The system that pays worship songwriters is broken. Here’s our alternative plan

In January 2026, my phone buzzed with a bank notification. There it was: $3,063.77 in backpaid songwriting royalties. The sum was owed to me for co-writing ‘In the hands of Christ my King’ for Austin Stone Worship, a music collective founded by Chris Tomlin at the Austin Stone Community Church in Texas.

In 2016, as a 21-year-old intern at the church, I had written a key phrase of the song’s bridge. Yet, due to a variety of reasons, I was not given songwriting credit when it was released in 2020. A recent audit had rectified the situation and triggered my payment.

Today, you won’t find that song on any major streaming platforms. In 2024, Austin Stone Worship’s prominent frontman, Aaron Ivey, was fired following devastating allegations of abuse and misconduct. Because he was a songwriter on virtually every track the band produced, and refused to rescind his rights to the music, the church made the painful decision to remove almost its entire back catalog from public platforms. It halted further revenue from flowing to Ivey – but also, unfortunately, to every other songwriter on those tracks, too.

The fallout left a wake of profound spiritual trauma, but it also caused me to take a closer look at the hidden economic mechanics behind modern church songwriting - particularly how royalties are paid to those writing songs for church worship.

The mechanics of the machine

My backpay only arrived because three of the four other songwriters on the track chose to voluntarily dilute their own splits to give me my rightful share. But otherwise, a songwriter’s livelihood is at the mercy of a massive financial pipeline, managed by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI).

So, how does it work? There is a clear process for how a sacred song written for the Church to sing goes from a notepad to a royalty check, and CCLI is in the middle of it. First, the lyrics and the chords are registered with CCLI. If a church wants to print or project those lyrics in a gathering, they pay CCLI an annual fee based on congregation size. That money enters a centralised pool, which CCLI distributes twice a year to corporate publishers and administrators.

At best, this is a disaster waiting to happen; at worst, we are prostituting the bride of Christ

After that, the remaining funds are distributed through CCLI back to the songwriters, typically through their labels. The percentages paid are based on church self-reporting once every few years. Larger churches with more administrative resources can often do a better job of accurately tracking song usage. Because those logs are tied to massive attendance numbers, their data commands a disproportionate share of the pool.

In other words, the songs that megachurches sing receive the greatest payouts, meaning there is massive incentive to write worship that makes it into the megachurch song rotation. These tracks end up on the CCLI Top 100 Chart, which lists the most popular songs in the global Church.

Statistically, landing on that chart requires signing with one of the ‘Big Three’ Christian record labels (Capitol CMG, Essential Music and Integrity Music) that collectively control roughly 80 percent of the Top 100. To catch their eye, you have to build a platform: a personal or corporate brand large enough to justify the label signing you or your church worship team as an artist who can generate profit.

Mixed motives

This is where things get sticky. What often starts off as a holy desire to write songs that honour God and bless the Church can get caught up in a system that blurs sacred worship with economic incentives. Pure motive becomes mixed. Because now you aren’t just writing for the Church. Now, there’s money involved – and, in some cases, an awful lot of it.

This is what happened when Austin Stone signed with one of the big three labels. Like many church worship teams, our songwriters were financially incentivised; the more people sang our songs, the more money we made. It can be a very slippery slope, and in recent history, it has been the only way.

Until now.

When the dust settled after Ivey left, the ministry was forced to rebuild its creative engine from scratch. Out of the ashes, the new creative director, Donovan Golden, is pioneering a radical new blueprint.

Songs that megachurches sing receive the greatest payouts, meaning there is massive incentive to write worship that makes it into the megachurch 

Instead of the traditional royalty structure, they have introduced a new voluntary model, where songwriters can choose to waive their personal CCLI royalties, signing the future revenue over to the local church to fund global missions instead.

This is a voluntary opportunity, meaning songwriters are not coerced or obligated to use the new system. Writers are completely free to keep songs for their solo portfolios or release them independently. 

The new system means writers aren’t in it for the payouts anymore. They want to serve Jesus, love their local church, and use their creative gifts to fund His mission. Right now, there is no slick corporate tech team managing this. There is simply a transparent quarterly Slack message sent to the writers that tracks the Kingdom impact of the fund. In the future, there are plans for a public webpage to provide total financial transparency.

A New Way Forward

A decade ago, my $3,063.77 bank notification would have been a dream come true for many Christian worship leaders. Now, it is a quiet reminder of the temptations of the current church songwriting royalty system. I was paid in full for the song that I wrote for my church and, yet, there is a storm that rages inside of my chest. There is both pride and unease. I cannot imagine what I would feel like if a few zeroes were added to that number.

I think creatives deserve to be paid for their work. But when there is no economic safeguard in place, and the end of a sacred process is a massive platform and staggering wealth fueled by the Church, the maths change things. At best, this is a disaster waiting to happen; at worst, we are prostituting the bride of Christ.

In a way that only God could take what the enemy meant for evil and turn it for good, the ministry that wounded me is now leading the Church forward, and that is deeply healing.