When I was practicing with my choir this week, they mentioned that they wanted to do more new, "uplifting" music, which basically means music in an upbeat Gospel style. Here is some context regarding the music program: first, the choir is comprised of well over 50% African-American individuals, so Gospel music is part of what they have done for a long time. Our current repertoire for a given week does not necessarily reflect this, instead including an almost equal proportion of hymnody and post-1960s songs, plus some psalm paraphrases mostly written in the '80s and '90s. I am not crazy about a lot of these songs, although the hymnody is typically decent and pretty much all of this music is well-received by the parishioners. I have tried to weed out the overused and theologically weak songs as much as possible and instead focus on the best music that we have in our OCP hymnal. I will also occasionally sing the communion chant from the Simple English Propers while the choir receives communion as a way to familiarize the congregation with the Propers, and eventually would like to do more of this. Additionally, I am making preparations to begin using Richard Clark's English setting of the Missa de Angelis, and I think the choir seemed a little overwhelmed with chant when I played the Gloria at practice - several mentioned that it took them back to not-so-good memories of their school days. The Gospel style is typically reserved for the closing song at the Masses in which the choir sings and is taken from a collection of 40-50 songs that the parish compiled years ago, long before my time. In my 2 years as music director, we have only done a handful of these, largely because they either do not seem to contain very sound doctrine or because they are not as "uplifting" as the choir would want. They keep reminding me that "Order My Steps" and "Our God Is an Awesome God" are great options - I have consistently avoided both of these.

My question is this: does anyone know of any decent music in the Gospel style that are also solidly rooted in or at least not contrary to the teachings of the Catholic faith? I am trying to maintain the tradition in my parish of singing in this style and yet not have to revert to the mediocre songs that the parish has used in the past nor to the hit Christian pop tunes that tend to be just as bad or perhaps worse. My first preference would be settings that directly quote biblical texts or at least faithfully paraphrase them. As I am not sure if such a thing even exists (i.e., truly Catholic Gospel music), I extend my query to those who might know more than I.