- It is impossible to live like this when there is only money around,

The angelic singing is not heard: it is drowned out in doubt!

This current creates a slave instead of a genius,

Enmeshed in fear and laziness from birth!

In the studio, the music fidgets nervously, beats chirp in the speakers, words turn around and form rhymes. Standing outside the door, one can imagine a daring guy from an outlying industrial area at the microphone, reading about his unfortunate fate - about an attempt to go beyond the narrow boundaries of social restrictions. He has short hair, a heavy chain and wide trousers, his arms are covered in tattoos, and when the verse ends, he quickly grabs a slowly smoldering cigarette from the ashtray and takes a couple of nervous puffs - but if you open the door, you see a different picture.

At the microphone is Father Maxim Kurlenko, aka MC Priest - this is the name of the rap project that he has been involved in since 2013. Maxim is forty-two years old, and he is an Orthodox archpriest. He has a Spanish beard, long graying hair and a tired, ironic look. Father Maxim’s wide black cassock only completes the gloomy pictures of industrial rap about ghetto life and finding oneself in the world of the city outskirts. What is happening is slightly contrasted by a gilded cross, which hangs on a large chain and jumps nervously to the beat of the street rhythms, when Maxim characteristically and like a rapper waves his arms, as if completing especially important parts of the text with sharp body movements.

The studio is a small office that Maxim equipped in the house that the diocese allocated for him. There is a table with a computer, a microphone on a tripod and a small tape recorder from which Maxim reads “plus”, that is, he sings along to his own song sounding from the speakers. This is just a demonstration of his capabilities - he recorded the main tracks of his three rap albums in another place - in an apartment in Cheboksary. But about three months ago he was transferred to a new temple in the village of Chemursha. The studio had to be transported to a new location, where it was not yet possible to properly equip it.

Father Maxim uploads his clips to the Internet approximately once a year. In some, the priest appears in the unexpected image of a brutal rapper in a tracksuit driving an old foreign car.

Chemursha is a very small village of 300 houses, located in Chuvashia - twenty kilometers from the capital, the city of Cheboksary. The new temple looks neat and even slightly hipster-like: small, cozy, neatly built from timber in stylish brown shades. Getting to the temple is difficult - not because it is hidden, but because the roads in the village are too reminiscent of directions that are corroded by potholes as much as an unrepentant sinner is by vices. But, despite this, there are expensive foreign cars near the temple: townspeople love to come here, where there is no fuss and noise, and the service is conducted by a young Orthodox priest.

The service in the temple is held in two languages ​​- Russian and Chuvash. The texts of the Holy Scriptures in the unfamiliar language of the Volga people are briskly read by a wizened grandmother in a headscarf. Passages from the Sermon on the Mount read out loud and recited in Chuvash sound outlandish and also vaguely resemble rap. Father Maxim finishes the service near the altar and goes to the pulpit. “Lord, have mercy” sounds, the parishioners bow and cross themselves. There are a lot of children in the temple. They are gathered into a restless flock and given pieces of paper with the lyrics of the song. The children, smiling and exchanging glances, began to sing in high voices:

Lord have mercy, Lord forgive,

Help me, God, to carry my cross.

I am a great sinner on earthly path,

Lord have mercy, Lord forgive.

Valera was not friends with the outside world,

No matter what happens, he doesn't care about the lantern.

Valera knew the design of any simulator,

My favorite lesson at school is physical education.

The year 2003 is walking along the streets of Yekaterinburg. The group EK Playaz, which loosely translates as “Yekaterinburg players”, is recording its most famous track “Valera”. There are three of them: Dry ICE, T BASS and DJ Max - the one who has not yet become Father Maxim, the priest of the Church of the Presentation of the Lord in the village of Chemursha. But that’s later, and now they are at the peak of their fame. They, together with the group “Casta”, performed at the “Our People” festival in Luzhniki. They recorded their first album. And the rapper Vladi invited them to Moscow to the closed club Down Town.

Maxim Kurlenko does not stand out from the team: he is wearing jeans and sneakers, a gray sweatshirt with a print and a gray hat, confidently pulled down to his eyebrows. They write ironic rap about everyday absurdities and contrast it with the depressive and aggressive gloom that was popular among most rap teams of that time.

And even in 2003 there was a fair amount of gloom in Yekaterinburg. However, it cannot be compared with the 90s. Maxim still remembers how he graduated from school in 1991, receiving his matriculation certificate under the loud creaking of the disintegrating Soviet Union.

He was always self-absorbed. At school, he preferred reading history books to aimlessly wandering the streets and large companies. Napoleon, Alexander the Great - he read their biography in high school.

But, despite his passion for books and a certain reclusiveness, there were no impudent punks waiting around the corner of Maxim’s school, ready to squeeze out his pocket money and shout after him contemptuously: “Nerd!” In high school, Maxim regularly went to the gym and did 20 pull-ups on the horizontal bar. Since childhood, he wanted to devote his life to something important, big and defining the meaning of existence - he was seriously preparing to become a military man.

However, one year at the command school was enough to understand: poverty, theft, nepotism, confusion and chaos - that is, everything that illustrated the Russian army at the dawn of the 90s is not at all what he dreams of throwing in his lot with. He dropped out of school and served as a soldier for a year. Maxim guarded warehouses with chemical weapons.

He went on duty and stood alone all night. Behind him towered countless tanks with poisonous gas, dug into the ground under Stalin. The dim lights of a big city were visible ahead. Unusually bright stars for a resident of a metropolis hung overhead. There was silence all around. It was possible to talk only with the moral law inside.

There was one night when the stars became closer and he realized: there is something higher than the shift supervisor, the general, and even the minister of defense. Maxim came home on leave and was baptized into Orthodoxy. So he began his journey towards himself. Maxim did not intend to become a priest in the 90s - he became a DJ at the local Yekaterinburg radio. His spiritual search in those years was guided not by church scriptures, but by the songs of Tsoi and “Alice,” which he listened to on an old cassette player.

And a little later MTV appeared and an ardent fan of Russian rock discovered rap - then still foreign. Maxim did not understand the words of the songs, but he was captured by the unknown rhythms and energy of the new musical direction. For the young DJ, Russia has always been the country of Dostoevsky - that is, a country of gloomy, mysterious, talented and literary-centric - he found all this in rap.

Together with two friends, they launched the first rap program in Yekaterinburg on local radio. They were a kind of missionaries of a new musical direction and brought the rhyming word to young people. On the air they included the most popular rap songs from overseas.

But in order to put a new song on the radio, they stood guard for hours near the TV with a VCR. As soon as the clip started on the screen, you had to quickly press the record button. And then play the recorded song for radio listeners. Also, piece by piece, friends collected the broadcasts of Western stations, somewhere they found and played rare rap albums for Yekaterinburg from pirated cassettes.

Not a single fashion party in Yekaterinburg at the dawn of the 2000s took place without them. Eventually they decided to come up with their own rap. The three of them wrote all the songs, but about slightly different things. Dry ICE and T BASS openly mocked the surrounding reality, and DJ Max even wanted to insert lines about the search for meaning, about the purpose of existence into the ironic recitative, but the lyrical sketches did not always fit into the concept of rhythmic Ural buffoonery.

Nevertheless, the group’s very first compositions caught the attention of the capital’s rap scene, and they were offered to record an album. It came out in 2003. It was called “IgradaPobeda”, the disc was provided with a warning: “Attention! Intellectual and humorous vocabulary." On the cover there was a slot machine with four portraits: priest Maxim Kurlenko - on the far right, with a Spanish beard and a white hat pulled down to his eyes.

Loud parties, soft drugs, concerts and groupies - all this surrounded and constrained the rappers' party. The upbeat beats and recitative, ridiculing the new Russian reality, which at first amused Maxim so much, began to tire him. He recalled his childhood, when he went to the Rostov village to visit his grandparents and spent all his time there, in silence and in nature - alone and in harmony with himself. He remembered the starry night on guard duty, when the stars slowly descended towards him, when a mystical experience of something unknown and all-encompassing washed over him.

When the guys sat down to write their second album and planned a concert tour, Maxim said that he was leaving the group. He entered the Yekaterinburg branch of St. Tikhon's Moscow Theological Institute. Three years later he was ordained to the priesthood. This happened 12 years ago.

For this to become mega, you need to be a professional, like Father Photius, for example, and this requires a lot of time, money and preparation. I don’t have such a task - I haven’t even performed anywhere with the “MS Priest” project and don’t intend to. My grandfather played the trumpet, my dad played jazz on the trumpet - all this is close to me. But what I do cannot even be called poetry, it is more like sermons. The first album was called “Sermon in Rap Style.” Partly this is some kind of foolishness. As the Apostle Paul said, “for when the world through its wisdom did not know God in the wisdom of God, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe,” Father Maxim smiles.

The priest smiles openly and sincerely. Every time he talks about rap music, he perks up considerably, then, as if embarrassed by his increased interest in such mundane things, he instantly becomes serious. But he always talks about his younger years with passionate nostalgia.

Maxim does not directly talk about what became the turning point - the point of transition from rap to Orthodoxy. He rather speaks in parables, talking about the long search for his self, and about the mystical experience that awaits every true believer. In the 12 years since the last album recorded with EK Playaz, everything in his life has changed. In the church, Maxim rose to the rank of archpriest.

In the royal table of ranks, this rank is akin to a colonel in the army,” Father Maxim ironically notes.

In the monastery he met his future wife. Now he has four children - two daughters and two sons. For seven years he has been broadcasting a program about faith on a local radio station and travels to universities giving lectures. In the diocese, he heads the department for working with youth, so it seems that nothing reminds him of the past. But at some point in the life of Father Maxim, beats and rhythms began to sound again. It was as sudden as once in the army, on guard duty, when he felt that he believed. A few years ago, already in the priesthood, he realized that he wanted to record rap again.

True faith transforms, says Father Maxim, so my current work is not the same me, this story is about something completely different. This is an attempt to speak to young people in their language. Talk about serious and personal things. I'm not trying to throw a hook and on this hook to pull everyone to faith. I, as a sower, throw out seeds - some will fall on rocky soil, some on fertile soil. Still, they ask themselves questions: who am I? why is all this? Everyone asks these questions; it’s another matter what answers they find. Or they just throw garbage at it - let it be as it is, I’ll go with the flow. Here is my video from the first album “Without Grace” on YouTube, which was watched by 90 thousand people - I think this is quite good.

Father Maxim, or rather MS Superior, has many admirers on social networks. However, from the church pulpit he preaches in the classic Church Slavonic style, without confusing the parishioners with sermons in the rap style. Many believers, especially older ones, have no idea about the work of the holy father. Although the temple workers, even the elderly nun Anastasia, are aware of his work.

Well, I showed it to my grandson. He is 25 years old, he also used to wear these wide T-shirts and pants, he was also a rapper. He listened and said: you have a normal priest there.

However, there are also non-Orthodox trolls and militant atheistic haters on the Internet who write unpleasant things to Father Maxim.

They write: the priest reads rap - it would be better if he prayed. But, wait, I know how to pray a little,” Father Maxim retorts, smiling.

Maxim is not ashamed of the fact that he was friends and still maintains good relationships with many rappers. He speaks very well of Vladi and Casta, of the group “25/17,” although the latest trends in Russian rap are not close to him - he says that commerce has eaten up almost all creativity, all art, and Russian rap has begun to resemble a cesspool of secondary rhymes.

Even if the church authorities know about the existence of MC Rector, they do not publicly condemn creativity and do not impose a ban on rap sermons.

Many priests understand me - they see something missionary in this. But the only thing is that one priest once asked: “I heard you are dancing there somewhere?” I say: “Where?” This is apparently a video clip that came out, although I don’t really dance anywhere. I ask: “Did you watch it?” He: “No, I didn’t look.” That's roughly how it goes. I realize I'm walking a little on the edge right now. But a missionary, he must be a little on the edge in order to be a bridge between those who believe and those who still doubt or have never thought about it at all.

In Protestant America, entire styles of music have existed for many years: gospel rap and holy hip-hop. Popular musical genres are used to convey the universal ideas of Christianity to different social strata - to speak to them in their language. In the Orthodox Church, such phenomena as the MS Superior are rare and always raise a lot of questions, surprise and interest.

Maybe because Orthodoxy is a rather closed and orthodox religion, closed primarily to new trends. Young people are not always ready to accept the Church Slavonic language and do not always understand what elderly clergy with long gray beards are telling them.

We finish filming, Father Maxim thinks and looks at the cameraman for a long time.

Is there much left in the ending of this story? The friends with whom he began his Ural rap crusade still promote their Ekaterinburg group and occasionally give interviews to Internet bloggers on a park bench. In these interviews they joke, remember Maxim, praise his work, say that he always followed his own path and you need to listen to him. They say that they listened to his new tracks and they are fine.

Maxim has not yet gained enormous popularity. His project “MC Priest” is certainly interesting, but so much so that every new album released adds a thousand friends to his social network account. On his page, along with songs, he posts radio programs about Orthodoxy, which are also listened to. Father Maxim does not deny that if the situation suddenly changes and the highest spiritual authorities demand that he step on the throat of his own song, church subordination will force him to do this and he will give up rap, but he would not like to see such an outcome.

MC Rector will not be able to become a mass phenomenon, and Father Maxim, of course, does not encourage all priests to become rappers - that would be funny and stupid. However, if believers and simply thinking people diluted commercial rap music with something that had a higher meaning and a clear rhythm, he extremely approves of such attempts. It’s not for nothing that Russia is the country of Dostoevsky.

Finally, Father Maxim comes out of his reverie.

ABOUT! - he suddenly exclaims.

He quickly approaches the operator and asks him something. In the presence of icons, the words “aperture”, “lens”, “autofocus” are heard.

“It’s an excellent camera,” summarizes MS Abbot, “I have the same one, but worse and second-hand.”

At this moment he perks up, and it seems that a little more - and he will start reading some kind of freestyle. However, this impression quickly evaporates, and now a serious and thoughtful Orthodox clergyman is seeing us off.

Guardian angel on your way! - he says measuredly and rhythmically, and we leave the church. And then, as if there was another track, or a sermon, either from a rapper, or from a holy father, or from two people at once.

In contact with

More than five thousand views and plays, hundreds of “likes” and reposts - this is the reaction of listeners to the Orthodox rap of the artist Nastoyatel. Under this nickname hides priest Maxim Kurlenko, a cleric of the Chuvash Metropolis. Before being ordained, he was a rapper and DJ. After nine years of musical silence, he returned - to put sermons and reflections on life in Christ in rap form.

Non-classical priest

“The Lord knows about my activities. If there are any objections from him, I will stop playing music. But he hasn't scolded yet. Our Bishop is kind and trusts,” Priest Maxim Kurlenko heads the diocesan department for work with youth, and he is also the rector of the church in the village of Sosnovka near Cheboksary.

Father Maxim communicates a lot and willingly with young people. He hosts the “God With Us” program on local radio, gives lectures, publishes in newspapers, and organizes round tables. And also - it goes to those who are not churchgoers. And, perhaps, they are, as marketers will say, the target audience of rap performed by the Cheboksary priest. “Lectures are good. But they are not for everyone, explains Father Maxim. “And - this is the same sermon, clothed in a language understandable to many.”

The key song in Father Maxim’s album is called “Without Grace.” Her refrain: “Without grace, we cannot get up from our knees” - the priest’s confident recitative is accompanied by a measured beat and plucking of guitar strings. The video for the song tells the story of a teenager, a young man. Every day he walks near the temple: he walks past to a tinted car, through the window of which they sell him drugs. Then he makes up his mind and one day enters the temple. A package of drugs flies into the trash bin.

Father Maxim knows what words and images are understandable to young people. Ten years ago, he was a member of the rap group EK Players from Yekaterinburg, worked as a DJ, and was immersed in what is now called street culture. His rap group was famous in youth circles: they performed on the capital’s stage, their albums were released on cassettes and discs. But even then, says Father Maxim, the spiritual search within him did not stop. And there was little street culture to respond to spiritual needs. This is how a musician from Yekaterinburg ended up as a student in Moscow. While studying, he was ordained and went to Cheboksary to serve in a small church outside the city.

“For parishioners, I am a priest in the classical sense of the word,” he says. - There, in the village, mostly elderly people, grandparents, go to church. They don't have the Internet. They don’t know that I write rap.”

Hip Hop Ministry

The music for the compositions - the so-called “beats” - was donated by former musician friends. At home, Father Maxim did the mixing and mastering - these skills have remained with him since his days as a DJ. The video was filmed with the help of friends. As the priest himself says, he did not spend a penny on recording and promoting the album. Nevertheless, the resonance from the compositions posted on the Internet was serious. Word of mouth worked: the songs of Father Maxim, who hid under the stage name “Abbey,” began to spread across the network. Hundreds of people wrote and thanked him for his creativity. Fame came unexpectedly.

The story from Maxim’s father’s video sometimes repeats itself in life. “Some guys write that they listened to the album and now, supposedly, they have given up bad habits and go to Church. To be honest, such stories do not seem entirely true to me,” says Father Maxim. But he admits: if his work really makes a person think and reconsider something, the goal will be achieved. “The obstacles that supposedly exist between the young man and the Church are cardboard fences. We need to get rid of them."

The priest plans to continue writing rap - as long as it does not interfere with his service. His experience with hip-hop as a form of preaching is not unique. There is a rapper, where a young seminarian named Anton Panchenko also writes rap texts on Orthodox topics. Two years ago he even received a blessing from the bishop for missionary concerts. Then the diocese commented on this undertaking: serving the Lord is possible in different ways, and rap is one of them.

Mikhail Bokov

The small village of Chemursha near Cheboksary, a broken, bumpy road and a little more than 400 residents, for whom a few years ago a brand new wooden church was built and a young priest was invited. 42-year-old Father Maxim serves in church, teaches Sunday school, makes an Orthodox program on local radio... And in his spare time he remembers his stellar Ural youth and reads rap. Or rather, “sermons in rap style.” He records under the nickname MC Nastoyatel and just released it a couple of weeks ago. For the sake of this news, we resumed the special project and traveled to Chuvashia to find out how the former DJ came to faith and what the church authorities think about the recitatives of the rector.

I studied at UPI, at the Faculty of Economics and Management, at the same time I worked on the radio and then became interested in rap. I liked his energy, it was masculine and fighting. Few people listened to this music, but there were like-minded people, the same black sheep: Dima Dry Ice and Sasha T-Bass, with whom we made the EK-Playaz project. And around this time, I began to have thoughts that this is not what I would devote my life to. Somewhere in the depths of my soul there was a search for something most important. We then signed a contract with a production studio and started going to festivals. This is the early 2000s, Moscow clubs, large venues...

I became very interested in everything connected with Orthodoxy. I did not grow up in an Orthodox family, I did not go to church. I was baptized as an adult, in the army. I served in a security company, there were guards there every other day, we guarded chemical weapons and ammunition depots. And so I stood on the tower at night, completely alone, and thought about something so important. Starry sky, trains knocking in the distance, city lights somewhere there. And suddenly I feel that the stars are too close. That God is much closer than I previously thought. And then my inner search ended with a meeting with God in my soul. I felt His presence, the presence of grace. I was completely turned over. This moment is difficult to describe. Not a single believer can reproduce in his memory exactly in seconds: yesterday I was an unbeliever - and today I am a believer. There is some mysticism in this. I remember the internal impasse, the contradictions that suddenly became exposed. At one fine moment, I probably somehow sincerely and deeply turned to God - and he answered me. And this blessed presence changed me.

But after the army I was still in a storm; I was far from the church. I guess I had the prayers of a confused guy who wanted to find his place in life. It's like that joke when a millionaire is asked how he got rich. And he talks for a long time about how he came to America with two dollars in his pocket, bought two lemons with them, squeezed the juice, sold lemonade, then bought four lemons... And then his grandmother died and left a huge inheritance. It’s the same for me - a miracle just happened.

For my parents, all this, of course, came as a huge surprise that I so abruptly went into faith. But they never tried to force anything on me. Back then, with my friends, I also kept getting confused about theological topics - this is called “neophyte syndrome.” Now I am on good terms with many people, but somehow everything changes over time, people who are closer to the faith have become closer to me.

It was very fast, from the ship to the ball. I answered the call that burned in my heart and decided to enroll in absentia at the Moscow St. Tikhon’s Theological Institute, I was just interested.

It was very difficult to study, I read from morning to evening, and so on for three and a half years in a row. I met Father Jerome - he was a famous elder in Chuvashia, the abbot of the Holy Trinity Monastery. At that time I didn’t imagine myself as a priest, I was wondering whether to become a monk or get married. And Father Jerome said right away: “You must be a priest.” And this struck a chord with me. I went to the monastery in Alatyr, which he helped restore, met my future wife there, Father Jerome married us and invited us to stay in Chuvashia. I petitioned to be allowed to become a priest.

The Lord calls: “Leave everything and follow me.” This is how it happened to me. I moved to Chuvashia and became a priest. At first it was very difficult. Life has changed completely. There are certain qualities that are needed for such a life. Humility comes first. But I'm not the kind of person to give up halfway. I don’t have any seditious thoughts of running somewhere or changing something suddenly. And I have four children - now I can’t decide only for myself.

The “Rabbot” project is pure missionary work, an attempt to churchize rap, just as Christians once churched paganism, leaving in many ways the form, but changing the essence. This is an attempt to show kids who are interested in both faith and hip-hop that they can be combined and do something like that. Show that the priest is much closer than it seems, that he is well versed in rap and can read you even better. In the video, I’m driving an old car that I borrowed from a friend, and I’m wearing an Adidas tracksuit, which I wear to workouts. This is a special provocation to show that the priest is also a person.

Few people work with young people; there are various Orthodox movements at large churches, where everyone wears the same T-shirts and does something - this is wonderful, but those who are already close to the faith come there. And those who sit in the courtyards are also great guys, they are into rap, and no one turns to them. American rap has had this for a long time: Gospel Rap, Holy Hip-Hop. And we have such a need.

Another goal of this project is some foolishness. I myself am a bit of a shocking person, and I would like to approach you from the other side. A person is used to being told: the gospel, the commandments, all that... And he has already grown armor against this. And if someone comes up to him from behind and knocks - hey, I'm here! - maybe he hasn’t had time to build those concrete fences there yet. The Apostle Paul said: “For since the world through [its] wisdom did not know God in the wisdom of God, it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.”

I suspect that the Metropolitan knows about this, but for now he gives me carte blanche - either to change my mind or to do something good. Older parishioners do not dare to say something like that to the priest - well, the priest is weird, let him be. My parishioners still came to see me. Sometimes reviews come in saying that this is not possible. But I have my own relationship with God, and I try to trust my steps to Him; if I did something, it means that I have such a need and an intention for why I did it.

The most difficult thing for a priest is to be a truly sacrificial and responsive person for everyone. I understand what a priest should be, but real life shows that sometimes the guts are thin. There are too many people and not enough time. But you see where you should strive and what is wrong with you now.

I found the answer to the question, what is the point. I felt the presence of God in my life, I realized that the life path that was given to me was the path I had to follow. When I was young, I kept jumping around, trying to find what was mine, what wasn’t mine - that’s no longer there. Now I feel in my own way and feel that it is me who lives, and not someone who lives for me.

The Lord does not put pressure on your hobbies - only this should all be for the glory of God. Just be honest with yourself, and if there are any contradictions, resolve them, don’t put it off until Monday. Yes, and maybe I still have everything ahead, I don’t know how much more storms there will be. The most important thing is not to spill your faith.