Passion

After a decade-long stint leading a student ministry at Baylor University in Texas, Louie Giglio and his wife Shelley moved to Atlanta in 1995 and started the Passion conferences, a national collegiate ministry that used live worship music and teaching to encourage young people to live for the glory of God. Yearly Passion events served as the movement's centerpiece -- multi-day, festival-styled gatherings whose attendance grew exponentially from a couple of thousand when Passion held its first get-together in 1997 to up to 40,000 in 2000. Since the second gathering in Austin, Texas in 1998, Passion decided to document the musical portion of the annual conferences via live worship recordings -- raw, in-your-face praise songs with an alternative edge. The original worship leader at the conferences was Charlie Hall, but soon other collaborators including Chris Tomlin, David Crowder Band, Christy Nockels, and Matt Redman joined the fold.

The growing popularity of the live discs and each of these worshippers' songs led Giglio to create sixstepsrecords, an EMI-affiliated label that would serve as a creative hub for the entire Passion team. Of the whole family, Tomlin and David Crowder Band would go on to reach superstar status -- the former would earn the label its first RIAA gold-certified album with 2004's Arriving. Multiple awards, nominations, and showings in the upper echelons of Billboard's Christian charts made the Passion and sixsteps brands the most popular in modern worship music, with many of their songs sung by millions in churches all across the country. In 2006, sixsteps released The Best of Passion (So Far), a two-disc retrospective chronicling the first ten years in the life of the movement. The annual Passion concerts became a praise & worship tradition and live releases drawn from each year's concert continued to appear in 2006 (under the title Everything Glorious), 2008 (God of This City), 2011 (Passion: Here for You) and 2012 (Let the Future Begin). ~ Andree Farias, Rovi