Gospel singer Kirk Frankin has gone viral after footage of him dancing and cutting up during Tye Tribbett’s set at one stop on last year’s nearly sold-out The Reunion Tour. The two chart-toppers were joined onstage by fellow Gospel artists Israel Houghton, David and Tamela Mann, and the premier female gospel collectives in the world, the Clark Sisters.
In a video circulating online, Franklin can be seen dancing playfully to the upbeat song as the performance began. In his signature style, the “Revolution” artist is seen bouncing all over the place but at one point gets parked close to the end of the stage as he starts to engage some of the other performers — who were much older than hIm.
Many people online objected to the Grammy-winning artist “doing the butt” on one of the Clark Sisters, Jacky Clark Chisholm, as Tribbett went into the vamp of “Victory” by Tribett and his choir group, Greater Anoited (G.A.)
One person, whose Instagram page is @Only1way2God posted, “Nothing to see here Just the sold out Gospel Artist & pastor old dirty Kirk Franklin, twerking on another gospel artist representing Christ Jesus.”
“Some Gospel music and artist are far worst off than R&B etc.,” the person wrote and then continued to preach that “Satan has his hands across the board in music don’t ever get it twisted.”
The video footage was taken during the tour’s stop in Tampa, FL on Oct. 7. Thousands who watched the clip hopped in the fans’ comments and agreed that Franklin’s behavior was “disrespectful” and “inappropriate.”
“Kirk dont wanna let go of his youth,” one comment assessed. Another exclaimed, “This is not the Gospel.” One person said, “Kirk acting like he at a Diddy / TD Jakes party!” while a fourth person added, “What’s sad is he’s married! If the tables were turned don’t think that he would have liked his wife doing what he did to another man!”
Franklin and his wife, Tammy, have been married for 27 years. However, not everyone was against the married man’s dancing. One commenter quoted scriptures, stating “we are not to judge” and said that there was nothing wrong with having “fun while they worship,” particularly since God “sent his only forbidden son cause he KNOWS we are not perfect.”
The Franklin's. Kirk and Tammy Franklin ❤ pic.twitter.com/FkqKD17hED
— 👑 WarepamorSammy 👑 (@Warepamorsammy) November 11, 2021
A more strait-laced remark read, “Some of y’all in the comments don’t understand the difference between judging vs calling out foolishness. Kirk is a married man AND that was NOT his wife he was twerking on. That was foolishness.”
Franklin opened up in a December 2023 interview on “Club Shay Shay” with Shannon Sharpe about facing ostracism in his ministry for blending secular music into his art.
Driven by fear of judgment, he said he turned down an opportunity to jam with Prince, despite the artist’s visit, family meeting, and expressed admiration. This fear also led him to miss out on receiving his first Grammy in 1996 to avoid criticism from his more strictly religious fans.
“First time, I was at home in the bed,” Franklin said, adding a little later that he didn’t want to seem “too worldly” to the older guard who dismissed the show.
” … Coming up sometimes in church, you can be in communities that can be so over religious that it’s almost like there’s a false humility that people force upon you that you don’t want to see him excited. Right. It’s because you don’t wanna see him like you too worldly,” he continued.
The 55-year-old then recalled a “time where anything that didn’t look like the church was the devil.”
“It drives me crazy now. A lot of times I would acquiesce to other people’s view of ‘don’t get caught up,’ [and] ‘you know that that’s the world.’”
Franklin revealed he would “downplay” certain things he learned from other Gospel artists as a “young puck.” He also gave context as to why people object to the way he ministers the word of God.
“It is an ideology from a culture and a generation of biblical illiteracy. So, a lot of times when it comes to our people, especially when you talk about something as colonized as American Christianity, sometimes it can be ideals that people want to make spiritual,” he said. “We take our personal belief systems and we super spiritualize them and try to put them in the canon of Scripture and try to make them ‘bibliometric.’”
Sharpe asked the “Brighter Day” vocalist when he began to shift this standpoint from “appeasing a certain group” to being himself.
“When I started to see that nothing I was doing was working. That nothing I did was pleasing anybody,” he said was the catalyst of his ecclesial emancipation. What also helped was that his hit song “Stomp” had debuted and no matter how it impacted people, he said she was still “crucified” and “beat up” over the inspirational song.
Still, Franklin said struggled to choose between two approaches about how he should worship. “Nothing I was doing was satisfying a lot of the elders, a lot of the community, that I wanted to please because again being raised [with] no family, no parents, being adopted, I had a lot of acceptance issues,” Franklin said.
He said he “slowly started to just become comfortable with either being scrutinized or being an outsider,” adding, “I still struggle to this day, wanting to be liked and wanting to be accepted by the church community.”
The criticism of his dancing on stage and some of his lyrics doesn’t stop him, and not all are against him, which is clear by the sold-out Reunion Tour.
The 19-time Grammy winner hopes there will be a time when naysayers will see he is a Christian man who really loves God.
