Ran across this article in a few-weeks-old Newsweek, and had to look it up online. It’s all about how hip-hop church services are all the rage in some congregations.
The white, middle-aged Rev. Timothy (Poppa T) Holder doesn’t look like someone who would shout “Holla back!” in his priestly blessing. But, noticing the power and ubiquity of rap in his South Bronx neighborhood, Holder created a hip-hop mass in his Trinity Episcopal Church of Morrisania. Now he wants to help other churches get in the act, and has devised a hip-hop service for the more buttoned-up St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church.
Hip-hop services are popping up all over. Lawndale Community Church in Chicago packs the house with its rap-inspired version. The leaders of Minneapolis’s Sanctuary Covenant Church do hip-hop services six times a year to boost youth attendance. In Tampa, the Rev. Tommy Kyllonen’s Crossover Community Church gained 10 times as many congregants when it started using hip-hop in youth outreach programs. Holder has developed “The Hip Hop Prayer Book,” inspired by the Book of Common Prayer, which he wrote with help
from dozens of rappers, musicians and poets.
On the one hand, so not my bag, baby. But, then, if someone finds it inspirational, no accounting for tastes (especially mine). Of course, the problem with being so “hip” is that it’s easy to get very dated very fast.
So, for example, take this “hip-hop” rendition of the 23rd Psalm from the above-referenced Prayer Book.
The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.
He allows me to chill.
He keeps me from being heated and allows me to breathe easy.
He guides my life so that I can represent and give shout outs in His name.
And even though I walk through the hood of death,
I don’t back down, for You have my back.
The fact that He has me covered allows me to chill.
He provides me with back-up
In front of player-haters, and I know that I am a baller and life will be phat.
I fall back in the Lord’s crib for the rest of my life.
(“Stewardess, I speak Jive …”)
(And for those of you wondering what a “baller” is …)
I don’t object to the above based on some bizarro sense of the inerrancy of the English Bible translation of your choice, like some do …
Eric Turner, the assistant pastor at Bible Baptist Church in Creedmoor, N.C., says that when you alter Biblical passages, “you take the author of those writings down. God is completely different from us, and trying to make him like us is incorrect … Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
(Which is, of course, why Rev. Turner will, this Sunday, be reading Scripture in Aramaic.)
No, my objection is that it just feels … stupid. Artificially hip and trendy, adults trying to sound “hep,” in a way that the youth they are seeking to reach this way will find goofy and unrealistic. I may well be wrong — it’s not my idiom or age bracket — but I find it more aesthetically and liturgically unpleasant than theologically so.
To each, though, their own.
I’ve always liked the ‘Cotton Patch Version’ of the New Testament. Is that a different thing?
Having performed in the stage adaptation of the “Cotton Patch Gospel According to Mark,” yes, it is. At least, I don’t recall any mention of “phat” and “baller.”
That said — it’s similar, in terms of adopting the Message to the common vernacular, which (bearing in mind the risks of paraphrase) is a beneficial thing, to my mind.
But … not sure this is going to last as long as some of the other vernacular translations (whether the Cotton Patch version or the “Todays English Version”) will. Again, imagine a “Jive” translation of the 23rd Psalm …
First a disclaimer: I’m probably one of the whitest guys around, secure in my Irish heritage and complete lack of appreciation for hip-hop or rap.
That being said, I really enjoyed that translation of the 23rd Psalm. Even scarier, I probably understood the reference in it better than I do the original tale about sheep and pastures. I’m sure that is even more the case for those in the South Bronx.
At the church I attended years ago, the pastor taught what was termed “progressive revelation” by which God continues to use events, objects and people today to continuously reveal His will to us. One might question the references, but their applicability to the message could not be more clear for those in non-agrarian, contemporary society (at leas parts of it).
As I said, if it brings meaning to you, it’s a good thing. I’ve seen other renderings of Ps. 23 that were also inspirational.
I find the above, myself, too “hip” for my taste, and I do worry that such renderings should be, if not timeless, then of some durability across time. I imagine what a Disco 23rd Psalm would be like (with Jesus dressed up like Travolta — “Sunday Morning Fever!”) and cringe a bit.
The fact that, aside from the “baller” reference, I, too, understood the above, worries me still more. 🙂
Then there’s this version…