African-American gospel has been borrowing from blues and R&B sources ever since Ma Rainey's pianist, Georgia Tom Dorsey, got religion in 1926. This two-CD overview of modern gospel proves that things haven't changed. The first disc is titled "Urban Contemporary," but that's misleading – what you actually hear are religious lyrics put to music borrowed from '70s funk and R&B. The problem is that some forms of '70s R&B encourage the ecstatic release that marks gospel at its best, while others discourage it. For example, the easy-listening, Quiet Storm pop soul of Lionel Richie and post-Supremes Diana Ross – with its slumbering rhythms and wishy-washy synthesizers – dampens the powder in gospel's cannon. Yet that's the musical model adopted by the Winans family and by such imitators as Donnie McClurkin, Anointed and Virtue, all represented on this set.

On the other hand, the bass-heavy, pelvis-grinding music of funk – which would seem unlikely source material for church hymns – actually turns out to be perfect for gospel's tension buildup and release. The WOW compilation begins with gospel's star of the moment, Kirk Franklin, whose infectious, hip-hop-flavored "Stomp" is built atop a sample from Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a Groove." The Sounds of Blackness get help from two of Prince's former sidekicks, Levi Seacer and Billy Steele, on the dizzying funk ballad "God Cares." Hezekiah Walker's "Jesus Is My Help" injects an earlier funk flavor – the organ-pumping, stutterstepping beat of James Brown – under its fervent choir vocals.

The second disc of the WOW anthology is labeled "Traditional," but that, too, is misleading, for it includes only one representative (Shirley Caesar) from gospel's golden age, the '40s and '50s. Instead it emphasizes artists such as Richard Smallwood, the Rev. James Moore, Dottie Peoples and Yolanda Adams, one-time innovators who are now considered old-fashioned because they craft their arrangements around the Stax/Volt soul of the '60s rather than the P-Funk and Quiet Storm R&B of the '70s. As a whole, WOW Gospel 1998 is maddeningly uneven, but it offers a cheap crash course in modern gospel and includes a dozen terrific tracks for home taping. (RS 780)

GEOFFREY HIMES