First Southwest Baptist Church has targeted the hip hop culture in planting several churches.

Rickie Bradshaw has discovered the heart language of the 48 million people his organization is trying to touch for Christ.

Rickie is executive director of StreetLife Worldwide and the senior pastor of First Southwest Baptist Church, Alief, TX, a predominantly African American congregation in a Houston suburb that boasts more than 50 language groups attending a nearby high school. StreetLife Worldwide has targeted the hip hop culture for church planting.

"We've been hearing about the 10/40 window for a long time," Rickie says, "but now we're targeting the 13/30 window."

Missiologists created the term "10/40 window" to describe the geographical region between 10° and 40° latitude, which many consider to be the least evangelized region in the world. The 13/30 window refers to people between the ages of 13 and 30, the largest unreached group of people in the world today.

The number one music genre in that age group worldwide is hip hop, with countries such as Kazakhstan, Indonesia, India and even Tibet embracing the style.

But hip hop is more than a style of music; it's a culture. Coming out of the Bronx in the early 1980s, hip hop was seen as a "spiritual movement, identifying self as the ultimate expression of God," Rickie explains. "Many hip hop artists grew up in church, a lot of them being raised by their grandparents."

Project Fresh Start has created 16 churches with a goal for the Hip Hop generation to see God as the "ultimate player."

But the traditional church of their grandparents often rejected the hip hop culture. Some even branded hip hop as evil and burned the music. "They were told to keep that junk out of the church," Rickie says. "There was no place for them in the traditional church. Add to that the lack of a father image and no respect for authority, and you have a movement where the church is irrelevant. You are your own boss and the world is yours. In fact, the world owes you." Leaders of the hip hop movement often will say, "I love God, but I hate the church." It's a world of pain where many in the culture have been abused, neglected--or both. Many rappers of today have become "pastors" to members of the hip hop culture, with a message promoting self, not an omniscient God. "This is the second and third generation of children who have had to take care of themselves even in childhood," Rickie says. "Dad's not

there--in fact they may not even know who Dad is--and Mom's at work. They feed themselves, they get themselves to school. They are their own authority, they control their own destiny. At five or six years old, a boy is told ‘you're the man.' "

StreetLife has started 16 hip hop churches with the goal of creating an environment for a generation to see God as the "ultimate player." They are simple churches with no buildings and no money. Small group meetings take place at malls, on college campuses, and even inside hip hop nightclubs. Pastors are called "players" and small group leaders are "coaches."

The term "rap" is an acronym for rhythm and poetry. Coaches teach that the Bible is full of rhythm and poetry. Taking it a step further, StreetLife has developed its own media arm, with Houston television programs and even full-length movies targeted to the hip hop generation.

"You have to allow them to encounter Jesus Christ in their own culture," Rickie says.

Survive-and-Thrive Church Planting Jim Slack, a missiologist and ethnographer who has done extensive research on church planting and church planting movements in the United States and worldwide for the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, has discovered that church planting movements that survive--and thrive--have always been churches that speak the "heart language" of people in the community. "When our Lord inspired those to write the New Testament, it was in ‘street' Greek, not classical Greek," Jim says. "Every church planting movement that continues to thrive is in the heart language of the people targeted by the church." The heart language of a people includes not only the language that is common to them, but it also includes their worldview. It's important for church planters to identify and understand the worldview they are trying to evangelize. By the time a child is five years old, about 50 percent of his or her worldview is formed. By the time that child is 12 years old, 80 percent of the worldview is formed. In 1986, U.S. high schools graduated the first class of nonbiblically exposed children.

At five years old, a child has formed 50 percent of his or her worldview.

"This was the first group that had a worldview that came from family and MTV," Jim says. "The worldview forms during the growing up years. The teenage years are not the years to lay down a worldview, it's already there."

To read more about the issues leaders face when planting new churches, download Sherri Brown's full paper, Becoming a Church Planting Church--Issues Pastors Address when Leading a Church to Birth a Network of New Churches, at www.leadnet.org.