Only 3.4% of Worship Leaders rate their mental health as excellent compared to 29% of U.S. adults, and 9 in 10 get no help at all. Only 3.4% of Worship Leaders rate their mental health as excellent compared to 29% of U.S. adults, itself a historic low. At[...]

Today’s Worship Leaders may not be quite who you think they are. Picture the typical worship leader. You’re probably imagining someone young, artsy, and fashionable. Maybe you picture them sporting hipster glasses and skinny jeans, with a carefully curated Instagram aesthetic. You’d only be partly right. Worship Leader[...]

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[...]

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[...]

In contemporary worship music, few names carry more name recognition than CCLI. For decades, its Top 100 list has been a trusted measure for identifying the songs shaping the contemporary church–something like a Billboard chart for worship. But in September 2024, with little fanfare, CCLI removed the long-standing list of[...]

Following the Worship Money: Publishers and Administrators Explore a series of interactive visualizations highlighting the changing ownership and administrative control of worship music's most popular songs since 2010. We’ve previously discussed the complex web of names at the top of the chord chart (i.e. songwriters), but what about[...]

The Integrated Worship Songwriting Network Explore a series of interactive visualizations highlighting the interconnectivity of worship music's most powerful networks and the collaborative powerhouses that bridge them. When Elevation Worship releases a song, we might assume it was written solely by them.  Yet, anyone who has seen a[...]

Wishful Worship: The role of aspiration in Sunday morning setlists “Do you wish your church was more similar in worship culture/style to the churches and/or artists like The Big 4?”  In our survey of over 400 worship leaders (WLs), this question was posed regarding the influence of “culture” and[...]

When worship leaders talk about age, it’s mostly about the question of “aging out” and the hurt that has come from churches appearing to pass over older worship leaders in favor of their younger and more stylish counterparts. But “with age comes wisdom,” so the saying goes – does this[...]