At Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, New York 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 DJ played a hip hop beat, and shouts of praise rose from the pews. "Come on," Durso encouraged, "tear the roof off this place in praise to God."
Eleven years after the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York's Harlem district ran a steamroller over rap CDs, 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. Butts remains critical of some rap music, but younger ministers like 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 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.
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."
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?"
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."
Church resistance
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.
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