Lecrae is no longer worried about pleasing everyone in the room after finding freedom

NEW YORK — Grammy Award-winning Christian hip-hop artist, activist and CEO, Lecrae Moore, popularly known by his first name, is unapologetically free and says he's no longer worried about pleasing everyone in the room.

He has embraced a theology of liberation in Christ and is urging other believers to embrace “the multiple complex aspects of themselves” without fear of who God created them to be.

It’s the message he hopes people will draw from his latest book, Set Me Free: The Good News of God’s Relentless Pursuit, published last month by Zondervan. It builds on the narrative from his 2020 song “Set Me Free,” which he boldly performed for an intimate crowd of supporters after a live reading and discussion session at Amazon Music Studios in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Monday night.

“I got them shackles off my feet,” Moore declared.

In the unvarnished but artful discussion interrogating what it means to be free between the rapper and his friends — theologians and writers Adam Thomason, Sharifa Stevens and spoken word artist and poet Jason Petty, better known by his stage name Propaganda — Moore stressed the need to embrace difference as godly.

“I will hope people are comfortable embracing the multiple complex aspects of themselves and not trying to kind of whittle themselves down to fit one narrow category, especially believers,” Moore told Petty when he was asked what he wanted people to take away from the book near the end of the discussion.

“I think there are [a] multitude of different types of believers throughout the Scriptures. We're not homogeneous. We're not all one way, and that's OK,” he added. “You are a multitude of different things. … Don't drop one because no one else sees it or recognizes it or embraces it. Freedom is being all of who God created you to be, not [just] the side that's accepted by folks.”

From the start to the end of the event, the audience, which appeared to have a strong millennial influence, listened with nearly spellbinding silence punctuated only by intermittent applause as the speakers shared wincing truths about their experience finding freedom that ached and soothed in the same breath.

The discussion explored the meaning of freedom inside and outside the context of evangelicalism and continued to echo even after the conversation had ended. Citing an example of what it means to be free and the challenges to finding that freedom as a black man in Western Evangelical culture, Moore shared how his decision to speak out on the 2014 shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann affected support for his music.

He argued that Evangelicals are comfortable with him supporting causes like prison ministry and the persecution of Christians in foreign countries, but “when you say, I'm a black dude or a black woman in America who is a part of Western Evangelical culture, people are like, ‘oh, here we go again.”

“I see an 11-year-old kid get shot in Ohio, named Tamir Rice, and I said, ‘Hey, this ain't right. We need to speak on this.’ They said, ‘We don't like Lecrae. It's too political.’ And I didn't even realize, I didn't even understand that politics and Christianity were in this incestuous relationship,” Moore, who came to faith as an adult, recalled.

The rapper said that because he felt convicted about the shooting, he tried explaining himself to fans using theological terms, but he still lost significant support as a result of his stance.

“I think it was 2015. I had a show in Philly, 3,500 people showed up. … In 2016, after speaking out on things, 350 people showed up to my show in Philly a year later. That's what it cost me,” he said.

Petty described the book as moving through four phases: “confession, lamentations, resistance and persistence.”

“Confession asks us to tell the truth about what we carry. Lamentations gives us permission to grieve what we lost. ... Resistance reminds us that choosing wholeness in a world that profits from our brokenness is an act of defiance, and then finally, persistence speaks to the meaning, speaks to what it means to keep going and to believe in freedom even when the process is slow and [un]clear,” he said.

Moore, who is originally from Texas but now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, shared his experience growing up in a “place and space where I was not accepted all the time.”

“I found myself afraid of losing acceptance, but freedom is understanding you[‘re] already accepted and then moving from there,” he said.

Right now, Moore says he is at a point in his life where he's no longer “worried about pleasing the people in the room” but about protecting people in the margins that he needs to protect.

“Books like this had to be created not to please everybody, but to protect the people that needed to be protected. To serve the people [who] needed to be served. Now that's my thought process as I move forward,” he said.

Stevens explained how working on the book with Moore was “healing” for her.

“I think that contributing to this book was healing for me. Seminary was challenging for me because of the specific seminary that I went to did not affirm the holiness of black women … so that affirmation had to come from somewhere [else] if I was to keep going,” she explained.

She said that because she was the first person in her family to do a number of things, like going to college, she has focused on diffusing landmines to help others like her who are following in her footsteps.

“I want my words to be a refuge. And so, yes, I am purposeful in my writing, and at one point, I was not given room to be specific. So a poem like the one I read would be unacceptable, because 'all lives matter.' And indeed they do,” said Stevens, who explained that she is committed to truth-telling and living life unmasked.

“My passion is to go to the margins. I live in the margins. I'm well-acquainted with it. And so there was a joy to contribute to this book,” she added. “… because if I'm a good sister in Christ, I need everybody to know that we are all made in the image of God.”

While all the speakers shared nuanced interpretations about what it means to be free, Thomason centered his understanding of freedom more explicitly on the life of Christ.

“What I realized from Jesus is, He was the most free being, man, prophet, God, Savior — not because He was high class, upwardly mobile and advanced. He was able to have an inner shalom despite the results and the pressures that came His way,” he asserted.

“And nobody actually likes a free man or a free woman, especially a free black man or a free black woman, because you cannot threaten them with results. When I learned that that is true freedom, it actually makes me an unstoppable force. Jesus' Words say, do not fear the person who could destroy the body, but fear the person who could destroy the body and the soul in Hell.”