Song of the Saints

Phil Wickham has described “Song of the Saints,” the title track of his September 2025 album, as a deliberate twist on his own earlier song “I Believe” – taking a similar declarative structure and relocating its focus from individual conviction to collective inheritance. Where a typical contemporary-worship creed song centers the singer’s own faith in the present tense, “Song of the Saints” explicitly widens the frame to everyone who has held the same beliefs across church history, a song about belonging to a lineage rather than simply affirming a position.

That’s a more ambitious lyrical target than most CCM radio singles attempt, and the arrangement backs it up with scale rather than intimacy – a building, anthemic structure clearly engineered for a full room to sing along to, eleventh studio album or not, rather than a solitary listening experience. The album surrounding it, produced by Jonathan Smith, Shane Becker, and Micah Nichols and featuring an archival Billy Graham recording on one track, reinforces the same idea throughout: faith as something received and passed down, not invented fresh by each individual believer.

Released as a promotional single in July 2025 ahead of the September album, “Song of the Saints” never became a major radio phenomenon on its own – it peaked modestly on the Hot Christian Songs chart – but its thematic ambition is the more interesting story than its chart run. It’s worth hearing specifically against this week’s companion hymn: William Walsham How’s “For All the Saints,” built on Hebrews 12’s image of an unbroken “cloud of witnesses,” is doing almost exactly the same theological work a century and a half earlier, with less contemporary production polish and considerably more structural confidence. Wickham’s song is a legitimate, sincere modern descendant of that same idea, even if it doesn’t yet carry the same weight.

7.7/10 – an ambitious, well-aimed attempt to write a modern “communion of saints” anthem that doesn’t quite match its 19th-century ancestor, but understands exactly what it’s reaching for.

Hero image: “Song of the Saints” album cover art, Fair Trade Services/Columbia Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.