Although Amy Grant cannot claim to have invented the contemporary Christian music (CCM) style of gospel music, she did the most to popularize it in the 1970s and '80s before successfully crossing over to pop music in the '80s and '90s.

When Grant came along as a teenager in the mid-'70s, "inspirational" music was a tiny subgenre, its records sold almost exclusively in Christian bookstores and in smaller numbers.