But if churches simply add a DJ or a little slang to their services, the audience will not be fooled, he said.
"Hip hop is the hook that might draw them in, but what keeps them is building a relationship with God and with other people that are here,'' he said.
"Because if they don't have that, and that doesn't become authentic, we would just be another place to come hang out, like a club. A club gets old after a while. Then there's a new club that opens up down the street that the music is better, they got a better DJ, that's where everyone's going now. The difference with us is that spiritual aspect."
At Aftershock, the crowd lingered long after the beats went silent. A plexiglass box onstage brimmed with items that people had turned in at previous services, including secular CD's, pornography and gang insignia.
Leamon Richardson and Richard Dauphin, who arrived well before the doors opened, embodied the complicated messages of holy hip hop. Both are rappers. Richardson, 19, who lives in the South Bronx, called himself a "walking testimony," and wore a T-shirt celebrating 50 Cent, a secular rapper who rhymes about dealing drugs and killing people.
Dauphin said that people who cannot understand this apparent contradiction are blind to the prophetic powers of hip hop. "We're street disciples," he said. "You can be the greatest preacher in the world and not reach the street. That's where we're at."
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