Subjects of English Praise & Worship

Each percentage represents the estimated share of songs produced in that decade where the named category is the song's main subject — its organizing thesis, not a passing reference. A song that mentions the cross in a single line but is mainly about God's love for the worshiper is counted under Belovedness, not Cross & atonement. The test is what the song is about.

Each song has exactly one main subject, so columns sum to roughly 100%. (In this table they sum to 99–106% — these are estimates with ±2pp uncertainty on the larger numbers, plus rounding.)

"Total output" means the broad evangelical / Pentecostal / Holiness / Southern-gospel singing tradition pre-1970, and the more crystallized P&W industry (CCM, scripture-chorus, modern hymn) post-1970. Figures are weighted across the whole industry; within-stream variance is large — Hillsong's mix differs sharply from Sovereign Grace's, which differs from Forerunner/IHOP's, which differs from black-gospel.

A note on persistence and double-counting. The chart measures what each decade was singing, not what each decade newly wrote. The same song can appear in multiple decade columns when it persisted in active repertoire — this is consistent with how CCLI measures contemporary singing (a 2025 Top 47 list includes Amazing Grace, written 1779, alongside Holy Forever, written 2024). Within each decade column, every song-instance gets exactly one main-subject classification, so columns sum to ~100% with no double-counting per decade. The persistence framing is more conservative than measuring new-production share alone — it captures the slow decline of categories like Heaven as old hymns gradually drop out of active singing, rather than the immediate cliff of new heaven-hymn writing essentially stopping after the 1940s.

What anchored the numbers. Pre-1988 figures (when no measured CCLI data exists) come from direct classification of period hymnals and publisher catalogs: Inspiring Hymns 1951 (Singspiration / Alfred B. Smith) for the mainline-evangelical end of the spectrum, the Baptist Hymnal 1956 (Convention Press, Walter Hines Sims ed.) for the Southern Baptist mainstream, the Stamps-Baxter Heritage Collection for Southern gospel, the Lillenas catalog for Pentecostal/Holiness, plus Bill Gaither, Albert E. Brumley, and Vineyard catalogs for the genre transitions of the 1960s–1980s. Trajectory shape is corroborated by published P&W research (Lester Ruth, Lim Swee Hong, Robert Webber). The 1988+ figures use direct classification of CCLI Top 25 / Top 100 reports — the two named samples in this document (CCLI Top 25, February 2010 / Report Period 409; CCLI Top ~47, early 2025 reports via Renewing Worship) are reproduced song-by-song in the "CCLI anchor data" section below. The Psalter column applies the same 22-category test to the 150 Psalms, with form-critical anchors from Hermann Gunkel, Claus Westermann, and Walter Brueggemann, and LXX footnotes from Septuagint texts for the three NT-era categories (Cross, Christmas, Easter) where early Christian tradition read certain Psalms messianically.

All 22 categories across eight decades, sorted by 2020s share. Two patterns are immediately visible: the dark band building up in the top-right corner (Christology, Belovedness/identity, Trust, Healing), and the dark band collapsing in the bottom-left corner (Heaven/"going home," Confession & contrition, Longing, Intimacy, New Jerusalem). The middle of the table — Praise & adoration, Salvation testimony, Cross & atonement — is structurally stable across the whole period.

The rightmost column applies the same 22-category taxonomy to the 150 Psalms — same test, what's the song's main subject. Strict main-subject classification with form-critical anchors. Total sums to ~112% (mixed-subject overlap, the same fudge factor that affects the decade columns).

Some categories show 0% in the Psalter because they are NT-era theological developments. Worth flagging that early Christian tradition read certain Psalter texts messianically: Cross & atonement footnoted by LXX-Ps 21:17 ὤρυξαν χεῖράς μου καὶ πόδας μου (the pierced hands and feet); Christmas / incarnation footnoted by LXX-Ps 109:3 ἐκ γαστρὸς πρὸ ἑωσφόρου ἐξεγέννησά σε (begotten before the morning star); Easter / resurrection footnoted by LXX-Ps 15:10 οὐ δώσεις τὸν ὅσιόν σου ἰδεῖν διαφθοράν (you will not let your Holy One see corruption). These appear in the early kerygma (Acts 2, Acts 13) but they are not the primary subject of the psalms in question, so they sit at 0% on a strict main-subject test. Christology at 5% is reserved for the strict anointed-identity psalms (2, 45, 72, 110, 132); royal thanksgivings (18, 21) and the royal lament (89) sit secondary.

The most striking comparisons that fall out:

• Lament: Psalms 23% vs. 2020s 1.5%. The dominant Psalter form is the one modern P&W has almost entirely lost. ~40 psalms have outward lament as their main subject (3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14/53, 17, 22, 25, 26, 28, 35, 39, 42-43, 44, 52, 54, 55, 59, 60, 64, 69, 70, 74, 77, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 109, 120, 123, 129, 137, 140, 141, 142). Modern catalog production: roughly two laments per hundred songs.
• Heaven: Psalms 2% vs. 1950s 12%. Heaven-as-destination is a Christian/gospel development with very little Psalter precedent. The Hebrew Psalter has Sheol but rarely an afterlife-as-home idiom — Pss 49 and 73 are the explicit instances, with Ps 23:6 as secondary. The 1950s Southern gospel idiom is doing something the Psalter mostly doesn't.
• Belovedness: Psalms 1% vs. 2020s 14%. The modern therapeutic-affective register has almost no biblical-baseline precedent. Ps 8 (mindfulness of humanity) and Ps 139 (knownness) are the closest analogs, with Ps 131 as a childlike-trust echo. The "I am beloved / I am chosen / I am enough" framing is a recent development, not a return to biblical roots.
• Trust & refuge: Psalms 11%, 1950s 12%, 1990s 5%, 2020s 11%. One of the few categories where modern P&W lands at Psalter level — but it took a U-shaped detour to get there. Trust ran roughly at Psalter level in the mid-century evangelical hymnal, dropped sharply through the charismatic-renewal era as intimacy and personal-love registers took over, and recovered with the modern Hillsong/Bethel wave (Goodness of God, Way Maker). The Psalter, the 1950s hymnal, and the 2020s catalog all sit close to the same point. Trust appears structurally durable across registers, even if there was a 40-year dip.
• Justice/mission: Psalms 6% vs. 2020s 2%. The modern catalog is thinner than the Psalter on outward orientation — the nations, the oppressed, God's judgment.
• Kingdom: Psalms 6% vs. 2020s 1.5%. Same direction: the eschatological-political imagination is more present in the Psalter than in current production.
• Praise & adoration: Psalms 22% vs. 2020s 13%. Praise is the largest single category in both, but proportionally larger in the Psalter — and this is before counting how many laments or thanksgivings include praise as a sub-element.
• Confession & contrition: Psalms 2% vs. 1950s 7%. Even the 1950s gospel era sat above the Psalter's strict imputation-frame rate. The traditional seven penitentials cluster across the cat 14 / cat 22 boundary; on a strict main-subject test only 32, 51, and 130 are imputation-framed; 38, 102, and 143 are penitential in mood but lament-structured.

The general shape: modern P&W is heavier on identity, breakthrough, and Christology than the Psalter, and dramatically lighter on lament, kingdom, and justice. The 1950s gospel era differed in a different direction — heavier on heaven-as-destination and on penitential framing than the Psalter. No single P&W era looks like the Psalter on a category-by-category basis, but the modern era's specific pattern of absences (lament, justice, kingdom) is worth noting.

Three categories that genuinely grew, plus a fourth that has a more interesting U-curve story (covered separately below). Belovedness/identity went from ~0% to 14% — a roughly 14x expansion that tracks the broader therapeutic turn in evangelical pastoral theology. The category absorbs both pure 'I am beloved' songs (Good Good Father, No Longer Slaves) and a major affective-brokenness sub-thread (Reckless Love, Refiner, Who You Say I Am — "I'm a disaster but you love me anyway") which has no clear home elsewhere in the taxonomy; together these two registers account for most of its growth. Healing & breakthrough rose from under 1% to 8% in the Bethel/Elevation era. Christology is having an unexpected resurgence — its 2020s share of 15% is the highest in the entire 70-year period.

Trust & refuge doesn't belong on this chart, but its trajectory is worth noting: 12% in the 1950s → 5% in the 1990s → 11% in the 2020s. Trust was a pillar of mid-century evangelical hymnody (Great Is Thy Faithfulness, Be Still My Soul, Day by Day, All the Way My Saviour Leads Me, Like a River Glorious). It got displaced through the charismatic-renewal era as intimacy and identity registers took over, then recovered to roughly its 1950s baseline through the modern Hillsong/Bethel "lean into trust" wave (Goodness of God, Way Maker, Cornerstone). So Trust is a recovery, not a rise — the modern catalog is rediscovering territory the old hymnal already held.

Six categories that lost ground. Heaven / "going home" dropped from 12% in the 1950s — when Southern gospel hymnody was at its peak — to 0.5% today, a 24x collapse. Confession & contrition — the doctrinal-classical register of Rock of Ages, And Can It Be?, Just As I Am, Come Thou Fount's "prone to wander" — went from ~7% to ~1%, a 7x collapse that tracks almost exactly the rise of Belovedness/identity in the gainers chart. (Note: this category is the structurally doctrinal "in myself condemned, in Christ justified" frame. The modern affective-brokenness register — "I keep failing but you love me anyway" — is different and lives as a sub-thread inside Belovedness rather than as its own main subject.) The New Jerusalem / coming Kingdom register fell sharply between the 70s and 90s and partially recovered after 2010 (the modern hymn revival). Personal love & devotion peaked at 12% in the 1980s — exactly when Vineyard was inventing modern intimate worship — then declined as identity-language replaced love-language in the worshiper's voice. Intimacy and longing follow similar arcs: peak at the height of the charismatic-renewal period, then sharp decline post-2010.

The chart values throughout this document estimate share of total catalog output — what's being written and produced across the broader P&W industry. CCLI's most-reported lists measure something related but different: share of congregational singing in licensed US churches. The gap between the two is itself informative.

Three patterns visible in the comparison:

• CCLI overweights Praise & adoration substantially. Praise sits at 25.5% in the CCLI sample versus 13% in my catalog estimate — almost double. Praise & adoration songs are easy to sing congregationally and accumulate reports faster than narrative or doctrinal songs; the same handful of staples (How Great Is Our God, 10,000 Reasons, Holy Forever) get sung every week in thousands of churches. Catalog production is more diverse than what gets sung.
• Several categories don't appear in CCLI at all. Christmas, Easter, New Jerusalem, Heaven, Personal love & devotion, Intimacy, Longing, Lament, Mission, Church & unity all measure 0% in the recent CCLI sample. Some (Christmas, Easter) are seasonal and only register in seasonal top lists. Others (Heaven, New Jerusalem, the affective categories) are genuinely thin in the modern catalog AND further marginalized in CCLI's snapshot of mainstream congregational singing. The combined "below-the-line" share is real and ~12% by my catalog estimate.
• Belovedness (cat 7) shows the largest "hidden" gap. Catalog estimate 14% vs CCLI 8.5% — a 5.5pp gap. This is partly because the Belovedness wave includes a long tail of newer Maverick City, Bethel, and Sovereign Grace songs that haven't yet penetrated CCLI top reports. Conversely, Trust & refuge (cat 13) and Surrender (cat 9) appear higher in CCLI than my catalog estimate — these categories include older, deeply-entrenched repertoire (Way Maker, Goodness of God, Build My Life, Lord I Need You) whose sustained singing pushes their measured share above their share of new production.

The chart values throughout this document remain my catalog estimates. CCLI is shown alongside as a reality-check, not a replacement, because the two metrics genuinely answer different questions. See the "CCLI anchor data" section below for the song-by-song classification behind the CCLI numbers.

• The worshiper's posture inverted. Doctrinal-classical contrition (cat 22) — the "in myself condemned, in Christ justified" frame of Rock of Ages and And Can It Be? — collapsed from 7% to 1% in roughly the same window that Belovedness/identity (cat 7) rose from 0% to 14%. The grammatical position of the worshiper changed: from "I am a wretch saved by grace" to "I am a beloved child of the Father." Both register God's grace, but they place the worshiper in opposite postures. Worth noting: a softer modern echo of contrition — the "I keep failing, glad you still love me" register — exists, but it lives as a sub-thread within Belovedness rather than as its own main subject. So the collapse is specifically of the structurally-doctrinal frame; the affective layer migrated rather than disappearing.
• The eschatological registers (Heaven + New Jerusalem) and the affective registers (Intimacy, Longing, Personal love-devotion) declined in roughly the same window — 1980s through 2010s — and were replaced by the identity / trust / breakthrough triad. This is the therapeutic turn made musical.
• Personal love & devotion peaked exactly when Vineyard intimate worship was inventing the modern register (~1980s) and then declined as identity-language replaced love-language. The grammatical shift matters: songs no longer say "I love you" upward; they say "you love me" downward.
• The two eschatological categories had different death-curves. Traditional "going home" idiom decayed steadily across the whole period. New Jerusalem dropped sharply between the 70s and 90s, then partially recovered after 2010 — visible as a small uptick in the line chart. The recovery was led by the modern hymn writers (Townend, McCracken, Peterson) and one Passion crossover ("Even So Come").
• Trust & refuge has a U-curve, not a rise. The 1950s mainline-evangelical hymnal was thick with trust hymns (Great Is Thy Faithfulness, Be Still My Soul, Like a River Glorious) — Trust ran around 12%. The Vineyard/charismatic-renewal era displaced this register, dropping Trust to ~5% by the 1990s. The modern Hillsong/Bethel/Sovereign Grace wave brought it back to 11% — basically the 1950s baseline. So when songs like Goodness of God, Way Maker, Cornerstone, and Build My Life feel like a rediscovery, that's because they are: this is territory the old hymnal already held.
• Christology and Cross & atonement are the two doctrinal categories that resisted decline. The cross dipped during the Jesus Movement era but recovered with the modern hymn movement; Christology hit its highest share of the entire 70-year period in the 2020s. So the picture isn't simply "doctrine collapsing into experience" — some doctrinal categories are alive and even growing. What collapsed specifically is the eschatological and penitential imagination, not doctrinal content as such.

To anchor the estimates against measurable data, I classified two real CCLI Top lists song-by-song against the 22 categories. CCLI publishes "most reported" lists from licensed US churches; these measure congregational singing frequency, not catalog production. The two are related but not identical, and the difference is itself instructive (see notes at bottom).

CCLI Top 25 — February 2010

Source: CCLI Report Period 409, US territory.

#	Song	Main subject
1	Mighty To Save	Salvation testimony
2	How Great Is Our God	Praise & adoration
3	Blessed Be Your Name	Trust & refuge
4	Here I Am To Worship	Praise & adoration
5	Everlasting God	Praise & adoration
6	Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)	Salvation testimony
7	Open The Eyes Of My Heart	Longing & hunger for God
8	Your Grace Is Enough	Trust & refuge
9	Jesus Messiah	Christology
10	Holy Is The Lord	Praise & adoration
11	Shout To The Lord	Praise & adoration
12	Forever (Tomlin)	Thanksgiving
13	You Are My King	Christology
14	Come Now Is The Time To Worship	Intimacy & encounter
15	Revelation Song	Praise & adoration
16	In Christ Alone	Christology
17	Lord I Lift Your Name On High	Personal love & devotion
18	Hosanna (Praise Is Rising)	Praise & adoration
19	God Of Wonders	Creation reflecting God
20	We Fall Down	Praise & adoration
21	Beautiful One	Praise & adoration
22	From The Inside Out	Surrender & consecration
23	The Heart Of Worship	Surrender & consecration
24	You Are My All In All	Personal love & devotion
25	Days Of Elijah	New Jerusalem & coming Kingdom

Distribution: Praise & adoration 36% · Christology 12% · Salvation testimony 8% · Trust & refuge 8% · Surrender 8% · Personal love 8% · Creation 4% · Longing 4% · Thanksgiving 4% · Intimacy 4% · New Jerusalem 4%. Belovedness 0%, Confession 0%, Healing 0%, Holy Spirit 0%, Cross 0% (no main-subject Cross song made the top 25).

CCLI Top ~47 — Recent (early 2025 reports)

Source: Renewing Worship's reproduction of CCLI Top 100, ranks 1–47.

#	Song	Main subject
1	Goodness of God	Trust & refuge
2	Great Are You Lord	Praise & adoration
3	Gratitude	Thanksgiving
4	Build My Life	Surrender & consecration
5	House of the Lord	Praise & adoration
6	Graves into Gardens	Healing & breakthrough
7	What A Beautiful Name	Christology
8	Firm Foundation (He Won't)	Trust & refuge
9	I Speak Jesus	Healing & breakthrough
10	Living Hope	Christology
11	Way Maker	Healing & breakthrough
12	This Is Amazing Grace	Praise & adoration
13	King of Kings	Christology
14	How Great Is Our God	Praise & adoration
15	Glorious Day	Salvation testimony
16	Battle Belongs	Trust & refuge
17	10,000 Reasons	Praise & adoration
18	How Great Thou Art	Praise & adoration
19	Same God	Trust & refuge
20	I Thank God	Thanksgiving
21	Who You Say I Am	Belovedness / identity
22	In Christ Alone	Christology
23	Lord I Need You	Surrender & consecration
24	Great Things	Praise & adoration
25	Worthy Of It All	Praise & adoration
26	Raise a Hallelujah	Trust & refuge
27	Holy Spirit (Torwalt)	Holy Spirit / outpouring
28	Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)	Salvation testimony
29	This Is Our God	Christology
30	O Come to the Altar	Salvation testimony
31	God So Loved	Cross & atonement
32	O Praise The Name (Anastasis)	Christology
33	Holy Forever	Praise & adoration
34	Rest On Us	Holy Spirit / outpouring
35	Good Good Father	Belovedness / identity
36	Cornerstone	Trust & refuge
37	Revelation Song	Praise & adoration
38	Make Room	Surrender & consecration
39	Reckless Love	Belovedness / identity
40	The Lion and the Lamb	Christology
41	How Deep The Father's Love For Us	Cross & atonement
42	Yet Not I But Through Christ In Me	Confession & contrition
43	Christ Be Magnified	Christology
44	King of My Heart	Belovedness / identity
45	Here I Am To Worship	Praise & adoration
46	The Blessing	Trust & refuge
47	We Praise You	Praise & adoration

Distribution: Praise & adoration 25.5% · Christology 17.0% · Trust & refuge 14.9% · Belovedness 8.5% · Salvation testimony 8.5% · Surrender 6.4% · Healing & breakthrough 6.4% · Cross & atonement 4.3% · Holy Spirit 4.3% · Thanksgiving 2.1% · Confession & contrition 2.1%.

What the anchor data tells us

Three things to notice:

• CCLI top lists overweight Praise & adoration relative to the broader catalog. Both samples show Praise at 25–36%, much higher than my catalog estimates of 13–14%. This is a real and consistent feature of CCLI data: simple, easy-to-sing congregational praise songs get sung in many churches week after week and accumulate reports faster than narrative or doctrinal songs. The chart values estimate share-of-output across the catalog; CCLI estimates share-of-singing in church services. Both are valid measures of different things.
• Several categories don't appear in top lists at all because they're seasonal. Christmas (cat 18) and Easter (cat 19) songs make seasonal top-25 lists in December and April but rarely the year-round average. New Jerusalem (cat 20) and Heaven (cat 21) are similarly thin in any single-year top list, consistent with my estimate of ~1–2% combined. The anchor data confirms the eschatological collapse rather than challenging it.
• The data does suggest I overestimated Belovedness slightly and underestimated Trust & Surrender. Belovedness at 8.5% measured vs my 14% estimate; Trust at 14.9% vs my 11%; Surrender at 6.4% vs my 3%. The Belovedness gap may partly reflect my counting newer/long-tail songs more aggressively than top-list-weighted reality. Trust and Surrender being under-estimated tracks with songs like Way Maker, Goodness of God, Build My Life being core repertoire but less obvious as "trends" than the Belovedness wave. I left the chart values as my estimates rather than swapping in CCLI numbers because they measure different things, but flagging this honestly.

What I haven't been able to anchor

Pre-1988 CCLI data doesn't exist (CCLI itself was founded in 1988, and reliable Top-25 records start later). For the 1950s–1980s figures, I'm working from what's documented in published P&W research (Reagan, Ruth, Lim), denominational hymnals, gospel publisher catalogs, and the testimony of practitioners — not from systematically counted song lists. Those numbers are directionally trustworthy on the trajectory shape (the Heaven/"going home" collapse from 12% to under 1% is well-documented across the literature and the lived experience of anyone who grew up in 50s–60s evangelical singing) but the specific decadal percentages are informed estimates, not measurements.