Author: Texas Gospel

Ministry, entertainment, or something the Booth Brothers settled long ago

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AMY TURNER

The question has been asked in sanctuaries and greenrooms, on fan forums and theology blogs, with the kind of fervour reserved for things of extreme importance. Is Christian music ministry or entertainment? It is the sort of question that sounds profound right up until someone like Michael Booth gets hold of it.

“I don’t think that’s a good question at all,” says Booth, one third of the Booth Brothers, the Southern Gospel trio that has spent decades doing something that defies easy categorisation. “I think it’s divisive and I think it’s distracting.”

He is not being dismissive. He is being precise, which is a different thing entirely.

The Booth Brothers, consisting of Michael, Ronnie, and Buddy, have collected GRAMMY nominations, Dove Awards, and Singing News Fan Awards the way other people collect regrets. Chart-topping songs, industry recognition, a reputation among listeners and peers alike as one of the finest acts Gospel Music has produced in a generation. And still, inevitably, someone in the crowd or the comment section wants to know: what exactly are you doing up there?

Booth’s answer reframes the whole conversation. He reaches for 1 Corinthians the way a craftsman reaches for a well-worn tool. “Whether we eat or we drink, whatever we do, we do unto the glory of God,” he says, quoting the passage with the ease of someone who has lived inside it. “And I believe that goes for… whatever we do, that’s everything. So that means if you’re a gospel singer, a preacher, a teacher, an evangelist, a comedian, a plumber, whatever it is, we’re to do it for the glory of God.”

The logic is elegant and it cuts straight through the debate. Ministry or entertainment? The Booth Brothers do both, without apology, and they do them simultaneously. Audiences leave their events with something harder to quantify than a setlist, hearts and minds refreshed, having moved through inspiring songs and genuine laughter in the same breath. It is a combination that sounds unlikely on paper and feels inevitable in the room.

For Booth, the binary question misses the point so completely it almost becomes a different question. “The question is not whether it’s ministry or is it entertainment,” he says. “The question is motive. Is my motive to glorify God?”

That single word, motive, does a lot of heavy lifting. It shifts the responsibility away from genre labels and industry taxonomy and places it squarely with the artist, in the quiet space between intention and performance, before a single note is sung.

The Booth Brothers have built their career in that space. Every note carries what their biography describes as “the utmost desire for each song and lyric to minister to audiences, touch souls, and ultimately point others to Jesus Christ.” That is not the language of people trying to win an argument about categories. That is the language of people who settled the question a long time ago and got on with the work.

“I’m not going to be able to solve this for everybody,” Booth admits, with the candour of a man who has no interest in pretending otherwise. “I’m not even going to try. I’m just going to share with you my thoughts.”

It turns out, that is more than enough.

Every believer in Christ carries a richness that calls for gratitude and prayer

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

When Paul writes to the Christians in Ephesus and mentions that he has not stopped giving thanks for them, his gratitude is connected directly to what he understands to be true about every person who belongs to Christ. Ephesians 1:15-16 shows us a Paul who has heard about the faith of the Ephesian believers and their love for one another, and who responds not with a simple word of encouragement but with ongoing, thankful prayer on their behalf.

The reason behind his thankfulness is significant. Paul is not simply glad that they are doing well or behaving kindly toward each other. He is moved because he understands that every believer in Jesus has been given every spiritual blessing in him. These are not small or ordinary people in his eyes. Every person who trusts in Christ has access to a deep and vast spiritual richness that they may not fully see yet. That truth is worth praying about, and it is worth being genuinely thankful for.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,

Ephesians 1:3

The Hyssongs’ new single “It’s Not Over Yet” carries a message of faith, healing, and hope that hits harder than most

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AMY TURNER

There’s a moment in gospel music when a song stops being just a song. It becomes testimony. It becomes the thing a family reaches for when the doctors have delivered news that lands like a stone in still water, and the ripples just keep going. For Richard Hyssong and his family from Maine, that moment arrived twice, seventeen years apart, and the second time, they already had the song waiting.

The Hyssongs have been a fixture in Southern gospel circles long enough to know the difference between a number that fills a setlist and one that fills a room with something harder to name. “It’s Not Over Yet,” their new Horizon Records single, belongs firmly in the second category. Written by Jason Cox, Kenna Turner West, and Brian White, the track rides a stately, unhurried arrangement produced by award-winning Jeff Collins, with Dell Hyssong stepping forward to carry the lead. The production is deliberate in its restraint; there’s nothing here designed to distract from the lyric, which doesn’t pretend to offer easy comfort so much as it insists, plainly and without apology, that the story isn’t finished yet.

Richard reaches back to 2008 to explain why the song landed so personally. Their daughter Makayla was born into a situation no parent should have to navigate: 22 tumours in and on her heart, and a massive number of brain tumours alongside them. The prognosis was bleak. Doctors told the family she would likely not survive, and if she did, she would face severe limitations. “We were devastated,” Richard says simply, the understatement carrying the full weight of what those days must have been. But the tumours on Makayla’s heart disappeared. She grew up. She talks and walks and sings, and she now travels with the family, lending her voice to the very ministry that her survival helped to shape.

That backstory would be enough on its own to give “It’s Not Over Yet” its emotional ballast. But then December 2025 arrived, and the Hyssongs found themselves standing at a second crossroads. After years of good health, doctors discovered two tumours on one of Makayla’s kidneys, and one on the other. The song they had been singing to audiences about holding on and trusting God had become the message they needed to receive themselves all over again.

“We are not going to give up,” Richard says. “We know that ‘It’s Not Over Yet.’ The same God that healed her before can do it again.”

The lyric itself doesn’t shy away from the scale of what it’s asking people to believe. It invokes the parting of the Red Sea and the fall of Jericho, reaching for the kind of precedent that makes current impossibilities feel smaller. “Are you staring down a giant that just won’t seem to fall,” it asks. “Are you facing the impossible, your back’s against a wall.” The chorus doesn’t offer a formula or a timeline. It offers a posture: keep trusting, keep believing, don’t let your heart forget. The simplicity is the point. Theology dressed in plain clothes, for people who don’t have the bandwidth for anything more complicated.

Richard frames the song’s reach in terms that go well beyond Makayla’s story. “Maybe you have had a bad report from the doctor or family member,” he says. “Maybe you are struggling with finances and think it is the end.” The catalogue of ordinary crises is the point: the song isn’t reserved for extraordinary suffering. It’s for whoever is sitting with something that feels final, looking for a reason to believe that the last word hasn’t been spoken yet.

That’s a hard thing to pull off in any genre, and Southern gospel has its share of songs that attempt it and land somewhere closer to platitude. “It’s Not Over Yet” avoids that fate partly because of the restraint in the production, and partly because the Hyssongs aren’t delivering it from a position of resolution. They’re singing it from the middle of the story, still waiting, still trusting, still travelling Sunday to Sunday and believing it themselves. There’s a credibility in that which no studio polish can manufacture.

Whether the song crosses over beyond the Southern gospel faithful likely depends on how many people in any given congregation are quietly carrying something the doctors or the bank statement or the calendar has told them is over. If the Hyssongs’ experience is any guide, that number is higher than it might look from the outside. And for those people, “It’s Not Over Yet” arrives at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right message: hold on. He has the final say.

11th Hour’s “Just keep the faith” is the Southern Gospel reminder weary believers didn’t know they needed

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AMY TURNER

Amber Eppinette Saunders does not write songs for the highlight reel. She writes them for the Tuesday afternoon, the 3 a.m. ceiling stare, the moment when the prayer feels like it is bouncing off the roof and going nowhere. The soprano voice of Southern Gospel trio 11th Hour has built a career on meeting people in those moments, and with “Just Keep the Faith,” the group’s latest single for Sonlite Records, she has landed squarely in that territory once again.

“This song was written with every believer in mind,” says Eppinette Saunders, who co-wrote the track alongside longtime collaborators Kenna Turner West and Jason Cox. It shows. The song does not open with triumph or arrival; it opens with admission: Sometimes we grow weary from all of the trials we go through. From the stage to the pew, the lyric says. No exceptions made, no one excused from the struggle.

Producer Roger Talley frames that honesty in an arrangement built around Tim Parton’s piano and organ, kept front and centre throughout, grounding the track in the African-American-influenced gospel tradition that 11th Hour has long drawn from with both reverence and fluency. The result is music that breathes, that gives Eppinette Saunders room to move through the song’s emotional range without forcing anything.

And she uses that room. When the chorus lands, Just keep the faith as you watch and pray, remember God’s promises and trust in His name, it does not arrive as a slogan. It arrives as something closer to a hand on the shoulder from someone who has been in the same dark hallway and found the way through.

“We all get weary from fighting battles no one else can see,” she says. “Even though it only takes a little faith to keep going, sometimes we need a reminder to hold on to a little bit more.”

That kind of plain-spoken pastoral honesty is part of what has kept 11th Hour, rounded out by Garrett Saunders and Victoria Bowlin, consistently relevant in a genre that rewards authenticity over novelty. The trio has accumulated multiple Top 10 Singing News chart hits and earned nominations for Trio of the Year, AGM Album of the Year, and, individually for Eppinette Saunders, Soprano of the Year. The accolades reflect a group that has never mistaken polish for purpose.

The ministry remains the point. “There is nothing more fulfilling than ministering to the body of Christ and sharing the gospel,” Eppinette Saunders says. “Every dream we have ever had, God has already fulfilled. He never ceases to amaze us.”

“Just Keep the Faith” carries that conviction without wearing it heavily. The message is distilled down to its simplest, most durable form: perseverance matters, God comes through, hold on. In a landscape full of songs that complicate faith or celebrate it from a comfortable distance, this one sits down beside the listener in the middle of the hard part and says the thing that needs saying.

With Amber, Garrett, and Victoria continuing to follow wherever the next open door leads, 11th Hour shows no sign of softening their mission or their sound. If anything, this single makes clear they are just getting started.

The Gospel is more than one truth: Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection all matter

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

When we share the good news of Jesus Christ, we speak it, sing it, and live it out, but reducing the gospel to a single point leaves out something important. Many people summarise the Gospel simply as “Jesus died for our sins,” and while that is true, Paul was clear in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 that the full gospel includes three connected truths: Christ died for our sins, he was buried, and he rose again on the third day, all in keeping with what the scriptures had promised.

The empty tomb is not a detail we can set aside. Our rescue from sin does not stop at the cross. We are also saved by his resurrection. Without the risen Lord, the story is unfinished. The good news of Jesus Christ is whole only when all three parts are held together, and that is the message we are called to carry into the world.

For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,

Romans 6:5