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Ten years ago, if you had said that a Christian musician’s album could rise to the Number 1 album slot on iTunes across all genres — surpassing the likes of Eminem and Taylor Swift — you would have caught a look or two. You still might today.
But this is exactly what the young Texas-based musician and rapper Forrest Frank did this past week with his album Child of God — a refreshingly straightforward offering of feel-good, faith-filled music. “Really just beyond stoked for what God’s doing right now,” Frank posted on Instagram in reaction to the album’s #1 slot. “I feel a cultural shift taking place. Y’all feel it too?”
Frank — sporting tousled hair, casual clothing, and Converse sneakers — recounts in a recent interview a spiritual trajectory that’s become fairly common among millennials and Gen-Zers: raised in a Christian setting, he eventually drifted away from his faith in high school and college, giving in to a dissolute lifestyle. But there he found only spiritual emptiness: “In that quest, I just kept getting lower and lower.” An inner voice his sophomore year at Baylor University prompted him to go to the evangelical Antioch church in Waco, where he had a life-changing encounter with Christ.
Frank eventually started making beats with a Maschine drum machine and putting his music on SoundCloud, where he connected with another artist, Colin Padalecki. The two formed a group in 2017 under the moniker “Surfaces,” but a few years ago, Frank made the decision to strike out on his own and pivot from secular to worship music.
His first song as a solo Christian artist, the bouncy “No Longer Bound” featuring fellow rapper-singer Hulvey (who featured Frank on “Altar”), raked in millions of views on YouTube. And in a creative twist, Frank begins the video by saying that they had been working on an expensive production for weeks, but “right before we released it, God told us to do something different”: a simple montage of testimonies from various young people, all of them freed from spirals of addiction, trauma, and misery through faith.
The video was a clear signal — to fans and followers, to causal observers, maybe even to Frank himself — that Forrest Frank’s music wouldn’t be about Forrest Frank. “If God told me to delete my Spotify, I would do it right now,” Frank explains in the interview. “If God told me to delete my Instagram, I would do it right now. None of this matters except for the kingdom and Jesus.”
Child of God, after opening with a recording of his grandfather testifying at a Billy Graham crusade in 1985 and “No Longer Bound,” segues into a sunny blend of pop, hip-hop, and rock that includes the singles he’s released since: “Up,” “God is Good,” “Always,” and “Good Day” — a song that, paired with a clip of Frank offering to play the song for a stressed-out mom walking her baby by the beach, went viral on Instagram to the tune of 80 million views.
The 20 tracks are never predictable and always enjoyable; a golden thread of upbeat encouragement runs through the whole. “Always” is a case in point: “You are loved, you are chosen, your body isn’t broken / For every door that closes, a better one gets opened.” But the album’s lightness doesn’t unravel into saccharine corn; it’s also balanced by more reflective tracks like “All I Need” (again with Hulvey) and “Sunshine,” both reminiscent of soulful 1990s hip-hop.
Child of God comes to a close with the title track, in which the preacher Jonathan Pokluda beautifully reflects on God’s adoption of us as sinners over a steady chant of those same three words. Indeed, that thread of joy running through the album is carried not by a surface-level worldly optimism, but by the hands of faith. “Shine the light at Jesus so it’s him not me that stands out,” he raps on “All I Need.” “How could I be stressed today if God said it was planned out?” He goes on in the same verse to rap about “Holy Spirit music,” “the blood of Jesus,” Satan, and Judas. Frank wears his Christianity on his sleeve — not in a didactic or preachy way, but simply as a matter of course. It’s the lens through which he looks out at everything else. But the music doesn’t suffer for it — and clearly, neither has his popularity.
This joy of the Gospel is undoubtedly doing precisely what Frank hopes it will do: spreading the kingdom of Christ. As countless “evangelists” make the Good News look like a tedious and frustrating if not downright miserable affair, such infectiously joyful witness is a welcome addition to the cultural scene.
And it may be a harbinger of good things to come. Forrest Frank’s meteoric success, like the “No Longer Bound” video, challenges the narrative that the culture is on a fixed track of deepening secularism, and that young people want its hollow assumptions and sterile conclusions. “In the same way that Christians have sacrificed their value systems to absorb worldly art,” Frank said earlier this year, “I think what’s coming is the world’s going to sacrifice its value systems to absorb Christian art.”
The ”boldness and confidence” of faith from one of the adopted “children of God” (Eph. 3:12; 1 John 3) — but perhaps also, that same artist having since risen to the top of the charts, a prognostication to be taken seriously.
And today we celebrate...