Kirk Franklin To Perform For Child Welfare Agency This Weekend

07/18/2000 3:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(7/18/00, 3 p.m. ET) - Gospel superstar Kirk Franklin will perform for young people affiliated with the Michigan-based child welfare/family reunification agency Boysville on Saturday, July 22. Boysville provide assessment and treatment programs and services for young people and their families throughout the state of Michigan--such as substance abuse treatment programs and special learning programs--that are designed to establish and maintain family stability.

Like many of the young people at Boysville, Franklin had a troubled youth; he was abandoned by his parents as a baby, and was raised by his deeply religious aunt. Active in the church in his youth, Franklin began to rebel as a teenager and got into trouble until a friend was killed and he returned to the church and turned his life around.

Franklin, who will release his next album, Kirk Franklin Presents 1NC, next month, told LAUNCH that his faith and his study of the Bible saved him when he strayed as a teenager: "The teachings that I received as a Christian teach me that if you train a child up in His ways and the ways of the Book, when he gets older, even if he strays, he'll always come back home to it," he said. "And I can honestly say that when I was a child I was raised in the Book, even when I didn't want to hear nothing about the Book. Even when I didn't feel like doing what the Book said do, I was raised in the Book. And even when I tried to stray, those teachings are the teachings that kept me. Because, trust me, there were many times when I could have been killed, I could have been shot, I could have gotten really addicted to drugs or alcohol, but there was something inside of me that never allowed me to go over the limit."

--Lucy Tauss, New York

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