'All of us got mess, all of us got stains, and we all could use a good spiritual bath'
Gospel star Kirk Franklin has 20 Grammy awards to his name - as many as Bruce Springsteen - yet he's little known in New Zealand.
Kirk Franklin is America's most successful gospel artist of recent decades. He sells out arenas and stadiums, and is often considered to have revolutionised the genre, blending it with R&B, hip-hop, and pop.
With 14 studio albums to his name, Franklin has written for Whitney Houston and collaborated with Kanye West, Mary J Blige and Bono.
Although he's still relatively unknown in New Zealand, that could all change this December when he plays Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland for the first time.
Franklin is no preacher, he tells RNZ’s Culture 101.
“I'm a songwriter. I write, produce, and arrange. And those are the gifts that God has loaned me.
"Those songs that you're hearing are songs that I've been blessed by him to write over the last 30 years.”
Gospel music is deeply rooted in the black American experience, he says.
"Whether that's the transition of the experience that black people had during slavery and also during segregation, Jim Crow, that the music was what held people together through the faith, through the families, through tragedy.
"And so that's going to give the music a deeper level of not only consciousness, but spirituality and relationship with God, and also a deeper introspective connection with the soul."
All are welcome at Franklin's concerts, he says.
"Listen to me when I tell you that everybody, I don't care if you are a human being with oxygen in your lungs. I don't care who you love, who you are with, what you have done.
"God wants you in the building so he can love on you, and he will do it through his music. Everybody, everybody is welcome."
Franklin's musical aim is to reach across divides.
"There's room at the cross for everybody. The Jesus that I believe in died for everyone.
"He loves everyone, and not only died for everyone, but lives for everyone. And there is not one that's perfect. For all of us have sinned. All of us got junk. All of us got mess. All of us got stains, and we all could use a good spiritual bath."
He rejects dogma and authoritarianism.
"My job has always been to want to be humble and humanise the reality is that none of us are doctors, but we're all patients and we're all in need of the same doctor and we're all in the same hospital and I'm in the bed next to you. If you are an attorney, a billionaire or a drug addicted felon, is that there's room for everyone because everybody needs that same medicine. It's called love."
When Franklin sees religion being used as a weapon to divide, he says it challenges his faith.
"I'm a Black man living in America. Religion was used to get my ass on that boat. That's how my people even got on that boat.
"It's that religion was a weapon to get us here. But the weaponisation of the message did not take away from the truth of the message."
Kirk Franklin plays Christchurch Town Hall on 10 December, Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre on 12 December and The Civic, Auckland on 13 December.
