WorshipLeaderResearch.com is the home for articles and news related to a collaborative study focused on the behaviours of the primary contributors to contemporary worship and the attitudes and behaviours of local worship leaders towards them. By exploring the relationships between quantitative and qualitative data, we hope to better understand the relationship between the worship music industry and local worship practitioners. The study aims to equip practitioners with a deeper understanding of the forces that impact their corporate worship song selections.
Articles
After The Big 4 – What Happened To Worship’s Power Churches?
How Elevation Survived—and What the 2020s Say About the Future of Worship Music Two and a half years ago, Worship Leader Research released our first major article, which helped give language to what many worship leaders intuitively sensed but hadn’t fully articulated: namely, throughout the 2010s, a small handful of megachurches – Bethel, Elevation, Hillsong, and Passion – had dominated the relevant charts. We dubbed them the “Big 4.” If worship leaders were leading with the latest “top songs” in the 2010s, they were almost certainly[...]
Worship’s (Mostly Male) Power Players: The Rise of the Songwriting Family
The first installment in Worship Leader Research’s behind-the-scenes look at the worship music industry indicated the 2010s were marked by Big 4 songwriters (from Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, and Passion) largely operating in separate silos. Despite public language about a worship music “family,” the data told a different origin story. While the Big 4 did engage in co-writing, these collaborations were typically confined within their groups. Though a professional songwriter was sometimes brought in, the frequency of this varied by group. But in the years since, something has shifted.[...]
