What would help Christians have empathy toward what you and other minorities experience?
Genuine relationships. If you don’t need a person of color in your life, then there’s probably a problem. If there’s not somebody you need, right? If there’s no minority voices of authority in your life, if you’re a Christian and you can’t name any theologians that you read that are people of color, it might be a problem.
I would say you don’t really have real, diverse relationships or diverse needs in your circle, and so people become more projects than they become friends and brothers and sisters. I noticed that my white friends who I had deep relationships were really processing this with me. I noticed that my white friends who adopted children of color were really having to process this.
But if you really don’t have to deal … for instance, everything that’s happening with immigration: I don’t have to deal with immigration. If I don’t have any friends who have to deal with that, I can just turn the television off. But one of my closest friends, Propaganda’s married to Mexican-American woman whose family has to deal with immigration, so those burdens are now my burdens, and I have to process them because I know people now.
I think that’s what relationship does for you, and that’s what I would tell Christians. Proximity doesn’t mean you have diversity. Just because you got black people, Mexican people, gay people, whatever — just because you have them in your church or in your neighborhood doesn’t mean you’re bonding with them and you need them in your life.
What made you question your purpose, and how’d you find it again?
What happens is, there’s a cycle, and I think this happens with everybody. The cycle starts with vulnerability. You’re vulnerable. You confess your issue.
Your vulnerability, in a healthy relationship, is met with empathy, love, sympathy, care. Unhealthily, because I’m a public figure, people don’t see me as a person. They see me as a thing, so vulnerability is met with critique.
When your vulnerability is met with critique, you get defensive. When you’re defensive for too long, you get tired. When you get tired, you get weary. Your weariness causes you to make mistakes, causes you to doubt, causes you to believe that maybe everyone’s right.
You can only hear people tell you things about yourself for so long before you start to believe them or even ask yourself, “Is it true?” There was a season when I first … probably 2011, 2012, when people told me I was not saved so many times, I had to ask, “Am I saved?” I’m talking about people I don’t even know!
If it wasn’t for having real friends like, “Bro, shut up. What are you talking about?” … But I think that’s why I have sympathy to the Kanye’s of this world because I understand the amount of pressure and the amount of scrutiny and the amount of weirdness.
You don’t know what it’s like to have to go to the grocery store and you’re a thing, you’re an it, not a person. There’s just a different level of having to navigate life that I think the average person just can’t comprehend — they’ll never comprehend.
All that to say, questioning my purpose came about because that cycle got me so weary that I was like, “Nah, I don’t even know what I’m here to do. I don’t know what I’m here for.”
But getting it back was seeing the overwhelming amount of people who came to me saying, “Thank you for being vulnerable. Thank you for being transparent. Thank you for talking about your depression. I felt all of this.” And beginning to see a new group of people come to the shows now. Unintentionally, people from all walks of life started coming to the shows not because they love Jesus, but for various other reasons that they heard in “Can’t Stop Me Now” or my posts or my tweets.
Has there been a most memorable testimonial about “Can’t Stop Me Now”?
I remember a girl came to my VIP. She paid to come to VIP, and she said, “I don’t know you. I don’t anything about your music. I didn’t know you had old music. I just heard this song, ‘Can’t Stop Me Now’, and it broke me down, and I needed to be here.”
That’s powerful. And countless other responses — you just get them over and over and over again from people who need to hear it.
The thing that it’s done most I think, especially for both people of color and people who resonate with the sentiment of it, it’s given credibility to authentic Christianity for people who thought all we did was sit in our ivory tower and point our finger. Now they’re seeing that we’re not just finger pointers, but we are the hands and feet. We do put our hands to the plow, and what hurts them hurts us.
Photo courtesy of Joe Gonzalez.
Resources: The “Woke Church” series by Pastor Eric Mason, which Lecrae said impacted him in this interview, is available for free from Epiphany Fellowship church on iTunes.
Another influential friend who Lecrae named in this interview, Adam Thomason, published a “booklist for objective and intelligent conversations with the hopes for kingdom solutions” earlier this year called Woke University, which is available for free download here: “#WOKE University seeks to further the kingdom by equipping image bearers of God to serve great-er humanity, by understanding a deeper narrative of American history, teachings of Jesus, historical trends, solutions toward solidarity through reading, and interactions with @redrev.”
