Are
Rappers Raising Their Churches Roofs
September 13, 2004
By JOHN LELAND
At Christ Tabernacle Church in Glendale, Queens, on a
recent Friday night, Adam Durso, the church's youth pastor,
raised a microphone in exaltation. "Yo, God is so ill," he
shouted, using a hip-hop term of praise.
It was more than two hours into the weekly service, and
neither the pastor nor his congregation, a multiracial
group of about 350 teenagers and adults, was ready to quit.
The D.J. played a hip-hop beat, and shouts of praise rose
from the pews. "Come on," Mr. Durso encouraged, "tear the
roof off this place in praise to God."
Eleven years after the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem ran a steamroller over
rap CD's, in what has come to symbolize the antagonism
between hip-hop and the church, the two worlds seem to be
inching closer together. The singer R. Kelly and the rapper
Mase, who left the music business for five years to become
a minister, have new hit albums filled with gospel
messages, and one of this summer's most popular songs was
"Jesus Walks," an overtly Christian rap by Kanye West.
From the church side, a growing number of ministries are
adopting both the rhythms and the bluntness of hip-hop
culture. Mr. Butts remains critical of some rap music, but
younger ministers like Mr. Durso are using its attitudes
and beats to spread the gospel. In the New York area alone,
at least 150 churches or ministries use hip-hop in some
form, said Kim Stewart, a booking agent for Christian
rappers. These include many storefront churches or campus
ministries, she said.
"Hip-hop is the language and the cry of this generation,"
said Mr. Durso, 27, who mixes guest rappers and videos with
conservative evangelical preaching in his Friday services,
which are called Aftershock. The results are part revival
meeting, part Friday night out.
"In today's terms, the apostle Paul would be living in the
projects saying, 'Grace and peace to you, a'ight,' instead
of 'amen,' " Mr. Durso said, using the hip-hop contraction
for all right. "Don't get stuck on the word 'amen.' 'Amen'
just meant 'I agree.' Well so does 'a'ight' to this hip-hop
culture." The sometimes bumpy rapprochement between the
church and Christian hip-hop reflects changes in both.
Instead of meeting in the middle, each is adapting to the
rougher norms of commercial rap.
Christian rappers, who once presented themselves as squeaky
clean alternatives to their secular peers, are increasingly
spinning graphic tales of urban life, with little aroma of
church sanctimony. Corey Red and Precise, a New York duo
that performed at Aftershock, rhymed about their pasts as
drug dealers, lacing their rhymes with sexual frankness and
references to gunplay. Strutting the stage in a do-rag and
football jersey, Corey Red rapped, "I put the heat to your
knot," pointing a finger to his head like a gun, even as he
talked about being saved.
For churches, making peace with hip-hop is a matter of
survival, said Ralph Watkins, who teaches African-American
culture and religion at Augusta State University in
Georgia. "Mainline churches have identified hip-hop culture
as an enemy, and that's their problem," he said. "If you
walked in to 90 percent of your mainline churches who have
not embraced this culture, you're going to find an absence
of young people."
He added that even at its crudest, hip-hop flourished by
telling truths that churches ignored. "The church really
doesn't want to hear the true stories," he said. "They want
the made-up stories, 'I was broke on Thursday and God came
and I got paid on Friday, ain't he all right, he's an
on-time God.' Well, sometimes God don't come on Friday.
Hip-hop says, that's the deal. So I'll start selling weed
or selling crack, because that's the only choice I had. And
that's where the church can't embrace the honesty of what
hip-hop tries to get us to understand and deal with."
In "Jesus Walks," Kanye West cites a comparable
unwillingness on the part of the rap business to address
matters of faith. He rhymes, "They say you can rap about
anything except for Jesus/ That means guns, sex, lies,
videotapes/ But if I talk about God, my record won't get
played, huh?"
Mr. West, the son of a Christian marriage counselor, said
that when his father heard the song, he said, " 'Maybe you
missed your calling.' I said, 'No, maybe this is my
calling.' I reach more people than any one pastor can."
He likened "Jesus Walks" not to church teaching but to his
secular songs, which celebrate the high life without
moralizing. "I don't tell anyone they have to do this or
that. I never said, 'You better have your Louis Vuittons on
or something's going happen to you.' I just said, 'This is
what I want.' Same with Jesus."
The resistance that many churches have shown to hip-hop
culture resembles previous battles over gospel music or
drums in church, said Alton Pollard III, the director of
black church studies at the Candler School of Theology at
Emory University in Atlanta.
"This is just the latest of version" the battle, he said.
"It's about the continuing need for new expressions of what
it means to be human, and the church oftentimes is not able
to keep up, whether we're talking about jazz, the blues,
soul or gospel music."
But unlike gospel and soul, "hip-hop didn't start in the
church," said Phil Jackson, a youth pastor who last year
started a hip-hop ministry called The House in one of
Chicago's poorest neighborhoods.
"So there still exists some antagonism. But for this
generation, the only way to make the gospel relevant to
them is through hip-hop. In my neighborhood we don't need
another church on Sunday morning. We need something to
speak to young people."
Corey Red and Precise, who call their style hardcore
gospel, are emblems of the uneasy crossover. Corey Red,
whose surname is Sullivan, rejected the church as a
teenager, turning to hip-hop and small-timecrime. "I didn't
know anybody Christian my age," he said. "The ones I did
know, there was so much religiosity that we wouldn't be
able to talk. That turned me off." When he was stabbed in a
street confrontation and critically injured, he said, he
felt Jesus in a way that he never had in church.
"It took God to visit me outside the four walls" of the
church, he said. "That's why I love the Lord, because he
came into the street and met me where I was. Even though
the people inside the four walls wrote me off, like 'He's
finished, he's not going to see 25 years old.' "
The experience put him at odds with both his secular and
his Christian peers, he said. Even now, he uses the word
"religion" as a pejorative and sees his faith as tangential
to the business of churches. "I'm not Christian by
following the institutionalized religion of Christianity,"
he said. "I'm Christian like what the word really means, a
follower of Christ."
He and Precise occupy a precarious niche, recording for
Life Music, a Christian label started by Derek Ferguson,
the chief financial officer of Bad Boy Entertainment, Sean
Combs's company. Bad Boy stars who rap about sex and
material excess earn instant fortunes, but Corey Red and
Precise say they struggle to make ends meet. Unlike
Christian rock bands, Christian rappers are rarely played
on religious radio stationsand get little support from
churches or the music industry.
Mr. Ferguson said he struggles to justify the music of some
Bad Boy acts. But their Christian alternatives, he
acknowledged, can barely support a small business.
"The church has these soldiers at their disposal," said
Precise, whose real name is Robert Young. "But a lot of
brothers, after a night of risking their life, they can't
even keep their lights on in their house. We're here for
the church. But any army poorly funded is going to
struggle."
At Crossover Community Church in Tampa, Fla., Tommy
Kyllonen has built a thriving ministry around hip-hop and
runs an annual festival of Christian rap. Like Christ
Tabernacle, Mr. Kyllonen's church is loosely affiliated
with the Assemblies...