Category: Southern 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.

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.

Mark Bishop’s new album asks where the good stuff actually comes from

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AMY TURNER

There is a kind of songwriter who writes about joy the way a carpenter builds a chair: with patience, with structure, with the full expectation that someone is going to sit in it and feel held. Mark Bishop is that kind of songwriter, and Where Do Blessings Come From?, his upcoming collection for Sonlite Records, is the most deliberate thing he has made in years.

The album arrives July 17, with pre-save and pre-add already open for listeners who have been circling it since “Grandkids,” the early 2025 single that quietly burrowed into Southern Gospel playlists and refused to leave. That song, like much of what Bishop does, wore its feeling plainly, without apology. The new record expands that instinct into a full thesis.

“This album, if it has a theme, seems to be about recognising the good in life,” Bishop says. He is measured when he talks about the work, choosing his words the way he chooses his chord changes, carefully and without waste. “It seems to be about healing of heart and mind in troubled times. It’s about recognising that our best times are not behind us, but that our happiest moments still wait somewhere in the future.”

That idea, that the best is ahead and not behind, runs like a current through the whole project. The opening track makes no attempt to be subtle about it. Lines like You’re thinking your best days have come to an end, you’ll never be that happy again, oh yes you will hit with the blunt comfort of a hand on the shoulder from someone who actually means it. Bishop is not interested in hedging. He writes with the confidence of a man who has thought this through.

The focus track, “Over and Over Again,” pulls that confidence into a broader frame, retelling the stories of David, Daniel and the Exodus as evidence for a chorus that insists: God has proven Himself, over and over and over again. There’s not a mountain that He can’t move. He doesn’t have anything left to prove. It is revivalist in structure, anthemic in delivery, and it works precisely because Bishop trusts the material. He does not oversell it. The history does the selling.

Across the record’s full arc, which moves between the six singles that have been trickling out since early this year and a handful of previously unheard songs, Bishop covers terrain that stretches from the kitchen table to the cosmic. He talks about grandchildren and grief, about faith held on to through bewilderment, about the specific texture of gratitude. It is the range of a writer who has been paying attention for a long time.

“There was no love before God,” he says, shifting into something closer to a poet’s register. “Just an empty void. He not only created the heavens and the earth, He created an inner universe of love and peace and overwhelming joy that was as new as the mountains and the seas.”

He continued, “And He created blessings; little nods and kisses from an eternal plane. Blessings are little artefacts of God’s love that have leaked down from heaven. It’s a love so grand that not even Heaven can contain it.”

It is that kind of language, unhurried and unafraid of its own weight, that separates Bishop from a field crowded with capable performers and competent craftspeople. Southern Gospel has always had room for both types. What it gets less frequently is the writer who can make a theological statement feel like a personal letter. Bishop does that consistently, and on Where Do Blessings Come From?, he does it across an entire album’s worth of reasons to believe that something good is still on its way.

“God gives us hope,” he says simply. “This world most often promises much more than it can deliver. But God promises our greatest joy is yet to be experienced.”

Where Do Blessings Come From? releases July 17 on Sonlite Records.

Todd Tilghman is leaving TrueSong | Here’s why he’s walking away from the road

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RUDY DELASANTOS

The man who won over America’s living rooms on The Voice is trading concert stages for a church pulpit, and he’s at peace with every bit of it.

Todd Tilghman has never been the kind of artist who does things halfway. When he stepped onto The Voice stage and won Season 20, he didn’t just walk away with a trophy. He walked away with a renewed sense of purpose. That same intentionality is driving his latest decision, one that will leave a noticeable gap in Christian music’s most compelling group.
Tilghman is departing TrueSong.

Since forming in 2022, TrueSong has carved out a genuinely singular lane in Christian music, serving as resident artists at both the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, two of the most visited faith-based destinations in the country. The group built something rare: a tight, road-tested sound rooted in vocal harmony and songwriting craft, and a loyal audience that showed up for it. Tilghman was central to all of it.

But somewhere between the tour dates, the writing sessions, and the long stretches away from home, something shifted for him.

Todd Tilghman (Courtesy arkencounter.com)

“Honestly, at the end of the day, I know that God’s got a call on my life to do certain things, and I want to be able to do that,” Tilghman says. “But I feel like the number one call on my life is my wife and kids, and all the traveling and being away was kind of putting a strain on that. So I kind of wanted to prioritize them, number one, but also didn’t want to say that what I am doing is just kind of secondary.”

It’s the kind of honest tension most artists quietly carry but rarely say out loud. For Tilghman, keeping it quiet was never really an option.

He is leaving TrueSong to return to pastoral ministry, stepping into the role of pastor at Grace Point Church in Bristol, Tennessee, alongside his wife Brooke. It’s a homecoming of sorts, a return to the calling that shaped him long before television cameras and record deals entered the picture.

“I feel like God opened that door too,” he says. “Kind of brings my anxiety to life, to tell you the truth, doing this kind of stuff. But I got to open the door for Brooke and me to go back into pastoral ministry, where I can serve by her side and also with my kids and also be there at home with them.”

The decision isn’t just about stepping back from TrueSong. Tilghman is clear that this is a full exit from touring life.
“Really, for the most part, probably 99%, I’m coming off the road completely, whether it’s TrueSong or solo, off the road completely.”

That’s a significant statement from someone who has spent the better part of recent years building a music career with real momentum. But listen to him talk about his time with TrueSong and it’s obvious this isn’t a departure rooted in frustration or burnout. It’s something quieter and more deliberate than that.

“I’ve genuinely loved this, doing this with these guys, singing, doing the writing, the traveling, all the things that we’ve done together, I’ve loved,” he says. “And I’ll miss all y’all.”

There’s a warmth in that farewell that feels earned. TrueSong isn’t just a project Tilghman passed through. It’s a chapter he gave himself to fully, and he knows it.

Fellow TrueSong singer Jay Arview confirmed that the group will carry on. The current configuration of TrueSong will continue its residency at the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, with no immediate plans to add another member.

For Todd Tilghman, the next chapter starts in Bristol, Tennessee, with his wife beside him and his kids nearby. By his own measure, that’s exactly where he’s supposed to be.