The Conducive Nature Of Hip Hop Culture For Missional Praxis
One particular of the most exclusive, creative, and influential cultures in not only North America but all through the planet is hip hop culture. Hip hop's appeal can be noticed locally and globally as its style, music, and attitude continue to spread rapidly through a variety of mediums. In the midst of this culturally explosive motion, we also note that the North American Church is struggling, as its popularity and draw fades with every single passing year. However, rebirth is identified as thousands of Christians are taping into the fountains of biblical wisdom that are redirecting them back to God's Mission. A motion known as the missional church, is pleading with the body of Christ to be the Church, and to bring the gospel of Christ in a related and contextualized fashion to all peoples. A single would be wise to advise the missional church to take particularly severe the possibilities that hip hop culture brings to the table. For it is this papers intent to show that the particularly nature of hip hop and its cultural norms are tremendously conducive for missional praxis locally and often instances even globally.
Just before exploring why hip hop and missional theology would go together nicely hand in hand, one particular should initially grasp what hip hop culture and missional ecclesiology are to begin with. To the misunderstandings of quite a few, hip hop is yet another word for rap music. This confusion draws from a lack of engagement from those outside the hip hop community with those inside. In reality rap is just one aspect or cultural artifact that has come out of the hip hop community. "The hip-hop subculture manifests itself in people today, and as people today determine the needs in their life that hip-hop meets, the culture is sustained. To reduce hip-hop by saying it is just rap is to disrespect it, given that hip-hop is life" (The Hip Hop Church, 66). Hip hop is a culture, it is a planet view, it is a way of life. "Hip-hop is about dance, art, expression, discomfort, really like, racism, sexism, broken families, difficult instances, the search for God and overcoming" (The Hip Hop Church, 61).
For this function, we also make the point that hip hop at its core is urban youth culture, specifically culture representing African Americans and Latinos. In the book, The Hip Hop Church the author agrees that "it encompasses the culture of African Americans, Latinos and urban America far more commonly" (63). Now as we will point out later, the influences of hip hop have crossed these racial and geographic boundaries nonetheless, we attest to its cultural roots and authenticity located in mostly black and brown urban settings. From the beginning, hip hop has located its birth from the African diaspora. And then grounded itself in the urban knowledge largely of the northeast and west coast. "Accurate Hip-hop is a term that describes the independent collective consciousness of a distinct group of inner-city people today" (The Hip Hop Church, 63). And so it is the people's mundane life activities that make and create hip hop culture.
The missional community, on the other hand, represents a theologically diverse community who are committed to pursuing God's Mission. It seems at this point, that the missional movement (or at least beneath the title missional) is a mainly white upper and middle class theology. Even so, a homogeneous group is not the goal, nor want of those within that theological framework. In truth they represent the opposite, a community that wants to cross all boundaries as God does. They claim that God has and continues to interact in human history, and chooses to use persons, specifically the church, to be his hands and feet in this planet. And so according to John 20:21, just as Jesus has been sent into this planet, followers of Jesus likewise are sent into this world. They are referred to as to share the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to represent the reign of God right here on earth. Practically speaking, they believe that to do this we are referred to as to cross racial, ethnic, demographic, and cultural boundaries. At the identical time we are not to force any distinct culture or practice for each and every context. In Missional Church it is explained this way, "to be faithful to its calling, the church need to be contextual, that is, it should be culturally relevant inside a certain setting. The church relates continuously and dynamically both to the gospel and to its contextual reality" (18). And so the charge is to bring the great news of Jesus and his coming Kingdom to a planet that is broken, sinful, and in bondage. Relevance is a crucial word for this community as they are sent out into the planet. Engaging cultures and recognizing that every single culture can have the gospel applied to it is core teaching within the missional community. "The gospel is normally conveyed through the medium of culture. It becomes great news to lost and broken humanity as it is incarnated in the world through God's sent many people, the church" (Missional Church, 18). So no culture is beneath redemption, no culture is so lost that it can't be saved.
It is with this background of missional theology and hip hop culture that we start to lay foundation to who these communities, cultures, and movements are, as nicely as why they could possibly go well together for both are fascinating movements that have deep impact for the world in which we live. We must start to acknowledge that although they do not necessarily overlap in terms of human population and demographics, ideologically the two would go hand in hand extremely nicely. We will start to unpack this additional.
Within the hip hop community, there is a debate going on as to what is authentically hip hop, and what is a bi-product of the commercialization of rap music. Within the confines of rap as a genre you come across underground and socially conscious emcees as well as wealthy and renowned rap pop stars. The Hip Hop Church breaks it down like this, "a rapper is for the market or made by the industry they rap about whatever is popular, and they give the culture of hip-hop a reputation of only becoming about materialism and sex" (83). But there is a different definition for the conscious rapper, or as they call him the emcee. Right here they say that "an emcee, on the other hand, seeks to preserve the purity in hip-hop and stays away from the entertainment, performance-only view that rappers regularly have. The emcee is regarded as to be a lyricist with a thing to say that is for your heart, your soul or your intellect. They do not rhyme about what is trendy or imperative to the materialistic hip-hop head because they are stewards of the culture and hip-hop's message. Emcees are in search of to drop some understanding about life and how greatest to live in this world" (84). It is this stewardship and consciousness of hip hop that I would like to discover some much more as it relates to missional praxis.
