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Rattling Cages
Rattling cages
Rhymz Suhreal, Shalom deliver Gospel to inmates
By Called and Sent Staff
MILWAUKEE—That pin drop you just heard in the St. Charles Detention Center gym was the sound of a cage getting rattled.
There’s Zak Alwin, the Wonder Bread-white lead rapper for Wausau-based hip-hop duo Rhymz Suhreal, stepping up to the mic. Ten feet to his left stands his wife, Becky—next of kin, similar skin.
“You guys ready to have a good time?” Zak shouts. The silence from the 40 or so black teenagers in the bleachers is broken only by a heckler’s jab: “They gonna rap?”
The Alwins launch into “Let Love Loose,” their hard-driving remake of the vintage 1874 hymn “Take My Life and Let It Be.” By the first chorus, the kids are grooving in an arm-waving mini-rave. The gospel outreach, sponsored by Milwaukee-based Shalom Ministries, has turned into a party.
Zak has seen the before-and-after shots of this scene too many times to be surprised. Still, it’s a challenge to play a venue like this without feeling a little tension.
“In fact, that’s maybe where we’re at our most vulnerable,” Zak, 34, says of gigs like this. “We’re so different from the population we’re trying to reach.
“As cool as I might try to look, I don’t look anything like Jay-Z,” he says, referring to the rap mega-star who is virtually synonymous with hip-hop. “When the kids hear rappers are coming, and then we walk out, it’s like … crickets.”
That might have been how the night began. But at the end—after Rhymz Suhreal’s 45-minute set, a drama by Milwaukee-area-based Mission Possible and a sermon by Shalom Executive Director Tony Vento—about 30 youths are gathered at center court, praying to receive Jesus as their savior.
‘The Push, The Pull …’
Vento’s sermon at the end of the night takes the story in Luke chapter 17 of Jesus healing 10 lepers and relates it to the kids’ current condition—and his own years ago.
“I was a thug, a criminal,” shouts Vento, a former gang leader in Chicago and Milwaukee. “I was a leper, a big-time leper. I know about this place—it harbors lepers.
“I met that guy named Jesus, and he changed me! The darkness left! There’s a way out of this place. He’ll clean you and change you. He’ll put a new life and a new heart in you.”
The kids can relate all too well. Some from the center-court group relay thoughts and experiences that echo the lyrics Zak had delivered less than two hours before:
The push, the pull,
The tug of war,
The back and forth,
What’s in my core?
Flesh and bone,
This heart of stone,
Whispers of love scream, “Live for more…”
“I want to change,” says Kenyon, a 17-year-old Milwaukee boy who asked Christ into his life after the show. “I need something better for my life. I want to be remembered.”
Jonathan, 16, also from Milwaukee, says he was already a believer before the tonight but made mistakes that landed him in St. Charles. He prayed with the group nonetheless because he wanted to get his current sins out before God and start on the better life he’s hoping to lead when he gets out.
“It lifted a weight off my shoulders,” Jonathan said of the prayer time. “I felt like a leper. I used to be bad. That’s how I got in this predicament.
“I’ve been praying since I got here,” he says. “I’m trying to change. I’m trying to make life better for me and my mom, but mostly for myself.”
Hard Venue, Good Venue
Becky says that kind of honesty is part of what makes prisons and detention facilities her favorite venue. After she’s put away the thoughts of what the inmates have done, they become real people.
“Many of them, because they’re at the lowest point of their lives, this is the time they finally look for help and open themselves up,” Becky, 32, says. “It’s cool to see many people give their lives to Christ and to be a part of that.
“It’s cool to see them connect to the music,” she says. “You see the barriers come down really quickly as they start to open up to what we’re sharing. Even though we have totally different walks, somehow this music bridges that gap between us.”
For Vento, it’s not such a wide stretch. When he looks at those kids, he sees himself at that age: hard, tough, wrapped in the false sense of power and control that his criminal lifestyle offered.
“It’s like looking in a bad mirror,” says Vento, who has been ministering with Shalom for 12 years and doing prison ministry for seven.
Shalom does outreaches to jails and other detention facilities about once a month and personal visitations every other Tuesday. Vento says that when a slot opens up at a detention facility or prison, he grabs it. If he doesn’t, somebody else will—Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and other groups vying for the kids’ attention and loyalty.
“Even it’s at a time that’s inconvenient for you, you take it,” he says.
And if that motivation isn’t enough, Jesus’ example should be, Becky says.
“If Jesus were here physically again, that’s where he’d be,” she says. “He went to the lost and to the ones that were the outcasts of society. In many ways these inmates are forgotten. They are the criminals, the ones nobody wants to remember.”
“When you start to contemplate what they’ve done and some of the crimes—that you’re in front of rapists, people who’ve murdered—it can be intimidating,” she says. “What’s really cool is to put that out of your mind and see we’re all sinners. Before God we all fall short.”
Rhymz Suhreal’s new CD, “Free,” can be purchased at www.rhymzsuhreal.com.
© 2007 Called and Sent Magazine. All rights reserved.
Rhymz Suhreal, Shalom deliver Gospel to inmates
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Zak and Becky Alwin
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MILWAUKEE—That pin drop you just heard in the St. Charles Detention Center gym was the sound of a cage getting rattled.
There’s Zak Alwin, the Wonder Bread-white lead rapper for Wausau-based hip-hop duo Rhymz Suhreal, stepping up to the mic. Ten feet to his left stands his wife, Becky—next of kin, similar skin.
“You guys ready to have a good time?” Zak shouts. The silence from the 40 or so black teenagers in the bleachers is broken only by a heckler’s jab: “They gonna rap?”
The Alwins launch into “Let Love Loose,” their hard-driving remake of the vintage 1874 hymn “Take My Life and Let It Be.” By the first chorus, the kids are grooving in an arm-waving mini-rave. The gospel outreach, sponsored by Milwaukee-based Shalom Ministries, has turned into a party.
Zak has seen the before-and-after shots of this scene too many times to be surprised. Still, it’s a challenge to play a venue like this without feeling a little tension.
“In fact, that’s maybe where we’re at our most vulnerable,” Zak, 34, says of gigs like this. “We’re so different from the population we’re trying to reach.
“As cool as I might try to look, I don’t look anything like Jay-Z,” he says, referring to the rap mega-star who is virtually synonymous with hip-hop. “When the kids hear rappers are coming, and then we walk out, it’s like … crickets.”
That might have been how the night began. But at the end—after Rhymz Suhreal’s 45-minute set, a drama by Milwaukee-area-based Mission Possible and a sermon by Shalom Executive Director Tony Vento—about 30 youths are gathered at center court, praying to receive Jesus as their savior.
‘The Push, The Pull …’
Vento’s sermon at the end of the night takes the story in Luke chapter 17 of Jesus healing 10 lepers and relates it to the kids’ current condition—and his own years ago.
“I was a thug, a criminal,” shouts Vento, a former gang leader in Chicago and Milwaukee. “I was a leper, a big-time leper. I know about this place—it harbors lepers.
“I met that guy named Jesus, and he changed me! The darkness left! There’s a way out of this place. He’ll clean you and change you. He’ll put a new life and a new heart in you.”
The kids can relate all too well. Some from the center-court group relay thoughts and experiences that echo the lyrics Zak had delivered less than two hours before:
The push, the pull,
The tug of war,
The back and forth,
What’s in my core?
Flesh and bone,
This heart of stone,
Whispers of love scream, “Live for more…”
“I want to change,” says Kenyon, a 17-year-old Milwaukee boy who asked Christ into his life after the show. “I need something better for my life. I want to be remembered.”
Jonathan, 16, also from Milwaukee, says he was already a believer before the tonight but made mistakes that landed him in St. Charles. He prayed with the group nonetheless because he wanted to get his current sins out before God and start on the better life he’s hoping to lead when he gets out.
“It lifted a weight off my shoulders,” Jonathan said of the prayer time. “I felt like a leper. I used to be bad. That’s how I got in this predicament.
“I’ve been praying since I got here,” he says. “I’m trying to change. I’m trying to make life better for me and my mom, but mostly for myself.”
Hard Venue, Good Venue
Becky says that kind of honesty is part of what makes prisons and detention facilities her favorite venue. After she’s put away the thoughts of what the inmates have done, they become real people.
“Many of them, because they’re at the lowest point of their lives, this is the time they finally look for help and open themselves up,” Becky, 32, says. “It’s cool to see many people give their lives to Christ and to be a part of that.
“It’s cool to see them connect to the music,” she says. “You see the barriers come down really quickly as they start to open up to what we’re sharing. Even though we have totally different walks, somehow this music bridges that gap between us.”
For Vento, it’s not such a wide stretch. When he looks at those kids, he sees himself at that age: hard, tough, wrapped in the false sense of power and control that his criminal lifestyle offered.
“It’s like looking in a bad mirror,” says Vento, who has been ministering with Shalom for 12 years and doing prison ministry for seven.
Shalom does outreaches to jails and other detention facilities about once a month and personal visitations every other Tuesday. Vento says that when a slot opens up at a detention facility or prison, he grabs it. If he doesn’t, somebody else will—Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and other groups vying for the kids’ attention and loyalty.
“Even it’s at a time that’s inconvenient for you, you take it,” he says.
And if that motivation isn’t enough, Jesus’ example should be, Becky says.
“If Jesus were here physically again, that’s where he’d be,” she says. “He went to the lost and to the ones that were the outcasts of society. In many ways these inmates are forgotten. They are the criminals, the ones nobody wants to remember.”
“When you start to contemplate what they’ve done and some of the crimes—that you’re in front of rapists, people who’ve murdered—it can be intimidating,” she says. “What’s really cool is to put that out of your mind and see we’re all sinners. Before God we all fall short.”
Rhymz Suhreal’s new CD, “Free,” can be purchased at www.rhymzsuhreal.com.
© 2007 Called and Sent Magazine. All rights reserved.