Pastor Ken Muldrow looks out through his dark sunglasses from the DJ booth in the back of the sanctuary. He sees the rows of red chairs, the bowed heads of the congregation and the open dance floor. And he can see his oldest son, KJ, who is struggling to give the opening prayer. Bent over the clear Lucite lectern at the front of the room, KJ twists with anticipation as he awaits the word of God. He rests his head on the podium's cool surface, his shoulders hunched underneath his purple Minnesota Vikings jersey. He is still waiting silently when his father's voice comes through the speakers next to him, "Praise Jesus. And bless everyone who has come here today to this hip-hop ministry. Amen."
KJ steps off the pulpit and his father slides up the fader, releasing a heavy Southern funk beat that cascades through the small sanctuary. To an outsider, the moment seems unbearably tense, yet it's normal for the father and son. This ministry is young, and there will always be growing pains when parents ask their children to take on more responsibility. KJ and his father know that.
Two months ago The General Assembly of the First Born Inc., on Moses White Boulevard in West Tampa, traded its normal Sunday service for a hip-hop ministry. The new service uses some of the old staples – the opening blessing, the sermon, the altar call. But the lead pastor sits in the back now, playing CDs. A rapper's set can stand in for the sermon. And the church's teenagers, like KJ, have begun to help shape the message. Run by a leadership team made up of the church's pastors and their kids, the hip-hop ministry is General Assembly's attempt to make the gospel relevant. The predominantly African-American congregation still meets throughout the week for traditional worship. But now Sundays are for the kids – and for their parents.
General Assembly isn't the first church to use hip-hop to reach young people – it's not even the first one in Tampa. Crossover Community Church, just west of the Lowry Park Zoo, draws hundreds to its services each week. Believed by many to be the world's model hip-hop church, Crossover is booming – largely because of its young lead pastor, Tommy Kyllonen. Known in the world of Christian hip-hop as Urban D, Kyllonen has released five rap albums and travels around the country speaking at conferences; he's an emerging expert on bringing the Word to the hip-hop generation.
These two churches – General Assembly and Crossover – are different in too many ways to count. Kyllonen has a record contract and a degree in urban ministry, and his church, when the lights dim and someone raps on stage, can look more like a nightclub than a sanctuary. He is slick and successful, his message clear and compelling.
General Assembly, just six services into its hip-hop ministry, has questions to answer. Money is tight. Attendance is growing, but slowly. The young folks are just beginning to grasp what it means to be a leader, and their parents, too old to be a part of the hip-hop generation, can't authentically reach the unchurched masses on their own.
But these churches have something in common, too. A faith that is simply unshakable. They both believe this is what they are meant to do.
Gospel hip-hop, or holy hip-hop, is by most accounts a genre in its infancy. As Christian rock continues to gather attention by bringing suburban white kids into the church, the Word has also made inroads into mainstream rap, highlighted by Kanye West's Grammy-winning single "Jesus Walks." But while West may have gotten His name onto the airwaves, the song – which includes profanity and a line about not wanting to convert atheists – is hardly rooted in scripture.
The idea of hip-hop being holy at all is counterintuitive to most; it's supposed to be about bitches and bling, not loaves and fishes.
Thus much of holy hip-hop is caught in what amounts to genre purgatory. It's too preachy, too spiritual and too clean for those who listen to secular hip-hop; yet it's too hard, too dangerous, and too raw for the traditional church. Its missionaries – and there are many – are left to promote their message at conferences and festivals around the country, such as last month's Holy Hip-Hop Awards and Summit in Atlanta.
Over 150 acts performed during the weekend, and countless more strolled through the small arena, hawking their CDs and showing their stuff in freestyle "get-togethers" (it's a convergence, remember, not a competition). Contacts were made, Sunday morning gigs were booked, and the movement's pioneers, including Kyllonen, taught ministry seminars on hip-hop's potential to attract that coveted 18-24-year-old market.
Hip-hop, they said, is the way to bring Him to them.
"It's not easy going [to] the pulpit to say a few words," says KJ, sitting in General Assembly's sanctuary an hour before the Wednesday night meeting of the holy hip-hop ministry leadership team. Rubbing his hands over his headband and checking out his reflection in the mirror across the room, KJ takes the same long pauses he does at the altar. "It's real hard to go up there and start praying "cause all this stuff gets in your mind and you start stumbling with words trying to make the prayer so perfect."Just then, Willie Green, the leadership team's resident extrovert and least devout member, walks through the door.
"I don't want to interrupt," he says, pounding fists with KJ. Willie grabs a red chair from the first row and sidles up to the table, light gleaming off the oversized fake diamond drooping from his earlobe. "How's everybody doing?"
These two have known each other since KJ was born, and both say that Willie, 20, is a role model for the young minister. Yet KJ, a high school junior, gets A's and B's, while Willie dropped out in ninth grade. Willie's got life experience, though. He's grown up without a father, been accused of robbing a Burger King and thrown in jail (he was acquitted). He works 40 hours a week packing meat at Wal-Mart.
Sitting a few feet from the pulpit, the two young men talk about women, and Willie dishes out all the advice he can. "Treat 'em with respect," he says. "But don't let them mistake your kindness for weakness, KJ."
The two are laughing a few minutes later when Pastor Muldrow walks in wearing a black Blake High Football windbreaker and a stopwatch around his neck. Two young members of the leadership team, Steven and Shevella Carridice, come in behind him and take a seat at the table. The four talk about music as Muldrow heads to the DJ booth and puts on a recording of the last service – the one where Willie rapped and Shevella sang. Willie moans as he hears himself over the speakers, begging the pastor to turn it off. But you can tell he enjoys the sound of his own voice; the smile in the corner of his mouth gives it all away.
The Wednesday night leadership team meetings are exercises in patience. But if they're tedious, they're also the most tangible opportunity for the team's elders – Pastor Muldrow, Evangelist Lorraine Davis, and Pastors Andre and Jaqui Aris – to guide the team's junior members (most of whom also happen to be their children).
"God has been telling us to focus on the children," Andre Aris says. "And hip-hop is a great medium to do that."
Many of General Assembly's leaders – not the leadership team but the pastors and the bishop who built the church up from a street ministry over 20 years ago – say hip-hop is a carrot, a way to lure kids into the church and a vehicle for spreading the Word. Few of them actually listen to the music – contemporary gospel and jazz are more their speed – but they respect its power.
"It has the beat of the drum," says Bishop Francis Davis, General Assembly's 66-year-old head. "The hip-hop beat is about praise – the hip-hoppers just don't know that they're praising God."
General Assembly is relying on that beat to make their latest ministry a success. It's what brings kids into clubs, they reason, so it can get them into the sanctuary, too. The message is in the words, of course, but that will come later.
The leadership team and Pastor Muldrow hope the ministry will eventually outgrow General Assembly's small sanctuary, attracting enough people to fill the Sun Dome. But that will have to wait. For now, the pastors need to be content that they've at least involved their own children.
Just drawing that handful doesn't make the ministry a failure.
Many church leaders have trouble keeping even their own kids around, and creating a space for KJ, Willie, and the rest of the pastors' children to enjoy God is no small feat.
Still, the folks at General Assembly can't help but expect big things. Holy hip-hop's potential, they say, is just too great. "Forty million people listen to hip-hop in this world," says Bishop Davis. "And God told us to go out into the world, and bring his people back."
"These kids want liberty – they want the freedom to praise God the way they want to," says Pastor Muldrow, who is also a student empowerment specialist, and a football and track coach, at Blake High School. And on Wednesdays and Sundays, he leads the hop-hop ministry, employing those same skills to motivate the kids to take control. It's a delicate act, balancing the self-determination of a bunch of teenagers with the need to actually get things done.
But he has a hook. "If you find the interest for any kid," he says simply, "then you tap into that interest."
Tommy Kyllonen sits in his office on Crossover's second floor before a Thursday night hip-hop service. Outside, people are already starting to show up. The sounds of dribbling basketballs and blasting car stereos come through the window as Kyllonen talks on the phone about a possible upcoming book on urban ministering and reaching the hip-hop generation. Across his office, an old Rocky poster is pinned up next to a bookshelf. The champ is standing alone in the fog, holding his fists above his head.Kyllonen, 31, who is white, grew up in northeast Philadelphia, a neighborhood he describes as somewhere between "rough" and "roses."
Despite being the son of a pastor, Kyllonen gravitated toward hip-hop, not the church. He bought his first tape in junior high, and the culture trickled quickly into the rest of his life. He started breakdancing, writing lyrics and tagging his various nicknames around the city. His world was as far from his father's as it could be.
Or so he thought.
A large white building on North Orleans Avenue tattooed with graffiti, Crossover is flanked by a basketball court on one side and a skate park on the other. What began in 1996 as a youth ministry with four kids has blossomed into a full-on urban church experience that uses all of hip-hop – the music, the clothes, the lingo – to reach the not-yet-saved.
Armed with a degree in youth ministry from Southeastern College and the rhyming talent to become an underground star, Kyllonen has built up the cred he needs to take chances, and Crossover is dedicated to staying untraditional. Kyllonen and his staff aren't copping some style they saw on BET – they're ministering the only way they know how, as themselves.
Standing at Crossover's lectern, which is designed to look like an oversized spray paint can, Kyllonen has the gift to speak to a room of 200 and yet find a way to talk to everyone individually. His well-prepared sermons vacillate between scripture and anecdotes, jokes and explanations. He moves around on stage wearing Jordan's and Timberlands, and often walks into the crowd, his lanky arms accentuating his point. Kyllonen doesn't bellow like some preachers, and he doesn't break into song. He just talks, engaging his audience in what feels like a conversation – even if he's the only one speaking.
For Crossover to work, he says, that conversation needs to stay relevant.
"We're part of [hip-hop] culture," Kyllonen says. "We don't stick our heads in a wall and say I'm not going to watch TV and I'm not going to turn on the computer and I'm not going to go outside … but the message isn't watered down. I shoot straight."
Kyllonen needs to keep the services entertaining, too; Crossover isn't a place many people come to out of obligation – or because there's nothing better to do. Thursday night hip-hop services start just before 8 p.m.
With the rest of the sanctuary's lights dimmed, the orange beam shining through the smoke paints itself on Naiomy Cardona. One-third of Crossover's R&B group Harmony, Cardona has her eyes closed and her hand outstretched as she pours her voice into the mic.
As the DJ behind her spins a slow piano riff and a beatboxer spits out a cackling rhythm, Cardona seems not to notice the congregation singing along with her.
The pews are filled by Latinos and African Americans, whites and Asians. While most of them are under 25, there are plenty of families, too – couples in their 40s and 50s who may have come to help their kids, but stayed to help themselves.
The crowd comes dressed in do-rags and baseball hats, with afros and cornrows and the close-cropped hair of young soldiers stationed at MacDill. Looking tight is important – whether you're in the congregation or on stage. "No one's gonna judge you [at Crossover]," Kyllonen says. "There's nowhere in the scripture where it says you gotta dress a certain way to go into God's house. That's a man-made tradition."
The operation is brand conscious: Everything from the programs to the annual glossy magazine to the website to the images they throw up on the sanctuary's four TVs have a professional touch that makes Crossover seem like a major rap label – not an emerging church.
"I want things to look good," Kyllonen says. "I want things to be done in excellence."
That goes for the environment too. Kyllonen figures that first-timers decide whether they're going to come back in the first 15 minutes of a service, so keeping the scenery familiar is vital. Graffiti on the walls, hip-hop spinning on the stage – it's authentic, but it's also by design.
The setting may be the focal point, but when Kyllonen and sidemen do speak directly to those new folks, they keep it as "seeker-sensitive" (a current Church buzzword that Kyllonen mocks) as they can. They crack jokes, apply 21st-century slang to 1st-century stories – "Sampson was a big strong dude, but that cat was dumb, man" – and translate scripture into language that sounds familiar.
For the last five weeks, that language has been sex.
Touted on a promo flyer with a photo of a condom, Crossover's "Sex in the Church?" series has touched on some risqué topics. Masturbation. Pornography. Lust.
Kyllonen isn't so progressive that he approves of any of those, but his message doesn't go as far as other churches'. Sex is a beautiful thing, he says, a fun thing that doesn't have to just be about procreation – as long as it's done in wedlock.
The pastors know folks in his congregation are struggling with such sexual sins, yet instead of demonizing them, they try to work through the issues. There are inspirational music videos, skits staged at porn shops, and testimonials about life-long battles with masturbation.
It is only at the end of the sermon that Kyllonen offers a challenge. At some point, he says, you're going to have to work this out and get your life right.
With that, the service ends, and the congregation migrates to the patio to munch on empanadas and catch up. Kids play hoops and skate, and on Thursday nights the sanctuary turns into a de facto club as breakdancers take over the floor, spinning on their heads in front of the pulpit, worshipping.
"This place keeps me out of the worst of jams," says De'Andre Long, a 22-year-old breaker who's been coming to Crossover for five years. "This place keeps my mind fresh."
The converted dance floor in front of the pulpit at General Assembly is starting to heat up. It's not full – at last count there were just a dozen people moving to the music blaring from the speakers – but the eclectic blend of ages, sizes and styles makes it seem crowded. Patricia Carridice, 44, dressed in a pink shirt with stars scattered across the front, sways gently, her hands outstretched as she looks toward the ceiling. Just a few feet away, her two children – Steven, 16, and Shevella, 19 – twist and turn, matching each other move for move. A few boys stand awkwardly by a speaker like a bunch of seventh graders at their first dance. And KJ, never far from the mirror, arches his knee to his chest in time with the beat then drops it down, throwing his shoulders into the air as his foot hits the floor.
For half an hour, Pastor Muldrow lets the music do the talking. There's line dancing, 360s, and endearing solo routines that usually go unnoticed. Muldrow will come over the speakers occasionally – "This is how we do it on the holy hip-hop Sundays," he'll say when things get especially live – but for the most part he stays quiet, just switching the CDs and waiting for KJ to come back and complain that the music's too soft, or too slow.
The kids will run today's service. KJ will deliver the sermon. Shevella will do the blessing. And Willie Green, who hasn't come to a service in over a month, will guide the service along as the afternoon's MC.
"Welcome to Willie's hip-hop ministry," he says as he pulls the red mic from its stand. Green pulls his tan visor to the side as he starts his monologue. He's been on stage before during a hip-hop service, rapping two of his original songs. But this is different. It's his show. And the aspiring comic/rapper/singer/actor isn't going to miss his chance to perform.
"You know what I don't like?" he asks, waiting for the crowd to respond.
"What you don't like, Willie?"
"I don't like when you ask people for money, and they know they ain't got no money, but they start patting down their pockets [anyway]," he starts. He goes on to do bits about O.J. and the L.A. riots – the kind of humor you would've expected to see 13 years ago on late-night TV. The congregation laughs along warily, unsure of what to expect from a kid who has been openly defiant in the past. One can assume it's the first time anyone has performed secular stand-up inside the General Assembly sanctuary.
His mother, sitting in the first row, covers her face with her hand.
"Mother, please don't be like that," he says, and moves on to the next joke.
When KJ gets up to give his sermon, he falls prey to the delays he's suffered before. "Satan does not want me up here, he does not want me to be ministering. He wants me to be out there in the streets," he says to fill the space as he again awaits the Word. When the pauses get too long, his father turns up the music to fill the silence. Pastor Muldrow does it once, then twice, but the third time KJ tells him to turn it down.
"I don't need it," he says, brushing off his father's help. His sermon, in which he implores his fellow kids to keep going to church and to stay monogamous, ends abruptly a few minutes later. But he's made it through.
Toward the end of the service, Willie gets up on stage to perform the altar call. The normally gregarious persona fades and Willie becomes serious.
The altar call is typically short – "if anyone would like to come up and surrender their life to God," Pastor Muldrow might say – but when Willie makes the call no one walks forward. So he keeps talking.
"I really believe this ministry can go big places," he declares. And then he starts talking about himself. About how he wishes he could lose his anger for the father that walked out on him. About how even if he's wandered, the General Assembly has always been there for him. About how when he was sitting in that jail cell, Jesus was there with him.
His mother stands against the wall, crying softly to herself.
"Get your life right," he says. "This is way more important than any rap song."
And with that people start coming forward to surrender to God. First the two kids sitting in the back, then an older woman, then Pastor Muldrow's 8-year-old daughter, Damaria.
A woman comes up to give the blessing, placing the holy water, and then her hand, on the row of foreheads. One by one they fall backward, overcome by the spirit.
Finally, after the last one has been blessed, Willie steps down from the stage, takes off his visor, holds his hands to the sky and is blessed himself.
Later on he will say that he is still lacking in his faith, that his life has been too filled with turmoil for him to just start believing now. But for those few minutes, Willie Green was exactly what General Assembly's pastors – and what his mother – wanted him to be.
Correction:
Max Linsky correctly reported that Willie Green had not been to church in over a month, but failed to give a reason for his absence. This omission may have implied that Green didn't want to be there. In fact, Green had to work on those Sundays that he missed. The Weekly Planet regrets the omission.
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.