Worship songs by decade: the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s

Ask what the worship songs of a decade were and you will get a list. Ask where they came from and you get something more interesting, because for most of this period the answer is one country, and then it stops being one country.

So this page follows four places. America, which is what people usually mean. Britain, which produced more of the songs your church sings than you probably realise. Nigeria, which produced a great deal and wrote almost none of it down in a form anyone outside it can reach. And Australia, which arrives late, in the nineties, and arrives so decisively that it deserves saying now: American dominance of the repertoire was broken twice in a generation, once in Sydney and once in Lagos. Britain had been chipping at it since 1966.

Every date here is checked, and where the record is thin or the sources disagree I say so rather than smoothing it over. There is a listening playlist for each decade at the top of its section.

One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts.

Psalm 145:4, NIVUK

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How to use this page

Each decade has a Spotify playlist, built from the songs in that section. They open in a new tab and you can follow them.

The songs are marked by where they came from (US, UK, NG or AU) so you can see the geography change as you scroll. That change is the point of the article.

And almost everything I have recorded myself is a free download: no email, no account. There is a note further down on why.

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Christian music from the 60s and 70s

The 60s: the decade the guitars got in

Two things happened in the 1960s that made everything after it possible, and neither of them was a song.

The first was a book. In June 1967 a folk musical called Good News premiered at the Glorieta Baptist Assembly in New Mexico, written by Bob Oldenburg, Cecil McGee, Eddie Lunn and Ted Overman. Broadman Press published it in January 1968 and it sold somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 copies. What that gave a nervous church music director was not a mood but a licensed, printed product with a denominational publisher's name on the cover that happened to require electric guitar, bass and drums. You could not be thrown out for using it.

The second was a chart position. In 1969 the Edwin Hawkins Singers' "Oh Happy Day" reached number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Black gospel had been recorded for decades and sold well inside its own market. This was the moment the mainstream singles chart became a channel a gospel record could actually enter.

Meanwhile, in Costa Mesa, California, Chuck Smith took charge of a small congregation at Calvary Chapel at the end of 1965. The church's own history gives three dates: a vote making him teaching pastor on 18 November 1965, his first official Sunday sermon on 5 December 1965 to about fifty people, and his becoming senior pastor on 14 September 1966. Wikipedia describes it as a congregation of twenty-five. From the spring of 1968, when he brought the street evangelist Lonnie Frisbee into the work, that church became one of the engines of the Jesus Movement, and the Jesus Movement is where the next twenty years of worship music comes from.

In Britain, the same modernising instinct arrived through the Church of England rather than through a beach. Youth Praise, edited by Michael Baughen for the Church Pastoral Aid Society, was published in 1966 (Michael's own Wikipedia entry says 1964, so take the year with that caveat) and eventually sold over a million copies; Youth Praise 2 followed in 1969 and Psalm Praise in 1973. A year before the first book, in 1965, Musical Gospel Outreach had been founded and launched Buzz magazine, whose first issue was dated October 1965, the seed of a British Christian music business, which would later give the country Key Records, Dovetail and Spree '73. And in June 1966, at Billy Graham's Earls Court crusade in London, Cliff Richard told a Youth Night crowd of 25,000 that he was a Christian, and sang "It's No Secret". Press photographs date that night to 5 June; other captions from the same crusade are dated 16 June, and I could not settle it.

In Nigeria, the recording had started forty years earlier and nobody in the English-speaking church noticed. Rev. Josiah Jesse Ransome-Kuti, an Anglican priest at Ake, Abeokuta (and Fela Kuti's grandfather) travelled to London and recorded Yoruba hymns on Zonophone discs in the early-to-mid 1920s. An archival account puts him at the 1922 Church Missionary Society Exhibition recording 43 songs; Wikipedia dates his first release to 1925 and calls him the first Nigerian to release a record album, while Music In Africa calls him the first West African to record one. Neither claim is that nobody in Nigeria had ever been recorded before.

Then Ikoli Harcourt Whyte, who contracted leprosy as a boy, around 1919, and lived in the Methodist leprosy colony at Uzuakoli, composed more than two hundred works from the 1930s onward and is credited as the first to write Christian choral music in Igbo.

And inside Christ Apostolic Church, the best-documented Nigerian church for this purpose, the peer-reviewed account traces indigenous hymnody to the revivals of the 1930s, names D.O. Babajide as composing indigenous airs in the 1940s, and names Elder Adeosun as a pioneer of the rise of gospel music in the 1960s.

The 70s: the decade the church became a record label

Everything in the seventies follows from one organisational change. In 1971 Calvary Chapel started Maranatha! Music and released The Everlastin' Living Jesus Music Concert. A local church now owned a label and a publishing arm whose purpose was to capture and distribute its own congregational songs. Nothing in the sixties had that structure.

Then a venue. Explo '72 ran in Dallas from 12 to 17 June 1972, with nightly gatherings in the Cotton Bowl and an eight-hour closing festival on cleared ground north of downtown. And an economy: in 1979 Keith Green left Sparrow Records, stopped charging admission for concerts, and from May 1980 distributed So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt for whatever the buyer chose to pay, a deliberate rejection of the industry then forming around him. By May 1982 he had shifted over 200,000 copies, 61,000 of them given away.

In Britain, the seventies built the festival culture that would carry British songs for the next thirty years. Greenbelt began in 1974 on a pig farm near Charsfield in Suffolk, with an early audience of around 1,500. Spring Harvest followed in 1979 at Prestatyn, founded by Clive Calver and Peter Meadows, and became the single biggest route by which a new British worship song reached an ordinary parish. Graham Kendrick released his first album, Footsteps on the Sea, in 1972. And Sound of Living Waters (1974), edited by Betty Pulkingham and Jeanne Harper out of the Fisherfolk and the Community of Celebration, put charismatic renewal songs into British hands.

In Nigeria, this is the decade recognisable gospel artists appear outside the church choir. Bola Are formed Bola and Her Spiritual Singers on 26 June 1973 and released her debut album, Baba Ku Ise, in August 1977; the Nigerian Tribune put her at more than seventy albums as of 2014, and she founded the School of Gospel Music International in Ibadan in 1990. Voice of the Cross, the Igbo-language duo of Apostle Lazarus Chukwuoma and Rev. Emmanuel Ogbonna, have been in gospel music since about 1974. Lazarus told The Sun in January 2022 that he was "48 years old in gospel music", which is not the same claim as a first recording date. And Panam Percy Paul's discography opens with Beautiful People in 1976.

I have to be straight about the limits here. There is no reliably dated first edition for Iwe Orin Mimo, the Yoruba hymn book. There are no documented individual composers for Celestial Church of Christ's hymn tradition, which survives orally. And no first-recording year for Voice of the Cross exists in any source I could reach. The music was real. The paperwork is not where I can get at it.

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Worship songs from the 80s

The eighties changed church music through a piece of office equipment, and this next part is my own reading rather than a sourced finding.

The overhead projector transparency meant a congregation could sing a song that was in no book anyone in the room owned. A hymnal takes a decade and a committee. A transparency takes an afternoon. I have not found a study that dates the tipping point, and projectors were in churches through the seventies, but the acetate is where the speed of the next forty years starts.

What is documented is the commercial proof. Amy Grant's Age to Age (1982) became the first Christian album by a solo artist certified gold, in 1983, and the first Christian album certified platinum, in 1985. Petra were selling at that kind of scale too, but I could find no certification for More Power to Ya; the band's first documented RIAA gold was Beyond Belief, certified in 1995. Christian music could now sell at pop volumes, in ordinary record shops.

A note on two songs everybody files in the eighties. "Give Thanks" was written by Henry Smith in 1978; Integrity's copyright arrived in 1986, initially crediting the author as unknown. "Majesty" was written by Jack Hayford in 1977, on his own ministry's account. Both are seventies songs that the eighties distribution machine made famous, which is exactly what that machine was for.

And the machine itself is older than the company that ran it. Wikipedia dates the Hosanna! Music tape series to July 1985, beginning with Behold His Majesty, and Integrity Music to 1987. The cassette subscription came before the label.

In Britain, this is Graham Kendrick's decade, and four of the twelve songs above are his. "The Servant King" in 1983, "Meekness and Majesty" in 1986 as that year's Spring Harvest theme song, "Shine, Jesus, Shine" in 1987 written for Make Way for the King of Kings, and "Amazing Love" in 1989. For most of the eighties, if your church sang a new British hymn, the odds were it was one of his.

They were written for something. March for Jesus grew out of Pioneer, Ichthus Christian Fellowship and Youth With A Mission, with Graham writing the music. The first London march in May 1987 expected 5,000 people and drew about 15,000. By 1989 there were marches in 45 cities across the British Isles, including 6,000 Catholics and Protestants walking together in Belfast. On 15 September 1990, more than 200,000 people marched in around 600 British towns. These songs were built for streets, not sanctuaries, which is why they scan the way they do.

And in 1982, Bazil Meade founded the London Community Gospel Choir with Lawrence Johnson, Delroy Powell and John Francis. Their first concert put 120 voices in front of more than a thousand people. Black British gospel is a story that runs from the Windrush generation and the Caribbean Pentecostal churches through the LCGC to Premier Gospel, and it is left out of American and British accounts about equally.

In Nigeria, Funmi Aragbaye began in 1983 at Evangelical Church Winning All in Ilorin with Olorun Igbala and Sioni Ilu Ayo. Sonny Okosun, who had spent the seventies making Afro-reggae and anti-apartheid records, turned to gospel as his mainstream career faded in the late eighties; the first gospel albums under the name Evangelist Sonny Okosun appear from 1993.

More significant than any single record is what was being built. The Redeemed Christian Church of God had existed since 1952 and passed to Enoch Adeboye in 1981. Deeper Life began as a fifteen-person Bible study in 1973 and became a church in 1982. Living Faith dates from David Oyedepo's calling on 2 May 1981 and began with four members on 11 December 1983. Christ Embassy started as a campus prayer group at Ambrose Alli University in 1987. Those four institutions would later supply Nigerian gospel with its audiences, its venues and its record labels, but not yet, and not in this decade. I found no dated history of any of their music departments, and no Nigerian gospel record label from the eighties at all. The distribution ran on self-produced cassettes and church halls.

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Christian bands of the 90s

The nineties invented the form the modern church still uses: the live congregational recording, sold as the record.

Hillsong in Sydney began recording its own congregation singing, and shipping that recording. "Shout to the Lord" (written by Darlene Zschech, on the evidence written in 1993, appearing on People Just Like Us in 1994, and given its definitive recording on Hillsong's own Shout to the Lord album in 1996) is the song that carried the method around the world. A church in London could now hear the exact arrangement, in the room, as sung by the people who wrote it.

Two other structures matter. CCLI's blanket licence, maturing through the decade, meant a church could legally project new lyrics without chasing permission song by song. And Christian bands crossed onto mainstream charts: dc Talk's Jesus Freak, released 21 November 1995, sold around 85,800 copies in its first week, then the biggest debut a Christian album had managed; Jars of Clay's "Flood" reached number 37 on the Hot 100 and number 12 on Modern Rock in 1996.

If you searched for Christian bands of the 90s, the honest answer is that the most interesting one was British. In 1992 Martin Smith and Tim Jupp put together a worship band for a youth event called Cutting Edge at Arun Community Church in Littlehampton, West Sussex. They self-released four EPs from June 1993 and sold more than 70,000 by mail order. "I Could Sing of Your Love Forever" is on the second one, from April 1994.

In January 1996, after Martin's car accident, the band went full-time, founded their own label and renamed themselves Delirious?. King of Fools followed in 1997. "Deeper" and "Promise" both reached number 20 in the UK singles chart that year; "See the Star" reached number 16 in 1999. "History Maker" was an album track in 1997. It did not chart as a single until a fan campaign took it to number 4 in 2010, which is worth knowing because the internet routinely dates it wrong.

Alongside them, Soul Survivor (the festival Matt Redman started in 1993 with his youth leader, and which drew 1,896 people to its first event) became the platform for his own songs. Stuart Townend wrote "How Deep the Father's Love for Us" in 1995. And in Manchester the Message Trust, founded in 1988 by Andy and Simon Hawthorne, spun out the World Wide Message Tribe in 1991 and would eventually produce LZ7.

In Nigeria, the best-documented event of the decade is a car crash. Yinka Ayefele was disabled in an accident in 1997, wrote through roughly nine months in hospital, and released Bitter Experience in 1998. Multiple Nigerian outlets converge on those dates, which by the standards of this research is unusually solid.

The structural change is harder to date and more important. The peer-reviewed history of Christ Apostolic Church records that praise and worship singing emerged in CAC in the 1990s as a mode distinct from its older indigenous hymnody. Kunle Ajayi was ordained an RCCG assistant pastor in 1991 and is now that church's Director of Music. And a young singer named Sinach had been singing at Christ Embassy since 1989.

I could not find a dated account of Nigerian gospel radio or television programming in the nineties. It existed. It is not written down anywhere I could reach.

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2000s worship songs

The 2000s did two things. Broadband and then YouTube, from 2005, collapsed the time between a song being sung in one city and learned in another from months to days. And Passion built the pipeline (a conference feeding an in-house label feeding the CCLI chart) that made a handful of writers into the repertoire of the English-speaking church.

It is also the decade the songs stopped all coming from one place, although the proof of that arrives later.

In Britain, two things of lasting consequence. Tim Hughes wrote "Here I Am to Worship" in 1999 and released it on 24 December 2001; he and Al Gordon founded Worship Central at Holy Trinity Brompton in 2006. And Keith Getty, from Lisburn in Northern Ireland, and Stuart Townend, from England, wrote "In Christ Alone" together in 2001, their first collaboration, and the start of a modern hymn movement that is substantially British and Northern Irish rather than American, whatever the Nashville addresses on the publishing now say.

Delirious? announced a hiatus in July 2008 and played their last concert at the Hammersmith Apollo on 29 November 2009.

In Nigeria, this is the decade the records start sounding like records. KUSH (TY Bello, Lara George, Emem Ema and Dapo Torimiro, formed in 1999) released one album, The Experience, in 2002, and split in 2004. Kefee released "Branama" in 2003. Midnight Crew, formed at Yaba College of Technology in 2001, released "Igwe" around 2006 and remixed it later. Tope Alabi moved from Yoruba film soundtracks into gospel and released an album roughly every year from 2001. Lara George released "Ijoba Orun" on Forever in My Heart in 2008, which is the single best-documented song-and-date pairing in the whole Nigerian section.

And the institutions arrived. The Experience, founded by Pastor Paul Adefarasin of House on the Rock, was first held at Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos in 2006 and reportedly drew 70,000 people: organiser figures rather than audited ones, but even discounted, a scale no British or American worship event of that year matched. LoveWorld Records, Christ Embassy's label, followed in 2009, and would carry Sinach, Frank Edwards and Joe Praize.

Sinach's own first album, Chapter One, is dated 2007 or 2008 depending on which paragraph of which source you read. Frank Edwards debuted with The Definition in 2008 and Eben with On the Rock in 2007, but both of those catalogues really belong to the 2010s, and so does Nathaniel Bassey, whose Elohim came out in 2008 and whose significance starts later.

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What changed across five decades

Set out plainly, each decade did one structural thing the one before it could not.

The instruments changed least of all. A guitar in 1971 and a guitar in 2009 are the same object. What changed was who could publish, who could copy, and how fast.

If you want that argument at full length, with the nineteen centuries before it, it is in the evolution of Christian worship music. If you want the songs that outlasted their decades, that is the ten most powerful worship songs.

And the geography. Look back at the five tables. The NG column is nearly empty in the sixties and seventies, thin in the eighties, and by the 2000s it is a third of the list. Some of that is real growth. A good deal of it is that Nigerian gospel was being made all along and the dates are not where an English-language researcher can reach them: no first edition I could find for the Yoruba hymn book, no composer credits for an entire church's hymn tradition, no gospel label at all before 2009. The scholarship exists; the discography largely does not. I would rather leave that gap visible than fill it with plausible guesses.

Australia broke the monopoly first, and quickly. Hillsong's method (record your own congregation, sell the recording) went from one church in Sydney to the whole English-speaking church inside about five years, and there was never any question of the songs being treated as regional.

Nigeria took very much longer, and not because the music was not there. The thing the 2000s actually changed was that the capacity to make a world-class gospel record existed in Lagos as well as in Sydney and Atlanta. The proof arrived in June 2020, when "Way Maker", written in Lagos in 2015, reached number one on CCLI's Top 100, the chart of what the world's churches actually sing.

Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth. Sing to the LORD, praise his name; proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvellous deeds among all peoples.

Psalm 96:1–3, NIVUK

Among the nations. It was always going to end up everywhere. It just took recorded music a while to catch up with the instruction.

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Why my own catalogue is free

Almost everything I have recorded is on this site as a free download. Twenty-six tracks across sixteen releases, no email, no account, no payment. A few older records in the full catalogue (Uncensored Worship among them) are not offered as downloads. Everything on the downloads page is yours.

People ask why, so here is the answer plainly.

I am convinced that a great many people need to hear good Christian music, and that God gets the glory when they do. That is the whole of it.

These songs were written across more than two decades. They come out of tens and hundreds of hours of scripture study, a great many scribbles, tonnes of discarded lines, fact-checking, prayer, and tens of thousands of pounds spent in production. I am not pretending they cost nothing. They cost a great deal, and most of it was mine.

I have simply come to the conclusion that the gospel in music deserves to be heard, and this is my gift.

Freely you have received; freely give.

Matthew 10:8, NIVUK

Freely was I given. Freely I give, unreserved.

All I ask is three things of every download. Listen to it. Pray with it. Pass it on to somebody else.

That is the only price, and it is not for me.

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Where to go next

• The four decade playlists above, on Spotify.
• Everything I have recorded, free · MP3, with artwork and metadata.
• The evolution of Christian worship music · the same story, from AD 112.
• The difference between gospel and worship music · why the two words are not rivals.
• The ten most powerful worship songs · ranked by what they survive.

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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

United States and international

• Calvary Chapel's own history for the 1965–66 dates; Chuck Smith
• "We're Gonna Change This Land": an oral history of Good News
• Oh Happy Day; Take the Message Everywhere; Upon This Rock
• Maranatha! Music; Explo '72; Keith Green
• Age to Age; Integrity Music; Jack Hayford on writing "Majesty"
• Shout to the Lord; Jesus Freak; Flood; Kirk Franklin and the Family
• How Great Is Our God; Mighty to Save; How He Loves; I Can Only Imagine

Britain

• The Jubilate Group on Youth Praise and Psalm Praise
• Musical Gospel Outreach, Buzz and Key Records · Cross Rhythms
• Greenbelt Festival; Spring Harvest
• Graham Kendrick and his own page on "The Servant King"
• March for Jesus and the movement's own history of the marches
• Cutting Edge (recordings); the Delirious? timeline; Deeper; History Maker
• Soul Survivor; The Message Trust's history
• Here I Am to Worship; In Christ Alone; Keith Getty; Worship Central
• The London Community Gospel Choir and Keep The Faith on the pioneers of UK gospel

Nigeria

• S.O. Ademiluka, "Music in Christian worship in Nigeria in light of early missionary attitude", Verbum et Ecclesia · the strongest academic source for the move from mission hymnody to indigenous song
• "The indigenous music of Christ Apostolic Church in Nigeria and the diasporas" · for Babajide, Adeosun, and praise and worship emerging in the 1990s
• The University of Vermont religion department on Rev. J.J. Ransome-Kuti's Zonophone recordings; Josiah Ransome-Kuti
• Music In Africa on gospel music in Nigeria
• The Nigerian Tribune on Bola Are; The Sun interview with Brother Lazarus of Voice of the Cross
• Funmi Aragbaye; Sonny Okosun
• RCCG's own history and Vanguard on the growth of the RCCG
• Yinka Ayefele's twenty-five years since the accident · TheNewsGuru
• ConnectNigeria on KUSH; Vanguard's November 2013 feature on Midnight Crew's first twelve years, and AfroGospel Music on the group
• Channels Television on Kefee; ThisDay on Sammie Okposo
• The Experience, Lagos