Many of the church’s most beloved songs were born in the valley. Sickness, grief, and loss have a way of driving God’s people to their knees, and from that low place rise songs of longing for a Savior. Yet gratitude is a form of worship all its own, and some songs are born on the mountaintop. Goodness of God is one such song. It began in a car on a country road, with a mother so overwhelmed by God’s kindness that she could do nothing but sing.
Jenn Johnson’s Early Life: From Preschool Teacher to Worship Pastor
Jenn Johnson was born Jennifer Louise Rock in California, 1982. Some accounts name the town of Eureka as her birthplace, though the record on that point remains unclear. She was raised in a Christian home, and it was in the local church that Jenn, as a little girl, first came to know the Lord. Music filled her childhood as well. Her father and grandfather both loved country music, and Jenn grew up loving it too; a small detail, but one that would surface years later in her most famous song.
As she neared adulthood, Jenn’s plans were modest and practical. She intended to go to college and become a preschool teacher. It seemed her path was set, but God had other plans. Instead, Jenn moved to Redding, California, to study at the school of ministry at Bethel Church.
Redding held a surprise of its own. Years earlier, at a summer camp, twelve-year-old Jenn had admired a sixteen-year-old boy named Brian Johnson. Now the two reconnected at the church where Brian led worship, and Jenn found she could think of little else. She had come to Redding to focus on Jesus, so she took the matter straight to God: “Listen God, either I’m marrying this guy, or take these feelings away.” God did not take the feelings away. Brian proposed on the tenth day of their relationship, just before leading worship on a Sunday morning.
Jenn was only 18 when she began leading worship alongside her new husband, and in 2000 the young couple were named senior worship pastors at Bethel Church. They learned they were expecting their first daughter on their first wedding anniversary, and while Brian worked in the church office, Jenn served from home, teaching piano lessons, raising their baby, and helping lead the worship teams. Piano teacher, young mother, worship leader; Jenn gave herself fully to whatever each season asked of her. The Johnsons would go on to help found Bethel Music, and their family grew to three children. It seemed to the Johnsons that their family was complete. But God had one more gift in mind.
An Unexpected Gift: The Adoption of Ryder Moses
“We thought we were done having children,” Jenn later said. Years had passed since their youngest was born, yet the Johnsons had always remained open to adoption, and one ordinary evening, that openness was put to the test. As Jenn tells it, the couple were watching a television show when, without warning, they both sensed God speaking to them: “I have this gift for you, if you want it.”
Jenn later connected that moment to the prophet Isaiah, who answered God’s call with the words, “Here am I; send me.” Through the teaching of worship leader Darlene Zschech, Jenn had come to see Isaiah’s answer as a willingness to say yes to God before knowing the assignment, and that was exactly the readiness she now felt in her own heart.
On June 2, 2017, Ryder Moses was born in Louisiana, and that very morning the Johnsons announced the arrival of their new son. They were present around his birth, prayed with his birth mother, and chose to remain in contact with her. According to the Johnsons, she even attended the hearing that finalized the adoption, and the judge remarked on how rare that was in all his experience. For Jenn, the adoption was nothing short of a miracle, and she could not keep her thankfulness to herself.
The Story Behind Goodness of God: A Song Born in the Car
After the adoption was finalized, Jenn was driving along a country road when the gratitude in her heart began to pour out as song. She took out her phone and recorded herself singing her thanks to God. “I was crying in my car,” she later recalled. By her own estimate, roughly 60 to 70 percent of Goodness of God came to her in that car.
What prompted such a song? Was it a season of sickness? Of grief? Of fear? No. The Johnsons had certainly known hard seasons, and God had carried them through each one, but this song came from a different place. In Jenn’s words, “It was just my genuine thankfulness to God.”
Remarkably, the finished song never mentions Ryder, adoption, or a courtroom. Jenn’s thanksgiving reached back over her entire life instead. Its opening words are simply “I love You Lord,” and its chorus is a lifetime testimony:
All my life You have been faithful
All my life You have been so, so good
The phrase “all my life” is the key to the song’s reach. A song about one adoption would have belonged to one family. A song about God’s faithfulness across a whole life belongs to anyone who has ever looked back and seen His hand at work.
From Voice Memo to Writing Room
Jenn brought her recording to a writing session with Brian and three seasoned songwriters: Ed Cash, Ben Fielding, and Jason Ingram. Together, the five of them shaped the voice memo into a finished song of two verses, a chorus, and a bridge, and all five are credited as its writers. Jenn later shared that she had hoped to capture the spirit of an older worship chorus expressing simple love for the Lord, which explains the plain and heartfelt words that open the song.
The lyrics also carry echoes of scripture. The bridge in particular recalls the twenty-third Psalm, in which David walks through the valley of the shadow of death without fear, knowing that God’s goodness will follow him all his days. The song’s steady theme of unfailing faithfulness also recalls Lamentations 3:22–23, the very passage from which Thomas Chisholm drew the title of Great Is Thy Faithfulness nearly a century earlier.
Victory Album Release and Early Reception
Goodness of God first reached the public on January 4, 2019, as one of four advance songs from Bethel Music’s album Victory, with church resources released alongside it. The full album followed on January 25, featuring Jenn Johnson and produced by Ed Cash. Critics took notice right away. CCM Magazine called it “the instant must-listen” of the album, and within months, a review in The Banner connected the song to Jenn’s adoption story. That same review noted the song’s country flavor, which was perhaps no surprise from a girl who grew up on her father’s and grandfather’s country music.
CeCe Winans and Goodness of God: “This Is My Testimony”
Many a worship song enjoys a season of popularity and then fades. Goodness of God did the opposite, and much of its second life came through gospel legend CeCe Winans.
CeCe first heard the song when the worship team at her church in Nashville sang it. It struck her at once. “This is my testimony,” she said. “Where did this song come from?” When she decided to record it, her team objected; so many artists had already covered the song that another version might be lost among them. CeCe recorded it anyway, for her conviction was simple: “If it ministers to me, it will minister to others.”
She also understood something her team had missed. A song well known in contemporary Christian music could still be entirely new to Black churches and to other denominations. Her rendition appeared on Believe For It, her first live album, released in March 2021, and it carried the song into churches that had never heard it. In February 2023, her recording reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Gospel Airplay chart, and later that year it won the Billboard Music Award for Top Gospel Song.
Goodness of God Around the World
On October 17, 2023, Goodness of God was named Song of the Year at the GMA Dove Awards, honoring all five of its writers. Accepting the award, Jenn returned to where it all began: “We wrote this song after our adoption was finalized with our son who changed our lives.”
By then the song had traveled far beyond Redding. In 2020, a Spanish version, La Bondad de Dios, carried it to Spanish-speaking congregations. In February 2023, it was among the songs sung during the extended worship gathering at Asbury University, and in 2024, CeCe Winans sang it on the season finale of American Idol. So widely has the song been embraced that in 2026 it stood at the top of CCLI’s Top 10 lists for both Southern Baptist and United Methodist churches, two denominations with very different traditions. That same year, Worship Leader‘s August chart ranked it first in the United States and Canada and second in the United Kingdom and Australia.
A Testimony for Every Believer
It’s easy to sing of God’s goodness when life is going well, and much harder when it isn’t. Jenn Johnson’s song invites us to look back over the whole of our lives, the mountaintops and the valleys alike, and to see a God who has been faithful through every one of them. Whatever season you find yourself in today, take a moment to look back. You’ll find His goodness has been following you all along.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
– Psalm 23:6 KJV
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