Inviting Everyone To The Table With The Second Season Of ‘Good Words’ Podcast

There is a virtue to humbleness, and in our self-inflating culture, it is rare to find a genre-defining artist that is both aware of their talents, and self-effacing – someone more than willing to bestow honor to others that helped them along the way. After meeting him last weekend at the Paley Center for Media, I think 16-time Grammy winner and gospel singer Kirk Franklin might just be one of those people. “I stole most of those awards,” he told me with a grin.

He recently launched the second season of his podcast Good Words with Kirk Franklin from Sony Entertainment, where he talks to people of all different backgrounds about faith and culture and finds ways that they can come together and talk about the important issues of life that touch all of us. This is a podcast where people as different as Chance the Rapper and Matthew McConaughey have been guests. “I want Good Words to be the church you can come to if you smell like Hennessey and weed,” he told me in our interview following a live podcast recording. I don’t want to give away the guest because they haven’t published the episode yet, but following their wide-ranging conversation that touched on faith, family, career, and finances, he asked her about his interview style. “How did I do?” he asked her, which tells me that he both wants to know how his guest feels and to grow as an interviewer.

In that way, he was also unlike any very well-known interview I’ve ever conducted as he approached me after his podcast recording to thank me for speaking with him and to let me know he would be a few minutes so he could use the restroom. Kirk seems to be that rare mix of openness and gratefulness and treated everyone I saw him talking to like they were the most important person in the room. When we reached the previously agreed upon 10-minute mark in our interview, I turned to his team to ask if he had time for another question and he gently touched my arm to remind me that he was right there and I didn’t need to talk to them. “You don’t need to look over there,” he let me know. “I’m with you. I’ve already peed. I’m good.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that one. Kirk Franklin is also very funny and that’s important, because we all need good words.

What are some ways we can shake up the culture that you’re aiming to talk about on your podcast?

Kirk Franklin: I think it’s very important for the health and future of faith conversations to deconstruct Western Religion and their many duplicitous layers of engagement with history that must be addressed from chattel slavery, to socio-economic disparity, to the health and leadership of women. Every moment where the church could have been on the right side of history for the betterment of all people, it failed in many ways. And it’s important to note that Western Christianity and the teachings of Jesus Christ are not synonymous and a lot of times they aren’t even in the same space. Western Christianity is led by a totally different set of motives and agendas that have not allowed for free thinking opportunities to ask ‘what about us?’ I believe that the teachings of Christ and the word as a whole allow room for our fears and challenges and give everyone a seat at the table for the conversation with the Jesus I love and believe in. He gave his life for everybody and there’s only one rule: No perfect people allowed. That’s kind of how I want to lead my conversations with the podcast and in my everyday space. I’m a flawed individual in need of what some would define as a higher belief system and substantive truth because I think a lot of people find themselves always in the rat race needing more, more, more. One of the reasons why I believe faith matters is that we can become selfish if we don’t grow up knowing there’s something bigger than us reminding us that the person next to us is just as important as we are.

Part of what you’re saying reminds me of the lack of women’s leadership in the church.

Kirk: I’ve been married for 27 years in January and was adopted by a powerful woman who raised me by herself as a widow. Something I’ve learned is that even the most powerful women are not going to reject or deny a man to cover, encourage, and protect; they want to know that the man has got her. If there’s a bump in the night, she wants you to go see what that bump is.

Powerful women aren’t trying to emasculate men and that’s what I think the message of the culture gets about being a feminist wrong. Women are saying it’s unfair that there are ten chairs at the table and nine of them are men. There need to be enough voices at the table to speak to the needs of all people. Why would the church limit their opportunity to be better with healthier conversations and less dogma?

There was an interesting moment with your guest today when you asked her if she had a relationship with God and she said she doesn’t currently subscribe to one.

Kirk: There’s so much data that shows that by the year 2070 only one-third of Americans will be Christian, and that’s daunting. I think these are real spaces where we need to have conversations and I’m not afraid to have a conversation with anyone, like a wizard or someone who believes in a cult, because I’m so confident in what I believe. But, if I don’t lead with love and humility, there is no conversation. If I would have condemned that lady, I would have been the hypocrite that I say I am against. Hopefully, I show enough love that there may be a moment to inquire about the space of faith. Christians don’t understand that we are the best selling points for our faith, and you have to ask yourself, ‘what kind of billboard are you?’ The new god is science and technology, so you better understand that you can no longer lead with authoritarianism. That’s not going to happen anymore. One of the most powerful answers that a Christian can give right now is ‘I don’t know.’ But what I don’t know doesn’t cancel out what I do know. Now that’s an honest conversation.

In light of what you were saying about a decrease in church attendance and not knowing what love is, I’ve got to mention Donald Trump.

Kirk: I believe the church’s response has been the worst thing for American Christianity since Jim Crow. We need to call it out and apologize for the duplicitousness that was used to manipulate the systems. It’s time for Christians to understand that God cares about life from the womb to the tomb, and if your ethics are only built on two pillars–same-sex marriage and abortion–then you’re missing the bigger point of the message of the greatest love story ever told. You’re missing these key moments where people are dying and hungry and still divided by socioeconomic disparities, over-policing, mass incarceration and all these things that are at the core of why America doesn’t work for so many people. Until you have that conversation, you can’t have a conversation about Jesus when it’s convenient for the things you’re passionate about because that’s manipulation. We need to get back to the truth of understanding that life matters, God matters and people matter. Hopefully, with Good Words, I can connect those dots so that when people listen and watch they’ll get humor, culture, sex and marriage, and Wu-Tang Clan because that’s who I am. I was raised on hip hop and church, so we’re going to have fun on this podcast. I want to speak to an audience that doesn’t get church jargon and thinks Christians are weirdos. I want Good Words to be the church you can come to if you smell like Hennessey and weed. If you don’t believe in anything but aliens, you can come, but I want there to be ten chairs for everyone to sit in.