Kirk Franklin is fiery, flamboyant and has almost single-handedly restyled contemporary gospel music. But challenges in 2007 caused the Fort Worth native to do the unthinkable: question his belief in God.

“It was just a hard year,” Mr. Franklin said during a local phone conversation. (Ever the multitasker, he was also getting fitted for a suit.) “A movie that I was supposed to have appeared in was pushed back. A lot of people around me were struggling, and I was just down and discouraged.

“I didn’t know God’s direction for a lot of things … I felt that God was being silent. I was doubting God and very afraid that he was just gonna leave me stuck.”

Since 1993, Mr. Franklin has funneled his faith into devotional yet danceable hits such as “Stomp” and “Revolution.” He’s earned millions in album sales and a trophy case full of honors, such as five Grammys and 13 Dove Awards.

Yet he’s titled his tenth album The Fight of My Life. In stores Tuesday, the Fo Yo Soul release features the likes of Da’ T.R.U.T.H., Rance Allen, tobyMac and the Williams Brothers. Its first single, the galvanizing “Declaration (This Is It!),” includes a hyper-speed sample of the Kenny Loggins hit referred to in the subtitle. The CD also includes the expected funk and soul hybrids (“Little Boy,” “A Whole Nation”), and sports elements of pop and metal, illustrated most vividly in the tempestuous rock-out “I Am God,” where Mr. Franklin gets his “white boy on” with tobyMac.

“I’m just trying to be honest in who I am,” Mr. Franklin said. “I listen to everything from U2 to Yo-Yo Ma. Rock, pop, gospel, jazz, classical, that’s what’s in my CD changer or my iPhone.”

Mr. Franklin also tackles uncomfortable subjects, such as hedonism, materialism and family dysfunction with impartiality on the disc. On “Little Boy,” for example, he admonishes a young man living the fast life, a young woman growing up too soon and parents so focused on getting paid that they don’t tend the kids. His straightforward approach to secular issues is what is most celebrated and criticized about him.

“I think it’s very important to speak not just from the pulpit, but on the problems,” he said. “As Christian artists, we can sometimes become this subculture that doesn’t really speak on social ills, politics, or any other different things going on in society.”

Even with his altruistic intent, many skeptics will question Mr. Franklin’s right to chastise now, considering his highly publicized struggle with pornography addiction. He doesn’t avoid discussing the matter but does dismiss the issue as old news.

“Sometimes, when you do a big show like Oprah’s,” he said of his 2006 appearance with his wife on The Oprah Winfrey Show, “things get lost in translation. People thought I was just confessing to something that happened now, but what I was doing was testifying to something in my past.

“Before that, other than people having problems with my music being too radical, no one had ever heard anything negative about me, and our culture’s not used to people testifying. They’re used to people getting caught. Admitting flaws and telling on yourself is seen as a sign of weakness.”

Given that assumption, the controversy has actually produced the opposite effect for his image to many since his honesty has only made him more endearing.
“I had men coming up to me in airports, crying on my shoulder and asking me, ‘How did you make it out?’ I get that all the time.” During a recent men’s conference on sexuality at his church, “dudes were just yelling, ‘Kirk, you need to do a book, man, we need that.’ And someday I will.”

In the meantime, Mr. Franklin takes his cuts on The Fight of My Life . For instance, “It Takes a Nation” features 10-year-old “Little” Donovan Owens of Milwaukee, Wis., and tackles fatherless homes.

“Men need to step up,” he said. “I’m also trying to go through my own healing, the anger and the frustration at the fact that I had a daddy who was too much of a punk to be there to raise me. I’ve got a daughter who needs to have a husband some day and at this rate, it’s gonna be a problem.”

Mr. Franklin just wrapped hosting the first season of BET’s gospel talent show, Sunday Best, and has a Dec. 21 performance scheduled for NBC’s The Today Show included in his packed schedule. The message he hopes to send on his new CD is personified in its first video, in which Mr. Franklin exchanges blows in a boxing ring with a powerful adversary: himself.

“We stand in the way of us,” he said. “It’s the old ways and the old habits that keep us from becoming whatever God created us to be. The old man is trying to keep the young man down. That’s the fight of my life.”