Sacred Sunday: A Hymn Written After a Shipwreck, Three Ways, Plus Three New Songs About What Comes After

What Sacred Sunday Is

Every Sunday, Song Reviews covers sacred music – Christian, gospel, worship, hymns, sacred classical, spirituals, and other religious musical traditions. It is not a tribute day, and it is not automatically a kind one. These songs get graded like any other review on this site, because taking a tradition seriously means being willing to say when a record doesn’t earn what it’s asking of the listener, not just when it does.

What We’re Covering Today

Six reviews, in two groups: one hymn covered three ways, and three new religious songs that each carry a real story behind the writing.

The Hymn

Horatio Spafford wrote the text of “It Is Well with My Soul” in 1873, reportedly while crossing the Atlantic near the site where a shipwreck had just killed his four daughters; Philip Bliss set it to music three years later. Three very different performances of it:

• Mahalia Jackson (9.0/10) – a 1968 recording that stays disciplined and restrained almost to the end, from a singer who could have made it a showcase and chose not to.
• Alan Jackson (7.6/10) – from 2006’s Precious Memories, a plainspoken country reading that started life as a hymn sung at his father-in-law’s funeral.
• Bethel Music & Kristene DiMarco (7.9/10) – a 2015 reinterpretation that keeps Spafford and Bliss’s refrain and builds an entirely new, more personal set of verses around it.

New Religious Songs

Three songs that aren’t hymns and aren’t covers – each one carrying a documented real-world story that shapes how the song lands:

• Elevation Worship & Chandler Moore (8.1/10) – “God I’m Just Grateful” (2025), Moore’s first major release after leaving Maverick City Music amid a fraud lawsuit over disputed royalties.
• Tasha Cobbs Leonard & John Legend (8.6/10) – “Church” (2025), a Grammy-nominated, deliberately stripped-down duet asking how Sunday’s experience survives a Monday.
• Brandon Lake & Lainey Wilson (7.4/10) – “The Jesus I Know Now” (2026), a comfortable, well-executed country-worship crossover.

What Connects Them

The hymn group makes the clearest version of this week’s point: the same 150-year-old text, written out of a specific, catastrophic grief, survives three completely different treatments without losing what makes it work. Jackson’s restraint, Jackson’s plainness (a coincidence of surname, not relation), and DiMarco’s decision to write new verses around the old refrain are three different answers to the same problem – how do you sing words this weighted without either underplaying them or turning them into a performance – and none of the three answers is wrong.

The three new songs are doing something related but sharper, because none of them can lean on a hymn’s built-in gravity. Each one earns its weight from a real, specific, checkable situation behind the writing rather than from craft alone: Chandler Moore singing about gratitude one month after a departure messy enough to end in a fraud lawsuit; Tasha Cobbs Leonard and John Legend building an entire arrangement around a single request – Monday church – specific enough to avoid worship-song cliché; Brandon Lake, for the second time on this site in as many weeks, casting a mainstream collaborator whose own public identity gives an otherwise ordinary lyric somewhere real to land. None of that guarantees quality by itself. But put a real, documented story next to a song’s plain text, and it’s easier to tell which songs are actually earning the emotion they’re asking a listener to feel – which is, this week as much as any other, the actual job of a Sacred Sunday review.

Hero image: Photo: Carl Van Vechten, 1962 / Library of Congress, Van Vechten Collection (public domain).