Something is shifting in music. And if you've been following Christian artists at all this year, you already feel it.
This summer, Phil Wickham and Brandon Lake are returning to arenas across the United States for their third consecutive Summer Worship Nights tour. The 2025 run drew over 200,000 voices across a completely sold-out stretch, including nights at Hersheypark Stadium and two sold-out shows at Dallas' American Airlines Center combining for over 33,000 attendees. This year's confirmed venues include PHX Arena, Bridgestone Arena, the Moody Center, and Toyota Center - buildings that routinely host the biggest names in mainstream entertainment.
These are not church events. They are arena concerts. And they keep selling out.
WME partner Mark Claassen, who works in Christian music, puts it plainly: "A big part of this is the breaking down of genre walls, especially with Gen Z. Their playlists consist of Christian and worship songs mixed right in with country, hip-hop, pop, alternative and more. It's just not separated or segmented the way it was in the '90s and 2000s."
The numbers back it up. Billboard's year-end Top Christian Artists chart for 2025 was led by Forrest Frank, followed by Brandon Lake, Elevation Worship, Josiah Queen, and Phil Wickham - a lineup that would have been unimaginable on mainstream radar even five years ago. Frank and Lake both placed songs on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously last year, the first time two Christian songs charted together since 2014.
UTA agent Nick Barnes described what he saw backstage at Frank's and Lake's recent tours: "I noticed the amount of crossover musicians, celebrities, actors, and artists that were backstage, wanting to hang in the culture. When you see that, you know the tide is turning."
The tide has been turning for a while. What's different now is that it's undeniable.
Christian music has always carried something the mainstream chases but rarely finds - honesty about suffering, clarity about hope, and songs built to outlast a trend cycle. What 2026 is proving is that people outside the church walls are hungry for exactly that.
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