NEWS FEATURE: Episcopalians in New York Go Hip-hop

c. 2004 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ In New York’s inner city, an Episcopal priest is taking the word of God to the streets _ literally. This summer, Friday evenings on Trinity Avenue in the South Bronx have been filled with the sound of psalms and prayers, over beats by Tupac, NAS and other […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ In New York’s inner city, an Episcopal priest is taking the word of God to the streets _ literally.

This summer, Friday evenings on Trinity Avenue in the South Bronx have been filled with the sound of psalms and prayers, over beats by Tupac, NAS and other hip-hop artists blasted to surrounding blocks from an eight-foot-high speaker system. It’s part of a seven-week Trinity Hip Hop Mass series.


Throughout a recent Mass, DJ duo Good Ol School Sam and Shake worked through a playlist and when someone on the altar finished a prayer with “amen,” the congregation shouted “word!” _ expressing their agreement in street speak.

The Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan was modified in a sermon one Friday into a tale about an elderly black man stopping to aid a Wall Street banker who had been mugged. During Communion, when the priest recounted the story of the Last Supper, Jesus’ “disciples” became Jesus’ “homies.”

The unorthodox curbside services are the brainchild of the Rev. Tim Holder, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church of Morrisania, who readily acknowledges that hip-hop doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of the upper-crust, educated, white Episcopalian.

During a meeting with New York Bishop Mark Sisk earlier this year, Holder said he asked if it was legitimate for a church of privilege to be operating in a place like the South Bronx, and for him, “living like a king compared to the average scale of the neighborhood,” to be baptizing children from the community.

“And we asked ourselves, `Is the love of Jesus Christ legitimate?’ If that’s what we’re preaching, then we’re legitimate. If it’s not, then we’re not.”

After a harrowing shooting incident last March (no one was seriously injured), Holder decided to canvas the neighborhood, a predominantly low-income area dotted with high-rise housing projects, to see if anyone needed help or wanted to talk. He discovered that most had never heard from a pastor before.

It was then that Holder set plans in motion for the Hip Hop Mass, working with nearby St. Ann’s and St. Paul’s Episcopal Churches and a lay team of teens and 20-somethings, and convinced that the South Bronx _ rap’s birthplace in the 1970s _ was the perfect setting.


Lutheran, Pentecostal, Baptist and Roman Catholic clergy and lay people have also taken part in the Masses and participated in the working groups that laid their foundation.

“Hip-hop is who we are; it’s how we talk,” Holder said. “We’re foolish if we think we going to communicate any other way.”

At a Mass on July 9, some of the clergy didn’t quite have hip-hop’s cadences down, but the 50-person congregation responded nonetheless. Jurnee Davis, 9, acknowledged an invitation to offer up prayers at the microphone by remembering a friend’s mother who is serving in Iraq. A young rapper from Brooklyn, Jermaine, performed his own rap about the kingdom of God before the closing prayer, which was penned by a 20-year-old St. Paul’s member.

Theo Payne, a 19-year-old youth leader at St. Paul’s, noted the different atmosphere of the outdoor street service as opposed to his traditional Sunday worship. In church, he said, “you understand it, but it really jumps out there in hip-hop’s language.”

Church leaders have gotten into the act, as well. In the presence of Kurtis Blow, one of rap’s founding fathers, Suffragan Bishop Catherine Roskam concluded the Mass July 2 by encouraging “all my homies and peeps” to “keep your head up, holla back, and go forth and tell it like it is.”

Bishop Vicar E. Don Taylor gave a blessing at the opening Mass in June, and during a procession before a Mass on July 9, Archdeacon Michael Kendall said, “this is a way of saying to the neighborhood, `We hear what you have to say.’ Hip-hop is what they’re saying.”


Holder’s own introduction to hip-hop’s music and language came after years of “thinking it was just some little thing down there,” he said after Mass one recent evening, gesturing toward the pavement with a flip of his hand, as if he were shooing a fly. While watching the 2003 movie “Tupac: Resurrection,” a documentary about the rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot dead in 1996 at age 25, he was outraged by Shakur’s question, “Who will speak for the thugs?”

“I thought, `he’s just a criminal,’ which I guess is what they said about Jesus, too.

“And then I came home and studied him some more,” said Holder, who spent six years at a Birmingham, Ala., church before coming to New York City in early 2003. “I realized he was asking a question from the roots of hip-hop. He was speaking the language of the oppressed. Over half of the young men around here will be incarcerated by the time they’re 40.”

The Trinity Hip Hop Mass concludes July 23. After taking it on the road to a boys’ correctional institute in Virginia in August, Holder said he hopes it will continue back in the Bronx in some form in the fall.

While Holder acknowledged hesitation among church leaders and clergy as to the extent of possible changes to codified prayers and Scripture readings, he felt it was part of the “creative tension” of accepting a new vernacular and said the Bible’s translation into English must have raised similar concerns.

“The church always moves very slowly,” said Holder. “Look how many years it took us to deal with racism, sexism, homophobia. In a negative way, it says more about the church than it does about anybody else.”


Asked if he envisioned Sunday worship along these lines someday in the future, he nodded vigorously. “It’s a new Reformation.”

DEA/MO END CIPOLLA

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