Trip Lee's 'For Your Glory' a Hip Hop Exploration of the Greatness of God
Trip Lee photo image courtesy of Reach Records
Upon initial consideration, it would appear that praise and worship music doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with hip hop. After all, the thought of syncopated beats and rhythms highlighted by the spoken word in a Sunday morning church service might be hard to comprehend for some.
Not so fast. Christian hip hop pioneer Trip Lee has always believed that cultural expression could naturally meet congregational worship. With the launch of BRAG Worship, a musical collective born from Lee’s long-standing BRAG movement, there is a strong conviction to forge a culturally forward sound created for both corporate and personal worship.
“I’m not a worship leader, but I am a worshipper,” says Lee, who has previously released eight albums and spent years in pastoral ministry. “This music, this collective, it’s for us. This is my expression of it.”
Seeing the hip hop musical genre blended with worship as a vital discipleship tool, Lee and BRAG Worship have released a new EP titled, For Your Glory. His hope is to broaden what worship can sound like while remaining focused on the greatness of God.
I recently sat down with the thoughtfully engaging Lee to discuss how pastoral ministry helped prepare him for this project, the vital need to bring some unity to the Church, and how worship music needs to become a broader concept as we move into the future.
This is sort of an odd question to kick things off today. I asked several musical artists this at the Dove Awards a few months ago and got some very interesting responses. How does your music affect your ministry and how does your ministry affect your music?
Well, I'll say this, I do think one of the interesting things about hip hop is because you have more words, you can say more things. And obviously I've been rapping for a long time. When I began to preach regularly, I think it actually helped me to be a better preacher because I was used to trying to say big theological truth in very understandable ways, with particular kinds of metaphors in different amounts of space. And one of the things that I value so much when I'm trying to help people see what God says in His word is I want to do the mental leaps for them. Not that I don't want them to think (on their own), but I want to bring it down right here so we can stare at it and really interact with it. I think writing songs while trying to put big theological truth in it, I think it helped me to do that well from the pulpit.
Let’s jump into the new album. It's a worship album and it seems like every time you blink your eyes these days, there's a new praise and worship album out there. But I'm fascinated by the fact you are releasing a worship album as a hip hop artist. That's not common. It's not an everyday occurrence. You have released eight previous albums. Why a worship record now?
This has been an idea I've had for a really long time, and some of these songs I actually wrote a long time ago as well. I've written more new ones, but I think worship is really important. I think sometimes we think there's all this stuff we kind of made up in the Western Church that we do when the church gathers. We have lights, some fog machines, and we sing songs. That's the reality of modern worship these days. But this is something that God has commanded us to do when Christians gather together. It's so important, and it's blessed me so many times. I can't count the number of times where I love Jesus more at the end of a song I sang with other Christians than I did when it began. Or the times people have said to me, I was really struggling with doubt.
I couldn't get in my Bible this week. But when I gathered with God's people and we all sang together, that helped to remind me that we're all going after Him together. It's just a really important thing. And so I think when I started realizing this, even when I was in college, and seeing how important it was in the life of the Church I was a part of, I thought I would love to be able to write worship songs one day. It was just something that has always been in my heart. Even when I was pastoring, when I helped plant a church and we didn't have amazing musicians right away, we were trying to take contemporary worship songs and make them feel more like culturally and traditional gospel songs. It was hard to do. And I always thought, we should keep having more and more different kinds of expressions of worship music. I understand that as a preacher, I'm never going to preach such a good sermon that on Thursday morning someone is going to be driving to work, reciting the words of my sermon. But music has a way of getting into our hearts and our souls in memorable ways that is really valuable.
Do you think your years of teaching in pastoral ministry helped you prepare for this project?
Absolutely. I think in part because I saw the songs we sing together as one of the ways I was helping shepherd in my church. Sometimes leaders can think like, ‘Oh, the important stuff, the Word is most important.’ We will think about that and just let other people figure out what they're doing with the music. But this is one of the ways God has grown us. In Colossians 3, it says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual praise.’ It's one of the ways that we teach and admonish each other. When I was pastoring and trying to think about how I can help, how can I help the people I'm leading to help each other grow in the faith? This was one of those big areas. And so, it really made it near and dear to my heart, especially choosing songs, helping to choose songs, and where they were going in the service. It just gave me a deep appreciation for how God grows us with the songs we sang together.
Bringing people together through worship is a contributing factor for your new project. Do you have hopes that with all the unrest in our nation right now that BRAG Worship will help bring some unity to the Church?
Yes. I think there can be a temptation sometimes when there's a lot of hard stuff going on. But why are we giving all this attention to Christian singing and about how great God is together? We focus on those things, and I think it's because we kind of compartmentalize and sometimes think, oh, when we sing songs about God's greatness, we have to ignore all the hard stuff going on in our life or going on in our country to then think about God for a second. What I'm saying is, when we make much of God, we see how great He is, we don't have to ignore how hard life is. God can be right in the hard stuff with us, and His greatness remains. It actually helps us think about that. I was looking at Titus in the New Testament, and he's saying that through God, we've been saved. God wants to purify people zealous for good works. The more that I look at God, I see how good He is, and it helps me to be zealous for good works to serve those who are going through hard times. And hopefully, those can serve me as well when I need that. I think even this unifying around singing great things about Jesus, it helps us to relate to one another as well.
You have primarily worked in the hip hop genre throughout your music career. Do you believe Worship is becoming broader in concept as we move into the future? This album is certainly not what you hear on the radio.
I think it should continue to be broad. When I played one of these songs for one of my friends a couple years ago they said, “Oh, this is really good, but this isn't worship.” And I was like, whoa, wait a minute. What makes you think it's not worship? I think sometimes without realizing it, we believe worship has to sound a particular way. And if we look throughout church history, the songs that Christians were singing together did not sound exactly like the songs we sing. Even if we look at the Psalms, even the meter of them is not the way that we would think the evenness of how lines should go. There are some eras where it was more chanted and less melodic. Even if you just go to different cultures, it all sounds different. And so, I want us to acknowledge that if Jesus is a savior of all people and all nations who trust in Him, then there should be as many cultural expressions of worship as there are cultures. Worship is a response to how incredible God is. And so, this is just my expression, and I hope that it connects with people.
Much of contemporary worship music leans relentlessly on an upbeat message, seemingly unrealistic at times. But this record seems to insist on telling the whole story. Was that your intention with For Your Glory?
That was definitely one of my intentions. That was one of the things that felt like a core value of how I wanted to write these worship songs. Sometimes when we walk into church on Sunday morning it feels like we walked into a world that's different from the real world that we live in. And when we open the Psalms, the songbook we have in the Bible, it's not just full of all happy feelings. A lot of them are like, hey, I have no friends. I have no shelter. No one cares for me, but God, you're my shelter. You care for me, you're my redeemer. That lament and praise stands side by side in the Psalms, and I wanted it to stand side by side in my songs too. I hope that's one of the things that people can find relatable about the music. It is honest about how hard life is, and then still trying to praise and make much of God in the midst of it.
After people have had a chance to listen to For Your Glory, what would you like to see people get out of that experience? What is your greatest hope for the record?
The first time I did a worship night was a couple of months ago in Atlanta. And the first time I got to hear a room full of believers sing these songs together, it made me emotional. I thought this is what I'm after. God is the greatest, God is incredible. God is glorious and beautiful, and one of my hopes is I just want to help give Christians more words to sing about how amazing He is. One of the things that I hope comes from it is people feeling more comfortable with lamenting and making much of God in the same breath. That feels so important to me. It feels like the only way to live honestly and transparently in the world. I hope that this music helps people to do that.
WATCH TRIP LEE AND BRAG WORSHIP PERFORM "FOR YOUR GLORY":
