Kirk Franklin Responds to Rapper Plies Inviting Him to Strip Club
Kirk Franklin may be willing to lose his religion for the sake of bettering his relationship with God, but he is not willing to compromise his Christian faith for a rapper who invited the music minister to a strip club.
Plies, a popular Florida rapper, proposed to Franklin to attend a Miami, Florida, strip club called King of Diamonds in exchange for the rapper attending church.
"Y'all tell Kirk Franklin I say I wanna take him to King Of Diamonds…," rapper Plies said in an Instagram video shared with over 2 million of the rapper's followers. "He can go in, he ain't even gotta get no dancers, he can go right in and turn right back around and go take him a holy bath. Kirk, listen, you go to King Of Diamonds with me and I'll go to church with you, an even swap."
Franklin did not hesitate to respond, and made his own Instagram video response to negotiate different terms of a potential agreement.
"Y'all tell @plies that the album is called Losing My Religion not 'Lost My Religion,'" Franklin responded. "Next time I come to Miami, you gotta come to a Baptist church with me, and sit through a three-hour church service with tambourines and a church cookout. And then, I may walk by the club. I may walk on the parking lot and just walk on the curb."
The gospel music executive has been transparent in the past about previously struggling with an addiction to pornography. The recording artist and his wife, Tammy Franklin, spoke to CBN about his convictions concerning the matter.
"That's what so weird about porn. You have different people even in the body feeling differently about it," Franklin previously told CBN. "There are some Christian men I know who say, 'I'd rather do that than cheat on my wife.' I've had to shed light on, 'Dude, 'We're cheating on our wives because whatever a man thinketh, so is he.'"
The minister of music expressed his frustration when he thought about those who did not hold him accountable while he was comfortable living in sin.
"It's weird because you're talking about the dude who was the minister of music at a church when I was 11. I have to check myself because there's an anger that rises up in me," Franklin told CBN. "I get evangelically ticked off by the fact that I wished somebody would have taught me a long time ago about the repercussions of sex and flesh and lust and vanity and pride and ego. I wished somebody would have been holding my little behind accountable years ago."
Along with accountability, Franklin has spoken about the importance of religious people showing love to those who are struggling with sin. In an interview with The Christian Post earlier this month, the "Losing My Religion" recording artist spoke about not receiving love from the religious community in the past.
"There's a lot of people like me who the system never introduced to the love of God. Knowing God as a loving father is very foreign to them," he told CP. "I think most people in mainstream America, they don't know God. There's always more picket signs [saying] 'God hates gays' or 'God hates abortion.' But when have you seen a picket sign that says 'Jesus loves you?'"
Franklin hopes to shed light on God's love with his newest album which recently debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Gospel and Top Christian/Gospel Albums Chart.
"I just keep trying and failing and I will continue to keep trying to see what I can do to try to keep people engaged in the conversation about our Lord and Savior, man," he said. "Really that's all I'm trying to do. Really, at the end of the day, if I want to keep God part of the conversation then I will do everything I can to make that happen."