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If you wondered why Kelly Price has been trending all morning on Twitter, here’s the short of it: The singer was asked to perform during the Indiana Black Expo (IBE) yesterday and due to unfortunate timing, her performance of “As We Lay” appeared to be a part of IBE’s Gospel Explosion segment. Mix a song praising infidelity with a room full of Bible believers and a sprinkle of social media and what do you get? A modern day internet scandal — and rightfully so.

Though the world (or the small segment of Indianapolis Christians present for Kelly’s performance) now knows the singer meant no immoral harm when she sang the song in question, it’s the immediate reaction of the woman who began singing in the church as a toddler that has now sparked a few queries in my mind. See below.

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I will give Kelly Price one 30-second moment to be in her feelings about the misinformed party who reportedly chastised her after her performance, but four minutes of faux anti-christian outrage? No ma’am.

Growing up in the church, as Kelly proudly reminded us in all of her Instagram clips, she’s well acquainted with the theology that colored the audience’s reaction to her musical selection. If she were ever at an event with the word gospel in it and someone got on stage singing about sleeping with another woman’s husband, she knows the attendees would have a fit — herself included. Someone would have to go on stage and make a statement condemning the musical choice, lest it appear the whole congregation be perceived to have forgotten the teachings of Deuteronomy 22:22, Exodus 20:14, Hebrews 13:4 and Proverbs 6:32. Kelly had a right to be mad, but she waged a war against the wrong people. The backlash she received wasn’t about bigoted Christianity; it was about a misunderstanding and one person who appeared a bit too hasty to judge. A misunderstanding that could’ve been cleared with a simple clarification on her end that she wasn’t actually a part of the gospel set and a statement from IBE that should’ve been made much earlier than 11 am today.

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But in her quest to clear her name — or her conscious — Kelly actually did more detriment to the Christian community than anything that was said about her following her appearance. Kelly is the one who gave credence to the longstanding perception that Christians are hypocritical judges filled with hate, not the people who condemned her actions without the proper information to do so. If anybody were to stop going to church as a result of this incident, I wager it would have far more to do with the image she painted of Christians with her rants than any behavior exhibited by the guests in question. And just like those who were too quick to judge, she’ll have to be accountable for her accusations as well.

Kelly has a right to be hurt, but her public expression of that hurt was self-serving. Christ’s love, which she professes to be so concerned with, didn’t shine through any of those videos. At all. And while Kelly is keenly aware of her self-appointed responsibility to expose that which isn’t authentic, she seems to forget that charge in the midst of holding back tears that never seem to reach their ducts in her third video. Someone asked Kelly about her discernment when she chose to sing a song about adultery during what we now know wasn’t in fact a gospel segment, but I’m more curious as to where her discernment was when she took to the ‘gram. Christian people are certainly not exempt from the correction of others (which is how she somewhat got in this mess in the first place) but there’s a way to do it in a manner that is edifying and furthers the mission of God and then there’s another way that’s condemning and satisfies the personal agenda of Kelly Price. If she wasn’t wrong before, she certainly is now.

 

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