Church Boy Read online

  PYC was small and had very few facilities of its own, but having a college campus surrounding it, there were lots of other resources that helped support the school. There was a Methodist church at the southeast corner of the Texas Wesleyan University campus. That church let us use the piano in the sanctuary for practice and rehearsals during the day. For me, that was one of the best parts.

  To be in that big sanctuary by myself, playing the big Steinway piano, was a truly wonderful experience. Except for the colored light that filtered in through the stained glass windows, it was dark in there, giving the place a very special feeling. It was peaceful, and there was a sense of holiness to it, just as there should have been.

  One of my teachers, Mrs. Como, was especially helpful to me, and she taught me a lot. She told me to stop trying to be somebody else and to start being myself. She showed me how my own background and experiences could help shape my life as a musician. She told me that the best music comes from the heart and that I needed to relax and let that energy well up from my soul. The fact that she was a black woman and had already been down the road I was traveling gave her words credibility.

  She was the only one at the school who really understood my culture. She had been a recording artist with a gospel group in Detroit, and she knew what my music was all about. She was cool, and it was great to have a teacher who had been there and made records.

  This school did recruiting tours around the state, and the year I went on the tour we traveled on a chartered bus to small towns all over West Texas. That was cool, except that most of the time we were in redneck towns and country places that had never really seen a young black man up close.

  We didn’t stay in hotels, but they had arranged for us to stay with families in a lot of these out-of-the-way places. So you can imagine what some of those families must have thought when they found out that a little black boy was going to spend the night in their front bedroom! But I must say, everybody was nice to me, and I really enjoyed myself.

  The tour was great. One night Perry and I stepped outside. We were talking and found out that we were both believers. After that we became very close and would encourage each other about spiritual things.

  Jason was my buddy because we were into a lot of the same stuff. He was into clothes; he had a Jeep. He was a white kid, but he acted black. He had some skills. He was cocky, and he had attitude. Besides, he liked black girls. It would have been nothing for him to date a black girl. He would have done it just to be with me. I haven’t seen either one of those guys in years, but I remember the good times we had back then. We really used to kick it!

  That was my first introduction to white culture, and it was basically a good experience. I was dating a white girl who went there, but we had to keep it quiet. She didn’t want her mom to know, and we didn’t really want the other kids to know either.

  Hanging around with Perry, going over to his house and seeing how his family lived, what they ate, and hearing the types of conversation they had was a learning experience. It was really interesting to see the differences between their lives and my own.

  Unfortunately, the school didn’t have a lot of juice, and they finally had to shut it down—mainly, I think, because it was more expensive to run than anyone had expected. But I’m convinced it was all part of the plan. It opened a year or two before I came and closed down a year or two after I left.

  Whatever else happened at PYC during those years, it remains as one of the most important steppingstones in my maturing as a person and a musician. It gave me a foundation that changed my life, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

  During that year, the Humble Hearts went through several changes, and eventually we started breaking up. It was probably because I was changing—not so much spiritually but from a creative standpoint. I was becoming a different person. I was beginning to write my own music. I was performing all the time and thinking about forming another group. So the chemistry of that original group began to break down, and I suspect that was for the best.

  I don’t want to give the impression that everything was great at the new school. There was one teacher in particular who never understood me, and we never did get along. I realize now that I wasn’t the only one dealing with new relationships and new cultures. Some of the teachers and some of the other students were seeing black culture for the first time. We were all learning new stuff and not always dealing with it very well.

  At the same time, some of the little white girls started liking me, and I started liking them. There were times when it felt like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and I was Sidney Poitier!

  A SPECIAL CALLING

  The custodian of the Methodist church where I practiced was an old black pastor who became a good friend to me during those years. He was so deep and spiritual it was awesome just to be around him.

  Sometimes when I’d skip an academic class, I’d go down to the basement of the church and talk to him. He took a special interest in me and encouraged me to put my trust in God and to allow Him to focus my abilities and interests. During that first year he became someone I really looked up to. He was powerful.

  This church was an intimate place for me; in some ways being there was like being on the roof had been for me when I was a kid. It was a place where I could get away and work out my emotions and my fears. I could get into my zone. I didn’t realize it then, but I was creating intimacy with God. As I got older I learned how this comes about, but it was a new experience for me in those days. During that time I was evolving, spiritually and musically, and the church was a great place to be alone with Him.

  I was in the church one day, playing for myself, and I had been feeling certain things spiritually when, all of a sudden, a guy ran into the sanctuary from outside. He was a Mexican American wearing earphones, and his eyes were wild and crazy looking. I didn’t know what was going on. Who was this guy? It really scared me at first.

  He came up to where I was sitting and said, “Man, I was just walking by outside the church, and I heard this music and had to come inside!” And he just kept going on like that, telling me stuff, and I was getting more and more nervous. I kept looking around for the janitor or for a security guard or somebody else to help me in case this guy was totally deranged. But he said, “Please! Please don’t stop playing.”

  So, naturally, I did as he said; I started playing again. As I played through several songs and hymns—whatever came into my mind—I looked over and saw this guy just fall on his face beside the altar and start worshiping God. After several minutes, when I came to a stopping place, I went over to the altar and sat down beside him. I was just seventeen, but my spiritual man was growing. I felt a sense of God’s presence.

  As soon as I sat down, the guy reached out, took my hand, and started kissing it. He said, “Man, I don’t know who you are, but you just saved my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  I was totally perplexed, sitting there wide-eyed and trying to figure out what in the world was going on. But the guy got up as suddenly as he had come in and ran out the back door of the church.

  Ever since I had been traveling with the Humble Hearts and going into a lot of different churches, I had begun to see a bigger picture of how different people worship God. Up until we started that group, I had only been at Mount Rose Baptist, and that was my whole frame of reference. But now I was more receptive to other experiences and to other ways of worshiping.

  When the guy ran out of the church, I followed him to the back door and looked out to see what he was doing. He had his hands up in the air, worshiping and praying all the way down the street.

  As strange as it was, that experience impacted my heart so much that I had to go downstairs to the basement, to the janitor’s office, to see what he would make of what had just happened. I told this old pastor everything, from the beginning, and said I wanted to get his reaction.

  He thought about it for a minute or two then said, “The only thing I can say, Kirk, is turn around.” I
turned around in my chair and looked on the back wall, and there was that famous picture of Jesus standing at the door and knocking. “I’m saying, just go to God,” he told me. “Tell Him you hear Him, and whatever He’s saying, the answer is yes.”

  Any other time those words might have come as a surprise to me, but I was ready for them at that moment. I was hungry for a deeper experience of God, and I knew I wanted more. So I went back upstairs to the chapel, got down on my knees and prayed sincerely, “Lord, whatever just happened, whatever You’re saying to me, I say yes.”

  When I got back to the school, I went by the room where my friend Perry was working and motioned for him to follow me. We went down the hall to a vacant room, and I said, “I feel God’s calling me . . . into ministry.”

  He was a little surprised, but he was pleased. He was glad to know I felt such a definite calling on my life because he also wanted to know what God was going to do with him.

  A few minutes later I got to a phone and called Gertrude at home. I wasn’t living with her at that time. She had put me out on Valentine’s Day because she got tired of girls calling me all the time! I was living with some friends, but I knew she would want to know about this, so I decided to call.

  “Mama,” I said, “I’m just calling to tell you that I feel the Lord just called me into the ministry, and I said yes.”

  All she could say was, “Oh, Kirk! Oh, Kirk!”

  She really did love me. She always did, but she didn’t always know how to show it.

  I think the distance between us occurred because she didn’t understand the physical stuff that was going on inside of me. She just couldn’t deal with the masculine stuff. Of course, it was never really planned for her to raise me. She was meant to be my covering, and she did that very well.

  MANNA FROM HEAVEN

  By this time I was at Corinth Church. In my excitement I stopped by the pastor’s house and told him about my experience and I felt called to preach. He just said, “Okay.”

  That’s all. No excitement, no congratulations, no sober cautions or fatherly advice. Just, “Okay.”

  I was playing piano and organ for this church as the minister of music, so the next Sunday morning during his sermon the pastor had me stand up, and he let me have it right in front of the whole congregation. He was from the old school, and although he said he appreciated my musical abilities, he didn’t have any patience with any kind of changes, in me or in the church.

  He said, “Brothers and sisters, young Mr. Franklin here says he has been called to preach the gospel, and he believes the Lord has given him a calling. Well, Mr. Franklin, we’re glad to know it, but there’s a few things you’ve got to do if you think you’re going to be a preacher.

  “First of all,” he said, thumping the pulpit with his open hand, “you’re going to have to change the way you dress. Second, you’re going to have to change the way you talk. Third, young Mr. Franklin, you’re going to have to start being a little more careful about the folks you’re seen with.”

  If I could have melted into the floor, I think I would have disappeared at that moment. But he wasn’t finished with me yet. “You’ve got to clean up your language, your house, your car, everything about you if you want to preach the Word of God. You can’t just stand up one Sunday and say you’ve been anointed to preach, and you can’t dress like that if you’re going to be a preacher.”

  Some of the older women were chiming in by this time, echoing back everything he said. But he went on, concluding his little roast by saying, “We’re all glad to know you want to use your talents for the kingdom of God, Mr. Franklin, but first you’ve got to show us that you’re a child of the King.”

  Those words, I’m sorry to say, were not spoken in a spirit of love. I felt that he had dressed me down to make me look small, and I didn’t leave the church feeling that I’d been blessed; I felt I’d been cursed. It was as if he were saying that if I wanted to be a preacher, I’d have to go out and get me some preacher suits. Well, the suits I was wearing weren’t even my own. I had to borrow them from my roommate, and they were all I had. But this preacher seemed to think that the clothes should come first, before the anointing of God. Maybe that was not his intention but that is how I left feeling.

  When I came back that night, the pastor let me deliver a short lay sermon from the front of the church. I was allowed to go up to the pulpit where the pastor was seated, but I couldn’t go up on the platform. I had to speak from the area down in front.

  He said this was just a way for me to let the others know that I felt God had called me into Christian service; but from that moment on, the word started getting around in the community that Kirk Franklin was going to be a preacher.

  By this time I was dating a young woman who was a few years older than I was, and she was about the only one who really celebrated the fact that I was called to preach. She introduced me to her friends as Reverend Franklin, and she encouraged me to study and learn more about my calling.

  Even though we didn’t stay together very long, it was an important interval for me. After I broke up with her, I continued with the girl I’d been seeing off and on through all those years, and it was that summer—the summer after I’d announced my calling—that I got her pregnant. It wasn’t until later in the fall that she knew for sure she was pregnant; but a few weeks after the beginning of my second year at PYC, she came up to the school and told me she was going to have my child.

  If I felt I was under pressure before that, suddenly I was in a pressure cooker. My studies slipped, rehearsals slipped, even my work at the church was starting to slip. Then one day early in the second semester of the school year, the teacher who had given me such a hard time ever since I’d arrived at PYC laid into me and said some things she shouldn’t have said.

  She made me feel really bad. She embarrassed me in front of everybody else, and I couldn’t let her get away with that. I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I told her what I thought of her words and what she could do with them. If I had been a little more mature in my faith I would have ignored her criticism, but I didn’t. Instead I got up, went downstairs, and told the headmaster what had happened.

  After we talked about it for a few minutes, Dr. Schooler realized it wasn’t going to work out, and he said that maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. “I’m sorry you weren’t able to make this program work for you, Mr. Franklin,” he said. “But I think the best idea may be for you to go ahead and leave school now.”

  So that’s what I did. I walked out the door that afternoon and never went back. That was the end of my high school career.

  For a time it felt like the bottom had fallen out of my life. All those people who had doubted my calling, including my pastor at Corinth Church, were seeing all this stuff that was happening to me. I was out of school, I had gotten a girl pregnant, I had been tossed out of Gertrude’s house, and now, suddenly, I was on the skids with just about everybody I knew.

  It didn’t look like there was any way God could ever use a messed-up kid like me. And you can just imagine how I was feeling about all of that.

  The amazing thing is that, within two months of that time, I got a call from another church. The pastor wanted to know if I would consider coming over there as minister of music. He told me that the folks at Immanuel Baptist Church needed a music leader and organist, and not only was the money better than I had been making at Corinth but they were going to provide me with a car and employee benefits.

  That was just what I needed, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Of course I took the offer. For a seventeen-year-old boy who had just dropped out of high school, it was like manna from heaven.

  Where the Spirit of the Lord is

  There is liberty.

  Where the Spirit of the Lord is

  The captives are set free.

  The wounded are made whole,

  I’ll find rest for my soul.

  Where the Spirit is

  Where the
Spirit is

  Where the Spirit is

  There is liberty.

  Where the Spirit of the Lord is

  There is liberty.

  Where the Spirit of the Lord is

  The captives are set free.

  The wounded are made whole,

  There is rest for my soul.

  Where the Spirit is

  There is healing.

  Where the Spirit is There is deliverance.

  Where the Spirit is There is joy.

  Where the Spirit of the Lord is

  There is liberty.

  Words and music by Kirk Franklin.

  Copyright ©1995, Kerrion Publishing / Lilly Mack Publishing (BMI).

  Used by permission.

  6

  Where the Spirit Is

  Imoved out of Gertrude’s house in July 1989, and I was completely on my own for the first time in my life. On Sundays and Wednesdays I had a steady job leading the music at Immanuel Baptist Church, and I was still performing with the Humble Hearts from time to time. But it still wasn’t enough to pay my expenses, and I realized I had to find a real job.

  There I was, needing a job, tossed out of Gertrude’s house, and with a baby on the way. I agreed to help with the expenses for the baby, but marriage was out of the question. We knew that marriage would have been a disaster, just compounding the injury of a relationship that never really was a true commitment and was bad long before there was a baby. In the meantime, I had to find some way of pulling myself together.

  By this time, a lot of the kids I had grown up with in Riverside were into drugs, and they were robbing and stealing to pay for their habits. So there could be no more contact there. But to make matters worse, there were also some people I had known through the church who were a bad influence, either because they were living a double life or because they were gay. So no matter which way I turned, I was alone and very much on my own.