It was inside a YMCA in Melbourne that God began to change the direction of Michael’s life and quietly plant the seeds of what would become Break Free Ministries.
As a college student, Michael had picked up breakdancing as a hobby. During a six-month internship in Australia, he found himself training daily with a group of about twenty men in Melbourne’s Hip-Hop community. The YMCA became more than a practice space, it became a place of relationship.
As Michael listened to their stories, two themes surfaced again and again. Many of these men had grown up without fathers and were beginning to repeat that same pattern in their own lives. At the same time, many carried skepticism or pain from past experiences with the Church.
This wasn’t distant for Michael. He had also grown up in a single-parent home and understood the weight of fatherlessness. But he had experienced something different as well. Through a loving mother and a healthy church community, he encountered the gospel not only as truth, but as a lived reality. The Church became a place where he and his family were known, supported, and shaped.
Standing in that YMCA, surrounded by men who shared both his story and his passion, Michael sensed God’s calling clearly. What if the same gospel that had transformed his life could reach this community? What if these men were not only reached, but discipled and sent?
The Hip-Hop community in Melbourne alone represented nearly a thousand men. If even a few were transformed and mobilized, the impact could extend far beyond one city. The question began to form: what if this was possible in cities around the world?
When Michael returned to the United States in 2004, that calling did not fade. He stepped into the Hip-Hop communities
of Southern California, including Orange County and Los Angeles, and found the same patterns. Fatherlessness. Spiritual openness. Distance from the Church.
As he began building relationships and discipling men, the vision for Break Free took shape.
Today, as the founder of Break Free Ministries, Michael has helped lead a growing movement reaching cities around the world. Break Free is committed to raising up missionaries from within the Hip-Hop community, men and women who are restored in their identity and sent back into their culture to make disciples, form spiritual families, and see generational healing take place.