The worship songs churches actually sing

Across 825 churches, two songs tie at the top: What A Beautiful Name (Hillsong Worship) and Great Are You Lord(All Sons & Daughters), each in the playlists of 194 churches, about 23.5% of the sample. Look past the individual songs and a sharper pattern appears: between them, songs from four worship houses (Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, and Passion) reach most churches. Hillsong alone turns up in 60% of them. That concentration echoes what analysts have long flagged on the CCLI licensing charts, measured here from a completely different source, real church playlists, and it means most churches, most Sundays, are drawing from a strikingly small shared songbook.

The chart

The 25 most widely sung songs

Ranked by how many of the 825 churches carry the song in a worship playlist. Percentages are the share of those churches.

The full ranked list is available as open JSON. The live, always-current chart lives at playlist.church.

The concentration

Four worship houses dominate the chart

Sort every church by which worship houses show up in its playlists and the modern-worship economy comes into focus. Four names reach a large share of the 825 churches, and 26 of the top 50 songs come from just those four houses plus Phil Wickham.

This is not a new worry inside worship circles. In 2023, Worship Leader Research found that nearly all of the 2010s CCLI Top 25 traced back to the same four megachurches: Bethel, Elevation, Hillsong, and Passion. What is striking is that our number comes from a different place entirely. They counted licensing reports; we counted what churches actually saved to their playlists. Two very different methods pointing the same way. The magnitudes are not identical, and they should not be, but the direction is unmistakable. The same analysis notes the concentration has started to loosen in the mid-2020s as individual artists and collectives gain ground, which is exactly what the next section shows.

The artists

The names on the most playlists

Reach is the number of churches with at least one song by that artist in a worship playlist. One name to watch at the top: Phil Wickham, a solo songwriter with no megachurch behind him, sits in 38.8% of churches, the highest reach of any single artist credit. Read the list carefully, though. It is keyed on how Spotify credits each track, so a worship house fragments across many rows (Hillsong shows up under several credits below) while a solo artist stays whole. The houses still reach more churches overall, as the previous section shows. What the artist view captures is how much modern worship now runs on individual writers and one-off collaborations, the decentralization worship analysts have started to describe.

The transatlantic split

American and British churches sing differently

The core canon is shared, but the tilt is real. American churches lean into the big Elevation and Bethel anthems. British churches put a modern hymn, King of Kings, at number one and rank writerly, lyric-first songs higher than their American counterparts do, like CityAlight's "Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me" and the modern hymn Cornerstone.

What the songs are about

A repertoire built on adoration

Tag the lyrics of every worship song in the corpus and the center of gravity is clear. The most common themes are adoration, God's majesty, and his presence, followed by grace and love. None of the twelve most common themes is about lament, justice, or the life of the church together. Whatever else modern worship is doing, it is overwhelmingly singing praise directly to God. (These theme labels are tagged automatically from each song's lyrics, so read them as a broad map, not a precise count.)

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