Jesus and the Gospel Rap Movement - Part 3

RES: How, if at all, does your background affect the way you minister through your music today?
Tedashii: My background plays a monumental role in how I minister through music. I grew up in hip-hop. I was raised to be family-oriented, and I loved to be vocal about what I believe. That is all from how my mom raised me to how my spiritual father trained me. I love those in the hip-hop culture—so much so, I want to devote my life to reaching as many as I can. I love my family, and now that means those who do the will of my Father. And I am vocal about the God I love, the salvation He provides through Jesus, and life as a devoted Christ follower. It’s huge!

Shai Linne: I’ve always been a lover of language. One of the things that makes rap an ideal medium to communicate biblical truth is it allows for fitting many words into a short amount of musical space. It’s both a challenge and a joy for me to seek to exalt the Lord through poetic devices like multisyllabic rhyme schemes, wordplay, and storytelling. My background in the independent, or “underground” hip-hop scene has definitely helped to shape my particular lyrical aesthetic. As far as my approach to ministry, that is very much influenced by the great truths of reformed theology. Thi’sl: The way I grew up gives me a certain authenticity when speaking to hood dudes because they hear certain stuff I say and know that I had to have gone through it to know about that part of it. There is some stuff you can’t talk about with conviction unless you been through it. I pour my heart out in songs; my emotion is usually on ten because I know the connection music has had on me all my life. When I’m doing music and talking about certain things, I’m praying that if a person going through it hears it that God would rock his or her life with it. It’s almost like going back and making songs that would have spoken to me when I was in those situations, if that makes sense. It gives me insight into certain places and things that happen that you only know about if you live in that environment.                                                                            V. Rose: I think growing up in church has a lot to do with me being humble and knowing the Word. But I sort of grew up going to two different types of churches—my mom’s house and my dad’s house. My dad’s was a more traditional church, they focused a lot on worshiping God. The other church sort of focused a lot on praising God. So I think it was cool that I got two different churches, and it just taught me to be really grounded, and to worship from my heart—to worship God, and not for it to be fake, but for it to be real. And I think that plays one of the biggest parts in my ministry today, and the way I minister today—definitely, my church background has a lot to do with that. FLAME: I think my background has everything to do with it. Growing up in the inner-city, my father was in and out of the house, my mom was in and out of the hospital, and it just kind of made me an emotionally unstable child, some would say. I grew up living with multiple people in my family: grandparents, great-grandparents, aunties, uncles. I’ve always seen the world differently, I’ve always been very conscious of myself—my thoughts, behavior patterns. And I’ve always really just kind of had a heart for issues—and deep-seated issues, and why we respond the way we respond, and “why am I the way I am?”, and “why do I feel the way I feel?”, and “why do I think the way I think?” When I think about those things as a part of my background, it affects the way I write, it affects the way I think. It makes me want to walk slowly with people, and be patient with them as they are trying to understand themselves, and understand life, and understand God. And I want to present the gospel and explain our Lord Jesus Christ in such a way where people see his relevance, and the relevance of his Word, and how patient he was, and how kind he was. I think about Jesus and the woman at the well—how he just patiently drew her, and was kind, and nevertheless he still confronted her about her sin, but he lovingly called her to repentance. I want to be the type of person that can think that way and speak that way so that people can see hope in Christ, but can still see truth that there’s judgment for sin, there’s judgment for responding sinfully to events in your life that brought trouble. I want to help people think through the difficulties in their lives, and how to properly respond to that, and some of the things God may have been up to with allowing some of those things to happen—although I can never completely answer those questions, but I at least want to provide a tactful and a gentle and kind, truthful response to our human experience.