A Good Inspiration

This past week as I was scrolling through facebook I saw an article written by the Christian Broadcast Network that was entitled, "Chance the Rapper Points to Jesus When Ellen Asks About His Motivation for Charity Work." I immediately watched the video (see below) of the interview and read the article to see what happened for myself.


In the video, Ellen begins the interview by asking Chance about his family. From there, she moves on to asking Chance as the article title indicates about his inspiration for all of the charity work that he does. After a little hesitation, Chance tells Ellen at 3:28, "So my understanding of a lot of stuff is based on uh, Jesus so like Jesus teaches to be like you know to care for your neighbour and care for people that aren't necessarily your blood but still a part of your body cause we are all humans..." He then continues to say that both his parents and Jesus are the main motivations for helping others out. 

Over the past couple years, Chance has been walking in his own journey towards God. Another article from CBN speaks about how in 2018, Chance posted a video of him rapping on Instagram where in it he says that he is a Christian rapper. As I was researching Chance's journey into Christianity I even found an article on Vice written by a non-believer who found that as a fan of Chance the Rapper, Chance had too much "heavy religious overtones" in his music and in the way that he spoke. Based on this, it seems clear that recently Chance has been quite vocal about his walk with God. 

There were a couple interesting things that I observed from this video and article. The first was Chance's slight hesitation to talk about Jesus. As Chance began to tell Ellen that Jesus was his inspiration for all the charity he had done, you can see him hesitate slightly. Putting myself in his shoes I would think that some discernment would have needed to take place before I would have answered knowing that my interviewer is a part of the LGBTQ+ community. I am sure he did not really know how Ellen would respond to that. Chance decided to just go with it after all and helped spread a positive message about Jesus on a secular platform that has a huge following. 

Another thing to mention would be the fact that in general, Chance sharing about Jesus in this way allowed people to get a positive view of Jesus that many would not be used to. Often in society, people like to pick apart Christians for all of the bad things that they have done, or even accuse Jesus of horrible things like being a liar or worse. It is nice for someone to just share that Jesus was the reason that they decided to be charitable. Jesus did speak about this in the Bible in passages like Mark 12:31 or the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19. 

The last thing that I thought was interesting was Ellen's response to Chance's answer about Jesus. When Chance says that Jesus and his parents were his inspiration, she agrees with him saying at 4:06 that they were, "good inspirations." There could be many reasons as to why she used the plural and affirmed Jesus to be a good inspiration. It could have been just a nice gesture or the pressure of the camera, but all in all, Chance's statement caused Ellen to basically say that Jesus is a good inspiration for people to have on TV which is incredible.

This moment not only spread an image of Jesus around the world, but it spread a positive, biblical image about who Jesus is. It is almost like a breath of fresh air to read a story like this amidst all of the other horrible things that we read about in the media today. So what do you think? Was this good press for Jesus? Is charitable a way that you would describe Jesus and his followers, the Christians? Who is Jesus to you?

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