Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I am on the phone with the truth.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: How are you, Randy? I'm fantastic. It's an honor.
[00:00:08] Speaker A: It is an honor to talk to you as well. I've been following your career for years, going way back to when I worked for a different radio station and we had an HD2 station that we put hip hop and Christian rock in the same format. And I loved programming both of them, but especially when I heard new music from you and Lecrae and the rest of the crew, it was just always amazing. But I've been following your career since then, so it's a pleasure having you on my show, man.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: It's a pleasure to be had. And that never gets old. You know, we've been at this for a very long time, over 20 plus years, maybe almost 30 at this point, which is insanity.
So, you know, it feels good to, you know, you know, have a bit of a legacy, for sure, Christian hip hop, you know, arena.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: So, yeah, for sure. You guys are trailblazers for the genre, of course.
And I just got word that we have a little bit of a shift when it comes down to the Stellar Awards because they're going to be doing both.
And I love that because I've been a lover of hip hop my whole life, it seems like. And for them to finally recognize it as not just, you know, oh, that's the hip hop, but, you know, to be able to recognize it as a culture, thousand percent.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: And it's again, one of the things that I think I love about this season of my life is getting the opportunity to kind of stand back and see the fruit of our labor while we're still here and active and still engaged and still relevant, and our voices still carry weight while at the same time, because generally, you know, it's one or the other.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: By the time you get a chance to kind of see the fruit of your labor, you're not necessarily active, you know, so, yeah, it feels good to be. Still be active while at the same time experience the fruit of our labor. So I love it.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: I'm thrilled about it as well. Now, that brings me to my next point, because you're going to be in Town on March 8 at Rhema International with Bishop Eric Lloyd and his beautiful wife. And I'm excited because you are kind of dipping into a different arena. And this is called the Intelligent Faith Experience.
And tell me a little bit about it.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, the arena that I'm in now is called apologetics, which is essentially the art of the science of contending for or defending the faith. So One of the things that. That is vitally important in this particular time, where we live in a world of competing ideas, is creating a space where we can not just be preached to, but engage in the complex conversations around our faith.
What's happening is while on one hand, it's an exciting time for the church, the church is alive, the gospel is spreading, it's growing, it's flourishing. People are coming to faith in Christ, while at the same time, on a parallel track, many are also quietly walking away from the faith. Yeah, and by the time people walk away from the faith, because we see it all the time, they leave the church, they walk away from the faith. And some even built platforms to actually put, deconstruct, and push back against the faith that they once held. But by the time people get to that point, they're at the peak of it. So by the time we see them walk away, they. They've already deconstructed, They've already done the work of, you know, kind of negotiating themselves out of the faith. What I'm doing with intelligent faith is I'm getting the people while they're in that process, while they're asking the hard questions within themselves, quietly wrestling with them within themselves, quietly wrestling with skepticism as they're being bombarded with a barrage of competing ideas, ideas that are generally antithetical to the Christian worldview.
They oftentimes suffer in silence. And then before you know it, they're gone.
What intelligent faith seeks to do is kind of enter into that space and just open up the dialogue and have the heart talks, have the hard talks around the credibility of the Bible, have the hard talks around the divinity and the deity of Jesus and how he's divine and human. All the things that culture is pushing back on in the digital public square and in social media. These are all the things that I'm kind of creeping in and say, hey, let's have the big conversation about who took those books out of the Bible. How come there's certain books that were left out? Let's get into it, while at the same time using the arts and music to carry it. So you get a double whammy with the intelligent faith experience. You get the apologetics element, but you also get the art, because I'm still an artist at heart. So we're gonna be doing some music.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, knock me down. But I got up again talking to Emmanuel Lambert, AKA the truth about his intelligent faith experience that will at Rhema International Church coming up on Sunday. I saw the video that you had posted about Tamar Braxton saying that she didn't need to go to church. She had a personal relationship with God. And I see a lot of people talking about that.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Yeah, thousand percent. It's interesting, you know, because there are so many different iterations of Christianity, so many different versions, so many different brands of Christianity that is difficult oftentimes to decipher, which is the truth. Will the real Christianity please stand up?
And I think part of this kind of new wave post pandemic of Christianity is listen, during COVID everybody stayed home pandemic, everybody stayed home and streamed. And so by the time the pandemic broke, everybody was ready to go back outside, just not back to church.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: And then found a way to justify it, which again, in a hyper individualistic context, which is what we are as Westerners, it's easy to just say, I could just, this is my personal relationship with Jesus. I don't need the community of faith at large. And so again, these are the types of conversations that we'll be having at the Intelligent Faith Experience. Is it necessary to go to church? Why can't we just stream. These are big conversations and important questions to ask and important conversations to have.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, again, it's going to be Sunday, March 8th at Rhema International National Church, and I will put all this information on our website for those of you who will be interested in going. And I appreciate your time to true. Thank you so much.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: I appreciate you. Thank you for having me see y' all there.
