For rapper Trip Lee the fusion of hip-hop and traditional praise and worship music is long overdue

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.

“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,” Lee shares. “When we open the Psalms, the songbook we have in the Bible, it's not just full of 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. And that lament and praise stand side by side in the Psalms, and I wanted it to stand by side in my songs too. This music is honest about how hard life is, and then still trying to praise and make much of God in the midst of it.”The thoughtfully engaging Lee joins us to discuss how pastoral ministry helped prepare him for this project. Listen as he shares 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.

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