Troy Evans preaches at Edge Urban Fellowship in a rundown Grand Rapids, Mich., neighborhood known for prostitution. Inside what looks like an abandoned office building are walls covered by graffiti. There are tattooed people wearing baseball caps and jeans. Three 20-year-old men holding mics get ready to bust out some elaborate dance moves.
It may seem like a hip-hop show, but it’s actually church.
While Evans preaches to about 100 people on a given Saturday, he has no seminary training and dropped out of school in the 7th grade. His goal is to reach out to kids who either don’t have families or are joining gangs. Evans knows exactly what that’s like: He was on his own at 16, the leader of one of the dozens of gangs in the area. He says gangs helped him feel that he was part of something bigger than himself.
“What I saw was a group of people that actually cared about each other at a level,” Evans says. “What I saw was when there wasn’t men in the community or men outside of the community or the church that cared at all about what we were doing, there was a man who took us under his wing. He just so happened to be the leader of the organization.”
Hip-hop churches started emerging in the late ’90s.
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article courtesy of npr.org
