Never Failing

Sinach’s “Way Maker” became a global congregational standard almost by accident – a 2015 song, recorded independent of any major US Christian label, that by 2020 had been translated into roughly 50 languages and covered by Western artists who often didn’t credit, or know, the Nigerian worship leader who wrote it. “Never Failing,” released September 25, is a far more self-aware attempt at the same job: a short, repeatable declaration of God’s consistency, built from the same plain, chantable phrasing that made “Way Maker” so easy to translate and so hard to misinterpret in a new language.

What’s smart about the writing is how little it depends on specific imagery that wouldn’t survive translation. “Way Maker” worked globally in part because its central phrases – “way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper” – are simple nouns with direct equivalents in almost any language. “Never Failing” repeats that strategy: short declarative titles for God, minimal verse complexity, a structure built to be learned by a congregation on first hearing rather than studied on a lyric sheet. It’s a song engineered for the exact kind of borderless, uncredited spread that made her first hit a standard before most of the people singing it knew her name.

Whether it matches “Way Maker” commercially is a five-year question this column can’t answer yet. What’s reviewable now is the songcraft, and on that count it’s a legitimately strong return to the same well – simple without being thin, and built with the same structural intelligence that made the first song travel as far as it did. 8.3/10.

Hero image: Sinach performing at Mosaiek Theatre, Johannesburg, 2016, by Pshegs, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.