This Artist Changed the Christian Music Industry One Song at a Time

Published: June 11, 2025

Microphone for singing and comedy — Photo by Matthias Wagner on Unsplash

By Michaela Gordoni

Matthew West and Grammy-winning songwriter and music producer Charlie Peacock recently talked about Peacock’s impactful role in Christian music.

“All of a sudden started getting calls from Christian record companies that were interested in me personally or interested in me producing their artists or writing for artist,” Peacock shared about a period in the ’80s. “At that time, it was kind of [a] very rare thing to be a Christian or a vocal you know kind of explicit vocal Christian who was…making pop records…The lyrics were more like worldview lyrics.”

Rather than writing directly about faith, he wrote lyrics about various topics from a Christian perspective.

“T-Bone Bernett had a famous quote that ‘You can either write about the light or what you see from the light,” he shared. “And so a lot of me and my friends, we took the second option. You know, we were often writing about the light in terms of the person of Jesus, but really more our lyric content was more about what here’s a whole multitude of subjects.”

West responded, “It’s like these songs about faith versus songs about life from a faith perspective…I’ve always felt like in that other lane of songs about life from a faith perspective. So that makes a lot of sense with me too. That resonates.”

Peacock is a six-time Grammy winner, one of Billboard’s 500 most important producers in music history and the host of Apple Top 100 podcast, “Music & Meaning.”

Peacock was part of a movement that went from writing from a faith perspective to writing about faith itself.

“In terms of serving the church in music, you’re thinking about what does it mean for this to connect with the youngest of believers, right? Including the mature believers,” Peacock said.

“So there’s a kind of a little bit of differentiation there as opposed to knowing that, you know, I’m called to be an artist in the world, which doesn’t mean that the work of serving the church through music isn’t artistic,” he said. “It just means that you may have just a slight shift in your direction…That’s what I felt I was I was called to do.”

He also led worship at his home church, but he knows that his skills lie in creating music.

Peacock released a book about his experience in the Christian Music industry called At the Crossroads: An Insider’s Look at the Past, Present, and Future of Contemporary Christian Music.

“The artist’s role in the world involves God’s people being artistic for everyone, everywhere, and in everything inspired and directed by the law of love,” he wrote in the memoir.

Peacock’s journey highlights the power of intentional songwriting, bridging the sacred and the everyday with artistic purpose.

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