Rapper C Reid performs a rap during Wednesday’s Hip-hop worship service at Perkins Chapel. (Nick McCarthy)

Yesterday at lunchtime, Perkins Chapel held a Wednesday service complete with readings, hymns of praise and … rap music?

The Black Seminarians Association and the Perkins School of Theology Worship Committee teamed up to present the second Holy Hip Hop Worship Experience. Students, faculty and staff gathered around the steps of Perkins Chapel to take part in some unconventional worship.

Pastor Diallo Smith, a 2006 Perkins graduate, talked about similarities between hip hop and Christianity. He also suggested that people look at the church in a new light.

“One thing I’ve really discovered is that I’m unabashedly, unapologetically hip hop,” he said. “It oozes out of my pores.”

This shouldn’t preclude anyone, he said, from becoming a minister or getting involved in the church.

“I was under the assumption I had to look a certain way. I thought I had to speak [the language] of church to be realized as authentic,” he said.

Smith made it clear that he didn’t want to be categorized or labeled as gimmicky.

“I am not a hip hop pastor,” he said. “Hip hop isn’t something that I do, it’s something that I be.”

Smith expressed his excitement about what he referred to as the “new Reformation.”

“It’s about setting God’s people free from the walls of the church to go out into the world,” he said, emphasizing that “people in the church don’t know everything.”

He added that many people want to be spiritual, but stay away from the structure of a church.

“It’s not that they don’t like god – they don’t like church people,” he said.

Later in his talk, Smith compared the lessons of “rhythmic nuances and innovations of hip hop” to important lessons in life. He tied scratching records to looking for new ways to do things and linked mixing records to finding a, “seamlessness with God.”

Anthony Everett, president of the BSA, said that the group had been planning the event since May. The BSA wanted to have the service in September, he said, because it wanted to “move it into the fall timeframe when students are just getting back to school.”

“We were glad to be able to bring worship in a different style,” he added.

Beside Smith’s Proclamation of the Word, the service included a Hip Hop Ministry rap by C Reid and a hip hop liturgical dance by Motion in Christ, a dance troupe from Korean Central United Methodist Church.

According to Ashley Kim, whose older sister Christina is a graduate student at Perkins, the troupe performs at concerts and revivals across the metroplex.

“We did this for God,” she said.

Smith, a Detroit native, said he came to Perkins partly because the leadership at his former church in Houston attended school here and partly because of proximity.

Now Smith is part of a new church, the Awakenings Movement, that aims to relate a modern view of everyday life with traditional Christianity.

Change is a crucial part of Smith’s approach to his faith.

“I believe that certainly God is doing some different things in the world,” he said. “But it’s also different in that more diverse cultures are coming together,” something attested to by the diverse congregation he spoke to.