The 41st Annual Stellar Gospel Music Awards will reach BET viewers on Sunday, August 30, 2026, with Kirk Franklin hosting the show and performing from a taped ceremony in Charlotte, North Carolina. The broadcast is set for 8:00 p.m. ET, with an encore at 10:30 p.m. ET the same night.
That makes the Stellar Awards 2026 a date-specific TV event, not just an industry gathering. The show carries the theme Feels Like Home, and its lineup leans heavily on gospel’s current range, with performances from Aaron Cole, Céjae, Darrel Walls, Jekalyn Carr, Jevon Dewand & The Trap Starz featuring Isaac Carree and Jazze Pha, JustCordell, John P. Kee, Lisa Knowles-Smith & The Brown Singers, Melvin Crispell III, PJ Morton, Tye Tribbett featuring ABLAZE, Maranda Curtis, Marvin Sapp, William Murphy and Vincent Bohanan & SOV.
Tasha Cobbs Leonard will receive the Aretha Franklin Icon Award, while Pastor Mike Jr. will be honored with the Thomas A. Dorsey Most Notable Achievement Award. Don Jackson, founder of the Stellar Awards and chairman of Central City Productions, Inc., said the event is meant to reflect gospel music’s power to inspire, heal and give hope, while BET’s Louis Carr said the network is a natural home for a night built around community, culture and connection.
That homecoming feel comes with a timing wrinkle that matters for viewers. Although the ceremony was taped in Charlotte, the BET premiere comes later, then the show rolls into a same-night encore before expanding into broadcast television syndication from September 5 through September 27, 2026. In other words, the first audience gets the national cable airing, but the reach of the show keeps widening after the tape is already in the can.
What remains unanswered is how much of the Charlotte performance night will make the BET cut in full. The network has already fixed the schedule, and the awards have already been recorded, so the next real milestone is not the ceremony itself but the way the broadcast lands on August 30 and then carries into syndication the following month.
