Hip-hop can work wonders in right hands
             Whether the banter is in the neighborhood beauty parlor or barbershop or the news is on the front page of your newspaper or you are hearing of the latest jeremiad of Bill Cosby, the subject is more often than not the failings of black youth, especially boys and young men.
             It's sometimes easy to forget that not all black youth are lost, and that there are people out there toiling to see that many more are reclaimed. Among them are the rapper Kurtis Blow and several ministers who have formed Hip Hop Church, which holds weekly services in Harlem, rotating between the Greater Hood A.M.E. Zion Church and the Abyssinian Baptist Church. The services are all about working with kids - some who were already attending traditional church but getting little out of it, others who were "unchurched," even some with hard-knock lives and street experience beyond imagination. The attraction, explained the Rev. Darren Ferguson, the church's musical director, is this: "Most people think that to be a Christian you have to give up being a young person, having fun, and we're saying you don't have to give up being young, you don't have to give up having fun."
             And fun - and lively and loud - it is. Because of the music, Ferguson said, "There's just enough testosterone to get the guys saying, 'Yeah, I like this.'"
             Lamar Haney, a 19-year-old member of a rap group called Three Shades of Faith, explained, "These are secular beats, but we use them to glorify God." Just as the Apostle Paul advised early missionaries to learn the languages of the people to whom they would take the gospel, Haney said, Hip Hop Church is using the language (sans profanity and misogyny) that many young people appreciate.
             Theirs is not necessarily the proper English that Cosby rightly insists be the standard. Nor is theirs necessarily the language of the smug members of the Christian right who are already pouring cold water on even the
             ...