CeCe Winans didn't set out to make an album. She just wanted to sit at the piano and sing.
That simple idea has now become the 18-time Grammy winner's 11th No. 1 Gospel album on the Billboard charts. Hymns began as something far more personal than a commercial project - Winans has said she initially only intended to record herself singing hymns at home, largely for her own devotion. It was her team who saw the bigger opportunity and encouraged her to turn it into a full record.
The result has struck a chord well beyond what she expected. In a new CCM Magazine interview, Winans explained her real motivation wasn't chart success - it was connecting a younger generation to the hymns that shaped her own faith. She pointed to a broader shift happening across the church right now, as many younger believers rediscover older traditions, liturgy, and hymnody that previous generations sometimes took for granted. For Winans, Hymns is her way of stepping into that moment.
That same theme - generations learning from one another - carries into her next major project. This July, Winans will host the fifth annual Generations Live Conference in Nashville, a multi-day gathering designed to bring women of all ages together for worship, teaching, and mentorship. She's described wanting to create a space where mentorship flows in both directions: older generations pouring into younger ones, and younger generations offering something back in return.
Despite an 11th No. 1 album and decades of accolades, Winans kept returning to the same posture in the interview - deflecting credit and pointing back to her faith. She said she can't take credit for any of it, calling it entirely the kindness and mercy of God.
For an artist whose career now spans generations of Christian and Gospel music, Hymns isn't a retrospective. It's an invitation - for listeners of any age to sit down at the same piano bench she started at, and rediscover the songs that have carried believers for generations before them.
