Kirk Franklin Shares “The Blueprint” for Success

by Bob Marovich, The Black Gospel Blog

Kirk Franklin revealed “the fight of his life” in lyrics and melody. With the publication of The Blueprint: A Plan for Living above Life’s Storms, Franklin now reveals it in a book.

The Blueprint, published by Gotham Books, goes on sale May 18. The seven-time Grammy-winning gospel artist and first-time author spoke with TBGB this week about the book and what he hopes readers learn from it.

The idea to write The Blueprint came from Franklin’s team. “It really wasn’t on my radar at the time,” Franklin explained. “But I’d been doing a lot of public speaking at colleges and youth conferences and churches, and so the people around me thought that it would be a good idea if I did a book.” In the end, he found writing it was “very therapeutic.”

Franklin describes The Blueprint as an “urban-style Purpose-Driven Life. It is a little more detailed, a little more transparent, a little more in your face and a little more real. It’s the good, bad and the ugly of my life.”

Gospel enthusiasts know about the good: the awards, the hit records, the sold-out shows. What about the bad and the ugly? These include painful chapters in Franklin’s young life, including a childhood bereft of role models but full of putdowns, difficulties in school, drugs and fatherhood at fifteen. Along the way, Franklin discovered that the path to success was not about blaming others or circumstances but to take control, turn to God and live purposefully. Today, he is a husband, father of four and one of gospel’s biggest stars.

But, Franklin is quick to point out, music may be what you do, but it is not who you are.

He also acknowledges that being a parent has had a big impact on his ethos of life. “[Parenthood] is one of the most un-sexy jobs! There are not awards for it, most of what you do goes under the radar, but it is the greatest tool for character development, if we would just embrace it. Marriage and children are God’s divine tools for creating character and depth, so that when we walk away from our families and walk away from our homes, we’re really walking away from opportunities to grow.”

The Blueprint provides more learned lessons like these that helped Franklin triumph over adversity and experience personal success. His belief and trust in God paved the way.

“There’s no way to begin to build a building of your life without tapping into the Chief Architect,” Franklin adds. “God doesn’t create you and allow you to come on this earth and then try to figure out how to live it. The more we tap into Him, the more we tap into who we are, into how we are created, and what our purpose is in life. We don’t have to spend years figuring it out. If we tap into God’s agenda and trust Him to reveal that process and that plan, we don’t have to worry about what to do next. Those steps are already divinely ordered for us.”

One constant in Franklin’s life is transparency. It’s in his music, how he lives his life, and in between the pages of his book. “I’m just trying to keep it real, keep it strong and on point. Trying to keep it, as the kids would say, 100.

“What I want the reader to feel after reading this book, more than anything, is that all the things they ever heard that turned them off about church, or turned them off about Christianity or about religion, that I have put in a practical way that is real, that is entertaining, that is fun and that gets to the bottom line. This is not cute; it’s real stuff that you can sink your teeth into. Sometimes Christians can make this stuff seem so shallow and boring. I want this book to be anything but that.”

If, as the author Bernard Malamud once stated, one has two lives — the life we learn from and the life we live after we’ve learned — Franklin is clearly living the latter. The Blueprint is, well, his blueprint on how to do that, and he believes it can be yours, too.

Kirk Franklin’s other recent project was pulling together Artists United for Haiti and recording “Are You Listening.” He just learned that the single has held the number one position on Soundscan for two weeks in a row. “It’s over Lady Gaga and Kenny Chesney and the Black Eyed Peas, and that’s really incredible!”