Chris Tomlin’s Burning Lights enters The Billboard 200 at #1. Tomlin, 40, is a worship leader at Passion City Church in Atlanta. Tomlin isn’t the first artist who has a leadership role in a church to climb high on the chart. Marvin Sapp, the founder and senior pastor of Lighthouse Full Life Center Church, located in Grand Rapids, Mich., debuted and peaked at #2 in March 2010 with Here I Am.

Burning Lights is Tomlin’s 12th album; his second to make the top 10. Hello Love hit #9 in September 2008. Tomlin won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album for his 2010 album And If Our God Is For Us… He has won 17 Dove Awards (the top honor in the Christian music field).

Les Miserables jumps to #1 in its third week on The Billboard 200. It’s the first soundtrack to a movie that was based on a stage musical to top the chart since Mamma Mia! scored in August 2008. Les Miz has grossed $103,503,000 in its first two weekends at the box-office. It dipped from #3 to #4 in the box-office rankings in its second weekend.

Les Miz opened on Christmas Day. The movie version of Dreamgirls, which also spawned a #1 soundtrack, opened on Christmas Day in 2006. Les Miz is likely to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture tomorrow.

The Les Miz Broadway cast album vaults from #171 to #104 (its highest ranking to date). It has sold 1,596,000 copies. The London cast album re-enters the chart at #160. It has sold 887K copies. Putting this together, Les Miz is #1 on Top Soundtracks for the third straight week and holds the top two spots on Top Cast Albums, a neat trick.

Adele’s 21 is officially the first album to wind up as the year’s best-seller twice since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales for Billboard in 1991. The album sold 4,414,000 copies in 2012. It sold 5,824,000 copies in 2011. It’s one of only four albums in the Nielsen SoundScan era to sell 4 million or more copies in each of two calendar years. It follows Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995-1996), Shania Twain’s Come On Over (1998-1999) and Santana’s Supernatural (1999-2000).

Even though it was in its second year of release, 21 sold more copies in 2012 than the best-selling albums of 2006 through 2010 did in those years. The album spawned three #1 hits, “Rolling In The Deep,” “Someone Like You” and “Set Fire To The Rain.” It won six Grammys in February, including Album of the Year.

If you were anywhere near a radio last year, you don’t need me to tell you the titles of the top three hits of 2012: “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye featuring Kimbra, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and “We Are Young” by fun. featuring Janelle Monae.

There are three main things you should know about them. First, none of the five artists involved had ever cracked Billboard’s Hot 100 before. Second, all three hits are nominated for Grammys as Record and/or Song of the Year, which shows an unusual degree of fan and industry agreement. Third, each of the three songs sold more copies than any song had sold before in a calendar year in digital history.