What Chance the Rapper has Taught me About Discipleship
Last night Chance the Rapper made history. He became the first artist to receive a Grammy without having sold any physical copies of his music. He won Best Rap Album as an new, unsigned artist when he was up against established icons like Kanye and Drake. And he did so with an unabashed Christian faith.
“I claim this victory in the name of the Lord,” he pronounced as he accepted his new accolades. Admittedly unlike most Christian leaders, Chance’s impact on the church and the world cannot be overstated. Here are three lessons his life has taught me.
1. Christians ought to be marked by joy
In effort to fight off the negativity surrounding 2016, the hosts of The Calling podcast decided to wrap up the year by answering this question: what was your favorite thing that happened in 2016? While most of the answers were forgettable––a certain movie here, a family event there––one struck me as profoundly important. One of the host’s said her favorite thing about 2016 was Chance the Rapper’s joy. Not his music or his performances, but his joy. Flanked by the palpable lamentations of Kendrick Lamar on one side and the political criticisms of A Tribe Called Quest on the other, Chance’s joy sticks out in his genre like a sore thumb.
Unmistakable, inestimable, and utterly counter-cultural, Chance’s joy represents the paradoxical freedom of the Gospel: that though we may suffer deeply, we will also rejoice greatly. This type of joy––which never makes sense when considering the brokenness of the world and painfulness of our circumstances––is that which confounds the secularist’s material happiness and the Buddhist’s austere peacefulness. It is the visible fruit of the Spirit, not as a stroke of personality or a trait of character, but as a manifestation of the God who lives in us. Chance teaches me that while there is room for grief at times, the Christian life always leads to ultimate joy.
2. Christianity is not about belief; it’s about identity
Webster defines a Christian as “a believer in Jesus Christ and in his teachings.” This is a severe understatement, yet one that I have been taught more than once. A Christian is not someone who maintains a set of beliefs, espouses certain propositional truths, or subscribes to certain arguments. That’s a philosopher. And Christianity isn’t a philosophy. Indeed, a Christian is someone whose heart has changed from stone to flesh, a person whose identity has changed so drastically that they would call their former self “dead” and their new self “born again.”
This is extremely good news because it affords us the ability to denounce European colonizers, many of whom had great theology and sound beliefs, as decidedly not Christian; it allows us to hear the vaguely Prosperity Gospel-esque lyrics in Chance’s Blessings and say that while we hope he’s corrected, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love Jesus.
As someone who’s apt to intellectual and theological dogma, I need to learn and relearn this lesson every day.
3. To change culture, you have to make culture.
In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch says that in order to change culture, we have to make culture. That is, to change the world, we have to live in that world. I can think of few people who do this better than Chance. He realizes that when Jesus commissioned his disciples to reach all the nations with the Gospel, he did not tell them to fall into seclusion or retreat into monasticism. Indeed, for Chance to bring redemptive change to the music industry, and more specifically, to hip hop, he realizes that his impact is not found in writing commentaries or thought-pieces on the sidelines; it is found in writing excellent music within that industry and genre.
Many of us Christians, wary of temptation, live outside of mainstream culture. Afraid of becoming of the world, we move away from cities, send our kids to private schools, retreat from everyday politics, turn off the news, and abstain from using new technologies. And then, once fortified by living most of our lives apart from culture, we occasionally choose to “engage” culture. But we’ve done so at the cost of not living in the world at all. I can’t imagine how different and limited Chance’s witness would be if he had chosen not to live in the world like many of us have.
It is my hope that we would choose to live like Chance as a people recognized for our joy, known for our transformed lives, for the sake of the redemption of the whole world.
– Alex Burlingame
