What An Awesome God

“What An Awesome God,” released in April 2025, set the record for longest-running No. 1 in Mediabase Christian Audience chart history at 21 consecutive weeks, and crossed over onto the Billboard Hot 100 – a rare feat for a contemporary Christian single. Worth stating plainly before anything else: this isn’t a fully original composition. The chorus is Rich Mullins’ “Awesome God,” written in 1988 and one of contemporary worship’s most durable songs in its own right; Wickham and co-writer Jonathan Smith built new verses around it rather than writing something from scratch.

That’s not a disqualifying complaint – worship music has always worked this way, hymn tunes and choruses recirculating across generations with new writing layered on top, and Wickham isn’t hiding the source the way an uncredited sample would. But it does mean the record’s commercial achievement is really two achievements folded together: a genuinely well-built new verse structure that gives the old chorus fresh momentum, and the built-in advantage of reintroducing a chorus a congregation already half-knows before the single ever reached radio. The verses do real work – they’re specific and well-constructed rather than functioning purely as connective tissue to the hook – but the record’s commercial run owes at least as much to Mullins’ 37-year-old chorus as it does to anything new here, and a review that credited the achievement entirely to the 2025 half of the song would be telling only part of the story.

7.4/10 – a well-built new verse structure grafted onto an older, stronger chorus, with a chart record that reflects both halves honestly.

Hero image: Phil Wickham performing live, 2008. Photo by Paul Adonis Hunter, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.