When Forrest Frank and his booking team at UTA opened up ticket sales for the Christian music singer’s 26-city Child of God Tour Part 2 in December 2024, they made a calculated risk — taking the artist from the 2,000- to 5,000-seat standing-room clubs where he had been performing hits including “Good Day” and “Up!” to 6,000 to 7,000 average paid capacity venues that would offer more comfortable seating for the families and younger fans attending his shows.
“We were very intentional about wanting to play smaller arenas,” UTA music agent Jonathan Roberts says. Forrest Frank had also just released “Your Way’s Better,” a catchy pop song that was bolstered by a viral TikTok dance in 2025, resulting in his solo Billboard Hot 100 debut.
“All the songs had snowballed. Dickies Arena in Fort Worth [Texas] sold out [12,000 tickets] on day one of the presale,” Roberts says. “We couldn’t add dates because of certain parameters of time we could work with, so the only thing we could do was find every seat in the buildings we were in and get as many people in as possible.”
For the tour stop at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena in April 2025, that meant opening upper levels. “We had the intention of only playing the lower bowl, up to the 200 level, because that still would have been 8,000 people,” Roberts says. “We ended up with 13,000 people in the building.”
According to Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Report, the global music industry earned 5.1 trillion on-demand audio song streams, rising 9.6% from 2024. The Christian music genre outpaced the industry’s general growth, rising 18.5% in on-demand global audio song streams in 2025 compared with 2024.
Several Christian artists have found themselves in the middle of the genre’s commercial swell.
In May 2025, two Christian music songs appeared on the Hot 100 simultaneously for the first time in 11 years: Forrest Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” and Brandon Lake’s “Hard Fought Hallelujah.” After first releasing a solo version of “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” Lake teamed with country artist Jelly Roll for a collaborative version, vaulting the song into the Hot 100’s top 40. Christian artist Josiah Queen, who is booked by the Jeff Roberts Agency, also made his Hot 100 debut in 2025 with “Dusty Bibles,” as did Phil Wickham with “What an Awesome God.”
Forrest Frank released his Child of God II project in May 2025, reaching No. 1 on Top Christian Albums and No. 12 on the Billboard 200. In June, Lake released King of Hearts, which peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on Top Christian Albums. Lake followed “Hard Fought Hallelujah” with such songs as “Sevens” and a featured performance on Queen’s three-week Christian Airplay No. 1, “Can’t Steal My Joy.”
UTA, which launched its Christian music division in 2024 and represents artists including Forrest Frank, Lake, Wickham, Lecrae, Elevation Worship, Elevation Rhythm and bodie, has seen that uptick in consumption translate to wins on the road.
According to UTA, average attendance for Forrest Frank’s shows nearly tripled from 2024 to 2025, rising from 2,840 to 8,320, as part of his Child of God Tour Part 2 arena trek, which included sold-out shows in Nashville; Anaheim, Calif.; and Tulsa, Okla.
UTA also reports that Lake’s 2024 tour dates brought an average of 8,199 attendees per show, while his 2025-26 King of Hearts tour has drawn an average of 11,436 to date. Lake and Wickham’s co-headlining Summer Worship Nights run drew 10,325 average attendance per show in 2024 and rose to an average of 16,823 in 2025.
“Ever since I got back into [venues] after 2020, it felt like there was something that broke open, that has not changed, just a hunger in the church for the presence of God, a longing for real connection with each other in God,” Wickham says. “It doesn’t feel like I’m preaching that from the stage, hoping people will respond. It feels like people are preaching it back to me with their faith in the room. I’m joining a wave of what’s happening and it’s so beautiful.”
For UTA agent Nick Barnes, who leads the agency’s Heartland initiative (a group focused on shared values of community, faith and family), a few other moments that signaled the genre’s influence on mainstream culture happened backstage at the Bridgestone Arena shows on Frank’s Child of God Tour Part 2 and the Lake-Wickham trek.
“I noticed the amount of crossover musicians, celebrities, actors, artists that were backstage, wanting to hang in the culture,” Barnes says. “When you see that, you know the tide is turning.”
WME partner of Christian music Mark Claassen says, “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.”
Genre mainstay artists such as Chris Tomlin and tobyMac, who are booked by Platform Artists, have long headlined at storied venues such as Kia Forum in Los Angeles and Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. But Claassen notes that historically, younger and newer Christian artists were limited to headlining church venues or Christian colleges. That has changed, as agencies have increasingly worked with not only established Christian music promoters such as Awakening Events and TPR but also Live Nation and AEG. Elevation Rhythm’s Goodbye Yesterday tour included stops at New York City’s Irving Plaza and Nashville’s Cannery Hall. Queen’s Mt. Zion Tour includes stops at Phoenix’s Arizona Financial Theatre and Boston’s Citizens House of Blues.
“We are in a season where all concert promoters are seeing the value and ticket sales and want to work with these artists, all the way down to local independent clubs and theaters,” Claassen says.
After his Child of God Tour Part 2 ended in May, Forrest Frank continued releasing a deluge of songs that reached the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs chart, including “Nothing Else” (featuring Thomas Rhett), “God’s Got My Back” and “Lemonade” (with The Figs).
All those hits primed the recent on-sale for his 29-city The Jesus Generation Tour presented by TPR, which launches in June. Forrest Frank will play a mix of arenas and outdoor stadiums, including Nashville’s GEODIS Park (23,000 capacity), Pennsylvania’s Hersheypark Stadium (30,000) and Arlington, Texas’ Globe Life Field (35,000) while arena stops will feature in-the-round seating. Roberts estimates that over 500,000 tickets have already been sold for the tour.
Awakening Events founder and CEO Dan Fife has also witnessed the growth in the genre. Among the promoter’s current tours are tobyMac’s Hits Deep Tour, Seph Schlueter’s Counting My Blessings trek and Chris Tomlin’s annual Good Friday Nashville event (which, in 2024, set the record for the largest ticketed Christian concert at Bridgestone Arena with 15,889 attendees). According to Awakening, last year it promoted 355 shows, selling over 820,000 tickets, with 2026 projections to be over 400 shows.
“This has been my primary genre for the past 25 years and it’s been fun to see the growth,” Fife says. “It’s a genre where radio is still as important as streaming. Between the [digital service providers] and some of the great radio networks out there, that’s a one plus one equals three situation.”
WME launched its Christian division, WME CMG, more than 10 years ago and has seen its touring income nearly double since 2018, largely due to more arena tours from clients including Lauren Daigle, Kirk Franklin, worship collective Maverick City Music, MercyMe and Crowder. (Former Maverick City Music members Chandler Moore and Naomi Raine are now signed as solo artists with WME.)
From 2023 to 2025, WME CMG continued having steady growth, from booking 800 shows with 3.3 million in attendance in 2023 to booking over 900 shows in 2025 with over 4 million attendees.
WME’s Claassen points to the opening weekend of Daigle’s 2020 global tour — which was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic — as a turning point. “At that time, no artist coming directly out of the Christian music space had reached that level of ticket counts or grosses,” Claassen says. “We were selling out arenas at on-sale. That tour was doing comparable business to artists like Carrie Underwood and the Jonas Brothers, which made it clear this wasn’t niche growth anymore. It was mainstream-level demand.”
According to WME, gospel music artist Kirk Franklin and Maverick City Music’s 50-city Kingdom Tour in 2022 marked a major milestone by grossing over $1 million for individual shows.
“Combining the biggest gospel act of all time with the hottest [contemporary Christian music] and worship act at that moment hit at exactly the right time. It felt like a true crossover of worlds, where everyone in the room felt welcome, and it became a never-been-done-before kind of show,” says Mike Snider, partner, Christian music at WME.
Like their Gen Z and Gen Alpha fans, today’s rising and established artists are social media-savvy, harnessing TikTok, Instagram and other platforms to promote their music, with more faith-based songs finding homes on secular playlists.
Over the past several years, artists ranging from Ye to Florida Georgia Line and Carrie Underwood have released faith-inspired music or albums. Barnes predicts the next several months will have more mainstream artists entering the contemporary Christian music space: “They’re inviting people into the CCM world [to be] themselves, and that’s working.”
Christian artists have also increasingly made appearances at mainstream festivals in recent years, with NF and Daigle playing Lollapalooza, Lake performing at CMA Fest, Anne Wilson performing at Stagecoach and Franklin appearing at All Points East. Forrest Frank will perform at RodeoHouston this year, and Christian artists Caleb Gordon, 1KPhew, whatuprg, Anike, Nathan Davis Jr. and JAN will play hip-hop sets that will open the final day of this year’s Rolling Loud festival.
“We’ve got these artists on our roster that are completely unashamed about who they are and are running headfirst toward it,” Barnes says. “That’s what’s drawing the Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids toward this music, and these kids are looking for something to believe in.”
Top Christian Artists
1. Forrest Frank
2. Brandon Lake
3. Elevation Worship
4. Josiah Queen
5. Phil Wickham
6. CeCe Winans
7. Lauren Daigle
8. Anne Wilson
9. Ye
10. Leanna Crawford
Top Christian Artists ranks the best-performing acts of the chart year based on activity on the Top Christian Albums and Hot Christian Songs lists, as well as Billboard Boxscore. The 2025 tracking period ran from Oct. 26, 2024, to Oct. 18, 2025.