THE MISSION

The reason for this being my mission statement is because in my opinion many churches today attempt to take the God of the bible and make him more hip and palpable for today’s culture, instead of taking our current culture back to the original apostolic teachings the Apostles taught to the first-century church. The Apostles taught on topics like the doctrine of hell / total depravity / dying to yourself / Lordship salvation/repentance/doctrine of election/separation from worldly systems / Heaven etc. But sadly many of the topics taught in the modern-day church sermons center around topics like worldly blessings / personal satisfaction / overcoming temporal pain / becoming more relatable to the world. The subject of hell is viewed as unloving. Heaven is rarely or if at all talked about. And repentance is replaced with self-esteem. So throughout this blog, I will be tackling these issues and many other topics as well.

BORN AND RAISED

To give you a little history of myself, I was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. My younger brother and I were raised by a single mom. My parents divorced when I was just a baby. So I never had the opportunity to meet my dad. But thankfully I always had great uncles around to step in to somewhat fill the gap of not having a male presence in my home. As a kid, growing up in Chicago was a lot of fun. Especially during the summers hanging out with friends and holiday get-togethers with family. But living in Chicago was also no picnic in the park either. The area I grew up in was infested with gangs, drugs, murders, and many other crime-related activities. For this very reason, my mom didn’t want my younger brother and me to succumb to the peer pressures of our environment. So at the age of 14, my mom relocated our family to Carrollton Texas. Carrollton is roughly 25 miles outside of Dallas. I have to admit the change of environment was drastically different from the neighborhood I grew up in; in fact, they were opposites. I grew up around a predominately African American community and Carrollton was a predominately Caucasian community. So it was an element of culture shock. 

THE CHURCH

During my first year in Carrollton, my Mother began attending this small Baptist church in our neighborhood not far from where we lived. The church was a predominately African American congregation which help minimize the culture shock. I did enjoy going to church with my mom, but not for the reasons she may have thought. The church was an opportunity for me to establish new friendships and meet girls. The pastor’s sermons were always heartfelt and interesting. And he would always end his preaching by asking the audience to bow their heads. He would then speak in a low voice to soft music being played by our church pianist. The question he’d ask is “if you die tonight, do you know if you would spend eternity in Heaven with God, or eternity in hell raise your hands and come forward?” To this day I remember vividly the reaction I would have to his question. My heart would start beating so hard against my chest until I could feel it throbbing in my ears. Everything in me wanted to raise my hand and go to the front of the church and find out how I could go to Heaven. But I was so nervous and self-conscious about what other people in the church would think of me if I expose that I wasn’t a real Christian.

So of course the self-conscious thoughts in my head drowned out the pounding in my heart. But like a magician on cue, the pastor would say “if you feel that tugging on your heart don’t ignore it! That’s the Holy Spirit telling you to come. Well, hearing that would only magnify the heart pounding in my chest. Now, this went on for a while, every Sunday the Pastor would give the same benediction at the end of his sermons, and my heart would react the same way each time until one day I just couldn’t take it anymore. After church one Sunday I decided to ask my mom on the ride home what did the Pastor mean when he asked if we die tonight do we know if we’d go to Heaven or hell. My mom would then try to explain the gospel to me, but for some reason, I was still confused about what she was trying to communicate. I remember becoming so irritated with my mother because I felt like she just wasn’t giving me a straight answer. I began to hound her to give me a straight answer. I started to feel like going to Heaven was a secret. Once we finally made it home from church and several nagging questions later my mom finally said it to me straight. She simply said “if you repent of your sins, trust Christ shed his blood on the cross for you. And believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. “I froze and let what she said to me sink in as if she just revealed the deepest secret known to man to me. After a few minutes, I repeated what she said back to her to make sure I understood what I just heard. After my mom confirmed I understood, I remember walking away slowly to my room and thinking about what she had said.

THE CONVERSION

Later on, that evening while laying in bed my mind began racing about the implications of becoming a born-again Christian. Finally, after I couldn’t take it a second more, I silently prayed to God and repented of my sins, and asked Jesus to be Lord of my life. I’ll never forget this feeling as long as I live, it felt like a weight was lifted right off me. I never felt so free in my life. My life drastically changed after that night. I began studying all of our church beginner's Sunday school Christian books. I studied every night for hours trying to soak up everything I could learn about the Lord. The passion I had to learn God’s word remained with me throughout my high school years. It wasn’t until a few years after leaving high school (by this time entering the workforce) that I began to slip further away from my Christian roots.

QUEST FOR SUCCESS

I still had a healthy respect for God and his word. But becoming successful and making money began to take precedence in my life. I started dating women more seriously and pursuing various entrepreneurial endeavors. I started meeting and mingling with successful people that made a lot of money and I wanted a piece of the action. Slowly but surely it became less about seeking God and Heavenly things, and more about gaining worldly success. I started buying and reading books on how to become a millionaire and attending business workshops etc. After several years of this and a couple of failed dating relationships, I decided it was time to get back into the church. But I didn’t want that old fashion style of a church like the one I attended as a teenager with my mother. I needed a church on the cutting edge I was desiring messages about receiving God’s blessings. So I began regularly attending the largest successful mega-church in Dallas. The messages were electrifying to me. I felt like I had been missing out on God’s blessings for years. I would hear sermons about me being the head and not the tail (meaning as God’s child I am the first not the last in this world.) I would also hear messages about how if I serve God and sow financial seeds into his kingdom I would receive it back 100 fold.

So I did just that, I would give thousands of dollars in the hopes God would honor my faith giving to him. But all of the sermons weren’t about just material blessings. There were quite a few messages about overcoming my setbacks/failures and using them to catapult me into my purpose/destiny. I decided my destiny was to become a Christian hip-hop artist. Growing up as a kid in Chicago everyone knew that rap music was my thing. I was a member of a local hip hop group and we would perform at all our local talent shows. I even got a chance to perform at the Taste of Chicago. So music is something I naturally gravitated to when I was deciding on fulfilling my purpose in God’s kingdom. 

THE MUSIC YEARS

The exact moment I began thinking God was orchestrating things for me was one evening while attending a Wednesday night bible study a lady sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said “excuse me are you a musician or in the music industry.” I was caught off guard and a little startled at first, but I smiled and said yes I am. She then proceeded to tell me that God revealed that to her about me. She also mentioned she was a music agent/manager. So naturally, we swapped information with one another. But as time went on I soon discovered that she had little connections in the music industry, no way to help with studio sessions because I had to find and pay for all my studio recordings. Therefore I soon dissolved that business relationship and moved on. But I didn’t let that setback stop me from pursuing my purpose. I eventually met a young hot producer in my city and together we produced my first gospel hip hop album. My album soon found its way into the right hands and about a year after completing the first album I got signed to a large independent record label out of Florida.

Man, I was excited! My childhood dream finally came true and not to mention the feeling of walking into my purpose/destiny. I began performing at various churches around my city. I also performed for inmates at a large prison (which is an experience I will never forget). The theme of my music ministry was to minister to hurting people. I rapped a lot about overcoming pain and personal life issues. My album was selling well in stores and due to sales I also charted on Billboard magazine alongside well-known gospel artists such as Fred Hammond, Kirk Franklin, etc. But not long after all the hoopla, I started having creative differences with the record label. They wanted my album to appeal to a more secular crowd so they began making changes to the sound of my music to appeal to the secular club scene. Also, the label wasn’t being forthcoming about money generated from sales. This type of activity went on for a while and I became increasingly unhappy with the artist/label partnership. So my manager and I decided it was in our best interest to negotiate an agreement to part ways. Shortly afterward I started my own independent label and was doing ok for a while, but something deep inside me didn’t feel right.

THE ELECTION CALL 

I didn’t feel like that young teenager who desperately wanted to know Christ and how to make it into His Heavenly kingdom. No, I felt more like the guy who was chasing after my self-interest and sprinkling a little Jesus on top just to feel better about it. After a while, the sermons at my church didn’t seem to be helping much to ease this feeling. The sermons became increasingly about temporal material blessings, ecstatic experiences, gaining financial breakthroughs, etc. Rarely if any did I hear sermons about repentance, the holiness of God, hell, or even Heaven for that matter. For some reason, I begin to have a desire to hear these types of messages. The feelings I once had as a teenager began to resurface inside me. The Lord was fulfilling His promise in me that He spoke in the book of John 10:27 “my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me”. The very words Jesus spoke were beginning to manifest in my life. I honestly couldn’t stomach another sermon about worldly temporal fleshly desires. I needed something deeper to water my parched soul. So after careful thought and consideration, I decided to part ways with the megachurch I attended for ten years. Afterward, I didn’t immediately have a church home to attend. The churches I visited all seem to be about appealing to the current culture. Churches felt more like entertainment centers rather than a place of Holy worship to God.

It wasn’t until about a year or so later that I met a female co-worker and we somehow got on the topic of church. During one of our conversations, she began to ask me a series of questions, one of which was how do I feel about Joel Osteen. I told her that I use to be into him, but I wasn’t on board with his Best Life Now self-esteem-type messages. She then proceeded to ask me if I heard of a pastor name John Macarthur. I thought about it for a quick sec and admitted I’ve never heard of him. She seemed surprised by the answer and offered to let me borrow a book written by him called Hard to Believe. 

FULL CIRCLE

I borrowed the book from her took it home that evening and read it. Reading that book felt like home to me. The gospel message was presented just like the Apostles spoke/wrote it in the bible. I had the same feeling come over me like the one I experienced as that fourteen-year-old who accepted Christ for the first time. It has been seven years since the day I read that book and I haven’t looked back since. The biggest challenge was unlearning all the dogma I was taught by the charismatic megachurch I attended years ago. I began to study God’s word in its proper context and my knowledge and faith have exponentially grown in the Lord. Sometimes I shudder to think of the times I was involved in the charismatic and word of faith movement. One of my passions is to help expose the fraudulent claims of these movements and by doing so God will hopefully use me in some way to reach His Elect Children caught up in these types of churches like I was for years. My life in many ways has come full circle. I have a beautiful Christian wife, two handsome sons, and to top it off I moved back to Carrollton Texas.