The word hustle has taken on many meanings over the years. When I was a kid it brought to mind everything from a disco dance to an X-rated magazine. But as hip-hop culture has emerged and evolved, the term has come to describe the struggle of urban youth ministry and young adults to find empowerment, identity, and purpose in the context of the many challenges of inner-city life. These all-too-common circumstances were recently portrayed in the Oscarnominated movie Hustle and Flow.
Urban youth culture offers both dirty and divine versions of the hustle. On the one hand it can involve the dirtiness of drugs and dealing, prostitution, robbery, fencing stolen merchandise, or creating “bootleg” products. On the other hand it can involve the artistic, creative, and entrepreneurial gifts that can lead to urban youth living the American dream. The hustle can also show up in urban youth who shovel snow, mow lawns, work at the mall, or launch their own small businesses. But the big difference between the urban and suburban youth is that inner-city kids aren’t working just because their parents are trying to teach them lessons about money or responsibility. Urban youth work because, in many cases, they live in single-parent homes and Mom or Grandmother needs help paying the bills or the family will once again be evicted from their apartment. Dad, if he’s around, has only a high school education, or a GED, and is often out of work.
So what’s all this got to do with youth ministry? A lot when you’re trying to get kids to pay for a missions trip that costs $200 or more per person or when you’re Core training team, the author organizing a monthly outing that costs $10 per kid. Such outings create economic dilemmas that set urban youth ministry apart from youth ministry in the suburbs.
In the City
Problems like unemployment, singleparent homes, under-resourced school systems, lack of healthcare, and lack of economic empowerment mean that many urban youth must do the hustle.
Shane Price, the coordinator of the African American Men’s Project in Minneapolis, Minn., adds that many urban youth also fall into a pattern of a negative cash flow system.
While entrepreneurial geniuses like Bill Gates teach young people how to handle and invest money, urban youth receive a completely different lesson from many of the adults in their communities.
Unfortunately, many urban young people resort to selling drugs to achieve financial empowerment. There are days when I feel the full impact of our nation’s continuing but failing war on drugs. We spend billions in our war against international terrorism, but we’ve forgotten about a domestic war of terror that is killing and incarcerating many of our urban youth.
The answer must come from the urban church. The hustle mentality can be redeemed in a way that urban youth find empowerment, identity, and purpose in Christ Jesus. Matthew tells us: “Jesus was going through all the cities and the villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest” (
There is a need for an army of God’s workers to go into the harvest field of urban youth culture. We must go beyond Sunday School classes, Vacation Bible Schools, youth choirs, and other shortterm ventures to a more long-term and holistic approach that promotes educational achievement and economic empowerment. We must create programs and mentoring relationships that help urban youth (and their parents) learn about money, work, and careers.
Examples of such ministries abound. My church partners with community development groups on projects such as the Momentum Workforce Development Program and Hip Hop Academy. In Minneapolis, a ministry called The Youth Enterprise Foundation teaches urban youth how to run their own businesses. At New York’s New Fellowship Church, Craig and Zola Allen are achieving great things at the Beats and Blessings Academy.
But we need many more projects that can bring a biblical and holistic ministry model to urban youth on the hustle.
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Efrem Smith is pastor of The Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, Minn., an itinerant speaker with Kingdom Building Ministries, a member of the YS Core training team, the author of Raising Up Young Heroes, and a contributing editor for YOUTHWORKER JOURNAL.
