Small Foxes
Efrem Smith
The is a snippet of an interview with Efrem Smith who is pushing Hip-Hop on the church. -Bobby Carter
In your book, you write: "Sometimes my hip-hop life and my church life have intersected one another, other times they've seemed like two totally different worlds, and sometimes they've seemed like bitter enemies." How do you walk this tightrope between two loves?
The balance for me here is to understand the two loves that are within me. Christ, obviously, is my first love. As I live in an intimate relationship with Him, as well as find my identity in Him, I understand my role to love the church but also challenge aspects of what the church has become in the United States. Because I love the church through the overflow of my relationship with Christ, I have to deal with the racial segregation of the church as well as the church's rejection of hip-hop culture.
In terms of hip-hop culture, I must have a love for it from the perspective of understanding culture. Culture is good and bad, lovely and destructive, healing and hurtful. I love hip-hop culture as God loves the world. How do I die to self daily that I won't become so "churchy" that I lose my credibility to reach those within the culture I grew up in?
1 John 1:6 6[So] if we say we are partakers together and enjoy fellowship with Him when we live and move and are walking about in darkness, we are [both] speaking falsely and do not live and practice the Truth [which the Gospel presents].
You believe that "the church ought to be engaging hip-hop culture but should be seeking to create Holy Hip-Hop culture as well." How do you do that with your congregation?
Every third Sunday of the month, we have a corporate experience of worship we call "Hip-Hop Sunday." The purpose of this experience of worship is to use the elements of hip-hop culture to present aspects of the kingdom of God, so that lives--especially of those living in hip-hop culture--might be transformed. We have holy hip-hop artist
