actually lives, I have written that out properly, including the permissions I can and cannot grant.
Is there a sacred and secular divide in Nigerian music?
Much less of one than in America or Britain, if a 2026 piece in Music Custodian is right. It argues the boundary has thinned to the point where sound and commerce no longer mark it, and that what remains of the difference rests on the artist's own intention and integrity rather than on genre.
One thing worth adding, since I was born there.
The sacred-versus-secular argument that Larry Norman and Jon Foreman had to fight in America may simply not apply in the Nigerian market in the same way. Artists move across freely and share infrastructure and audiences, and on that account the difference now lies, as the writer puts it, "not on genre labels but on the integrity and conviction of the artiste."
That is one industry writer's opinion piece rather than a body of research, so hold it lightly. But if it is right, then the question this article wrestles with is a specifically Western one, and the answer in Lagos was always simpler: you make the music, and whoever needs it finds it.
What I actually get out of it
Not rank. I gave that up on purpose, and some days it still stings. I would be lying if I said the pull of a platform disappears because you decided against it.
What I get is the occasional message from somebody I have never met, telling me what a song did in a moment I knew nothing about. Hope Alive is the one that brings the most of those. People write to me about that song more than about anything else I have made, and almost never to say they liked it. They write to say where they were when they heard it.
This one was left under the video in 2021. I have never known who wrote it, and I am not going to put a name to it here.
I discovered you and your song through your free download ad… I've been losing hope of chasing my dream because I feel like I don't reach the visual and physical standards. I have many insecurities because of that, but your song reminds me that God doesn't make mistakes and that there is always hope in his promises.
Read the first clause again, because it is the entire argument of this page in somebody else's words. They did not find that song in a service. They found it in an advert for a free download, on an ordinary day, in the middle of something I knew nothing about and could not have written for. No congregation, no worship leader, no Sunday. That is the whole case, and I did not make it.
Free downloadMP32:52
Hope Alive
Written for a friend who had lost almost everything, in the middle of a pandemic — and released as dance music.
No email, no account, no catch. Yours to keep, and yours to play to a congregation.
And underneath that, the knowledge that there are far more of those than I will ever be told about.
So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.
1 Corinthians 3:7, NIVUK
That is not a consolation prize for missing out on the platform. It is the actual arrangement, and it has always been the arrangement. The sowing is my part. The growing was never going to be.
Where to go next
- Everything I have recorded, free, MP3, artwork and metadata embedded.
- How to write a worship song a congregation can actually sing, the other job, and the research behind it.
- Free and legal Christian music, where else to get it, and what you may lawfully do with it.
- The difference between gospel and worship music, why those two words are not rivals.
- Found, the song that is most obviously about all of this.
Scripture quotations marked NIVUK taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised, Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. 'NIV' is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790.
Sources
The economics
- How a Worship Music Catalog Sold For $900,000 at Auction, Royalty Exchange, for the royalty split on "The Lion and the Lamb"
- Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, "Our Worship Is Turning Praise into Secular Profit", Christianity Today, 2023, for CCLI's mechanism, Capitol CMG's market share and the Juby quotations
- "Following the Worship Money", Worship Leader Research, 7 November 2024, for the three publishers administering almost 80% of the CCLI Top 100
- About CCLI, for the number of churches licensed
- "Music streams hit 5 trillion in 2025", Religion News Service, 16 January 2026, reporting Luminate's 2025 year-end figures and quoting Jaime Marconette
- Christian music streaming trends, Tithe.ly, 12 August 2025, a company blog summarising Luminate midyear data and the source of the listening-behaviour detail
The artists
- Andrew Mall, "Keith Green Vs. the Music Industry" and "God told me to give my records away", the scholarly account of the Sparrow episode including Billy Ray Hearn's own recollection
- "Refiner's Fire: Making the Gospel Free", Christianity Today, February 1981, contemporaneous coverage
- "History of Hymns: 'Our God is an Awesome God'", UM Discipleship Ministries, for Michael Blanton on Rich Mullins and for Mullins' own 1996 verdict on the song
- Rich Mullins and the Homeless Man transcript, for the royalty arrangement as Reed Arvin recounts it, and the Ichthus 1996 interview for the Navajo answer in full
- Love & War & The Sea In Between on Bandcamp; Josh Garrels on the giveaway, HuffPost; Album of the Year, Christianity Today, December 2011; Q&A with Josh Garrels
- "The Gospel According To Limoblaze", We Talk Sound, 24 March 2025
- Guvna B interviewed by Premier Christianity
- "After exiting the Christian music industry, these artists engage religion on their terms", Religion News Service, 28 October 2024, for Michael Gungor
- Why Should Christian Music Pay Attention to T Bone Burnett?, citing Bill Flanagan, Written in My Soul, and T Bone Burnett's Invisible Light, True Tunes, for the second circulating wording
The case against
- "Keith Getty on the 'narcissism' of modern Christian music", Christian Today, 23 June 2019, and Keith Getty in the Christian Post, 9 November 2019
- Michael Horton, "Reforming Church Music", Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals
- T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns (P&R, 2010), quoted via The Gospel Coalition's review
Nigeria
- Olumuyiwa Aderemi, "Gospel vs. Secular Music in Nigeria: Does the Line Still Exist?", Music Custodian, 15 January 2026