Another Hip-Hop Church

Hmm.. I have no comment at this time. Have any of y'all been there and seen him in action?

Jesus Is My Hype Man
The South Bronx's premiere hip-hop pastor expertly mingles the dope with the dopey

Reverend Timothy Holder, honorable 51-year-old white pastor of the South Bronx's Trinity Episcopal Church of Morrisania, would like it known that he came by both his hip-hop alias and his "beautiful bling cross" honorably. Both were presents. "Poppa T," he declares proudly. "A gift from the rappers. That's my street name. And I own it with all my heart."

Poppa T's been here four years now, after a distinguished career in D.C. politics (involved with "every losing campaign in the 1980s") and five years in Alabama founding a Spanish-speaking parish. He deems the language barrier he faced there "instructive," as now he's attempting an even tougher translation: Introducing rappers to God, and his God-fearing congregation to the rappers they often fear for entirely different reasons. Trinity Episcopal's HipHopEMass, a two-year-old experiment in imbuing a typical church service with streetwise vernacular and freestyle rappers, invades the South Bronx streets about once a month, when Poppa T and crew aren't traveling the city—invading St. Paul's, near the World Trade Center site, for a June hoedown—or fleeing the state entirely for outreach missions in Ohio or Texas. "The goal, my brother, is to pull people out of the church into the street, and people just on the street into the church," Poppa T explains. "As the old Anglican priests said, 'If you don't have both, you have neither....' "