Even before the music started Thursday night, the 3,000 young people who filled the Beacon Theater in Manhattan for a free event called the Passion Experience were getting loud.
"We love Jesus, how 'bout you," chanted a group in one corner, inciting a competitive echo from across the room. As the first band plugged in, the audience sang along, repeating choruses of praise from four giant video screens: "You are my drink," they sang, "You are my feast."
Two decades after Christian rock bands began to fill theaters, the popularity of the Passion Experience tour, billed not as a concert but a "worship gathering" for college students, reflects a groundswell both within churches and in the Christian music marketplace.
The songs' popularity comes not from Christian radio, but from churches, and the musicians -- who call themselves "worship leaders" rather than performers -- sing not about God, but to God. The audience sings as much as they do.
Praise and worship music, as the songs are known, has long been a part of Christian music, cultivated in churches and distributed to a small but passionate audience through independent record companies. But in the last half decade, it has become a booming business.
Contemporary praise songs have largely replaced hymns in most churches, said Howard Rachinski, president of Christian Copyright Licensing International, a company that follows the music performed in 137,000 churches. About half the churches in the country use more than 75 percent modern songs, he said.
The music, which can take any style -- like rock, country or pop -- is often described as "vertical," because it is directed upward, by band and audience alike.
"You're not connecting to the band, you're directly connecting to God, one on one," said Craig Steelman, 18, who drove up from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, for the concert.
No Christian lite!
The success of the songs outside the church reverses a long-standing assumption within the Christian music business, said Deborah Evans Price, who writes about Christian music for Billboard magazine. "For years people thought that for Christian music to explode it needed to be watered down," she said.
Instead, she said, audiences increasingly want "something more spiritually meaty" than Christian pop.
"People don't want Christian lite," she said.
Sales of praise and worship albums have doubled since 2000, to about 12 million in 2003. While music sales overall slumped last year, including Christian music in general, worship music was up 5 percent. A series of CDs marketed on TV by Time-Life, Songs 4 Worship, has drawn a million subscribers and sold about 8 million CDs since 2000.
Several Christian pop stars, including Michael W. Smith, Newsboys and Third Day, have recently recorded worship albums, often to the biggest successes of their careers.
"What's selling now is compilations and praise and worship," said John W. Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association in Nashville. For this music, he added, "Church is the new radio. It's where people learn about songs, and how songwriters get compensated."
The Passion Experience tour, which last year played 35 cities, chose New York, which is not considered friendly ground for Christian music, to bring area Christians out of isolation, said Shelley Giglio, who started Passion in 1997 with her husband, Louie, as an outgrowth of a student ministry they formed at Baylor University in the 1980s.
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