40 Best Christian Songs of All Time

From Mozart to Jonathan David and Melissa Helser

Mar 18, 2025

This is my Sunday morning playlist — my soundtrack for the most sacred and spiritually focused time of my week. And I usually dip into it for at least several minutes each day.

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For most of the world’s active Christians, the experience of sacred music is central to our overall spiritual experience. People like me can scarcely imagine what our spiritual life would be like without Christian music. It is integral to who we are. It is essential to our soul.

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Needless to say, musical works, like almost all works of culture, are a subjective experience. No one can write a list of the best Christian songs that will be the list for any other Christian. We each have our own list — and in our time, that generally means we have our own playlist on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Music.

With great music, as with most of life’s best experiences, we can do little more than share our discoveries with each other. But sharing our discoveries lies at the heart of our personal and shared quests for excellence and the good life. Either a song that resonates with me resonates with you or it doesn’t, and vice versa. When it resonates with both of us, the song becomes part of the bond between us.

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So here we go. I grew up singing in church choirs for 12 years — usually with my mother directing — and, while I loved the thousand dialogues about theology and spirituality that I had with my father (a Protestant minister), my mother’s music had a more profound impact than those conversations and his sermons, because Christian music had a bigger impact on me than Christian doctrine. Plus if you hear a sermon once but sing a hymn 200 times . . . of course.

37 of these 40 songs are Protestant (or nondenominational) songs. While Catholic painters have vastly exceeded in accomplishment Protestant visual artists, I find that Protestant composers and songwriters have vastly exceeded Catholic musicians. Again, totally subjective.

I’m neither an evangelical nor a charismatic Christian, but their achievements in music leave me in awe. So many of them are able to take their deepest spiritual encounters of Deity and express them in musical experiences, share them with us, and draw us into them. Music shapes our experience of Deity — and it’s impossible for me to find a higher purpose for music than that.

We are living through a renaissance in Christian music. Of these 40 songs, 37 have been written since 1993 — in less than a third of a century — and 35 have been written in the first quarter century of the 21st Century. I don’t know what you’d call that but a renaissance.

Contemporary Christian music can be seen as starting in 1982 when Andrae Crouch (1942-2015) went solo and emerged as “the father of modern Gospel music”. Amy Grant and then-husband Steven Curtis Chapman arrived as the next pioneers of contemporary Christian music, and it’s been on a roll ever since.

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“Jesus freaks” who became deeply committed in their Christian faith amidst psychedelic experiences in the 1970s also helped give rise to music with much more personal spiritual depth. Contemporary songs can make traditional hymns seem too rigid and less connected to our lives and souls.

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My favorite Christian musician of all time, Jonathan David Helser, is the son of a “Jesus freak” from that era — Kenneth Helser II. After 16 years in music and general ministry, Ken founded a 52-acre retreat in North Carolina, and Jonathan’s brilliance and that of Jonathan’s wife Melissa emerged from that environ. Someday a book will be written about the Helsers, and we’ll learn much more about this extraordinary family.

For me, there’s always been one great Boomer (born 1943 to 1959) in the mix: Michael W. Smith. Almost all the rest of these Christian songwriters and singers are GenXers born in the 1960s and 1970s or Millennials born in the 1980s and 1990s. Neither generation is acknowledged nearly enough for their spirituality, and no one has yet written a book about their achievements and greatness in Christian music. But I believe they’ll be very well-remembered in history.

I think it’s safe to predict that Millennials already match GenXers as Christian songwriters and will soon surpass them and eventually far surpass them. Millennials will become the greatest generation of Christian musicians because they have decades left to write and perform new songs. (Will they be surpassed by their next-juniors, the Zoomers? Time will tell.)

There are nine songs here by Jonathan David Helser, some of which are also sung by Melissa. Has anyone since Isaac Watts written so many great Christian songs?

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There are six songs by Kirk Franklin and five by Maverick City Music featuring Chandler Moore. There are four songs each by Michael W. Smith, Jesus Culture featuring Kim Walker-Smith and Chris Quilala, and Lauren Daigle. And three by Dante Bowe.

joyful Dante Bowe Official Music Video - YouTube

In my experience, many spiritual songs are emotional but stop at the level of feelings. I prefer a song that reaches me deep in my soul and guides me into an experience that is supernatural. Again, this is subjective.

For me, a great Christian song almost always involves an encounter with the Divine Being and Divine Love and / or human spiritual love. For me, that means the song is neither noisy nor just nice feelings. It means that the song brings me close to Christ — closely, intimately into His very Presence — and opens my soul to receive His Wise Love.

Usually with a song at this level, we are singing to Christ. Or Yehovah. And after thousands of Christian musical experiences since I was a toddler until now, at age 59, in the last analysis I still have to rank three hymns by Catholics — grand hymns by Mozart and Vivaldi and “Be Thou My Vision” by the sixth-century Irishman Dallan Forgaill — as my #1, #2, and #3 Christian songs of all time. Rounding out my Top Ten is “Goodness of God” sung by CeCe Winans.

Album: Cece Winans – Believe For It

If you’re on Spotify, the playlist is here.

On YouTube, the playlist is here.

Each song listed also links to its YouTube video.

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