By Kent Annan
While Princeton Seminary is accustomed to training biblical scholars,
missionaries, and ministers to become effective translators of Scripture,
seldom has it prepared students to render Ecclesiastes 3 quite like this:
He says to me, "Your job ain’t doin’ nothin’ for you.
While you slavin’ and savin’ for a legit home,
Anybody anytime could bust a cap in your dome.
Live for right now son, forget about the future."
But I know that he ain’t flippin’ the bigger picture.
- from What It’s About, by Charles Atkins
Charles Atkins, a senior in the M.Div./M.A. in religious education
program, wrote the lyrics. Its language is hip-hop —the culture and
style of music associated with rap, a predominantly African American form
that has gained a vast audience since its inception twenty years ago. Last
year hip-hop sold eighty-eight million CDs, records, and tapes.* To these
young and malleable listeners, Atkins is translating the Gospel.
(For those needing a translation of the above: "could bust a cap
in your dome" means "could shoot you in the head," and
"he ain’t flippin’ the bigger picture" means "he does
not understand the wider perspective"…to put it very blandly.)
Atkins was born and raised in Camden, New Jersey. Before going to
Haverford College in the Philadelphia suburbs, he had not traveled far
from home and had never left the country. The need for translation had not
occurred to him; everyone spoke his language.
Then during his junior year at Haverford, he embarked on a yearlong
study program in Montpellier, France. After returning and graduating with
a sociology major, Atkins went back to France where for two years he
wrote, recorded, and performed French rap songs and worked for a record
label. The relationships that Atkins formed there with people from around
the world forever changed him — providing him a wide-angle lens with
which to see, and surround-sound with which to hear, the needs and
possibilities of ministry. That and a growing knowledge of the African
American experience in America led him to understand what he wanted to
accomplish with his life: "I need to do all that I can to break down
barriers that, while they are up, cause us to suffer."
But Atkins still was not connecting his faith, ministry, and music the
way he wanted to. He moved back to New Jersey and decided to enter
Princeton Seminary.
While in seminary, he has learned more about the world, increased his
language dexterity, and grown in theological insight. During the last
three years, Atkins has visited France several times, spent a summer as a
peace observer in Chiapas, Mexico, served for a summer as an assistant
pastor in Jamaica, West Indies, and traveled to Zimbabwe for the World
Council of Churches Assembly. Foreign languages have become a passion.
This extends even to his answering machine, which greets you and lets you
know what to do after the beep in English, French, and Spanish.
Now as he returns to singing in the language he first learned on the
streets of Camden, translation remains his central motif.
Recently, Atkins released a new CD, LoveOne World. The CD consists of
fifteen hip-hop songs. Atkins is the main songwriter, but collaborates
with his brother, Keith, who lives near Princeton and is an electrical
engineer, and several PTS students. So far he has sold about five hundred
copies. The medium isn’t the message, but it invites you to sing to the
message. The title track is soulful, honest, and hopeful about the central
issues of Atkins’s ministry:
Surrounded by poverty, surrounded by despair;
People walking around as if they don’t care.
They think what happens to others doesn’t really matter to them.
But if they knew the real deal, they would stretch out their hands.
So much could be done, so much could be done.
If we just love one, love one, love one world.
Atkins considers his songs a theological response to the incarnation,
based on the belief that "Jesus Christ is God’s human
translation." Today’s challenge is to take the first-century
incarnation in Palestine and translate it for twenty-first-century
American youth. That explains the lyrics that he writes, but what of the
music — the rhythms and melodies — that carries the words to the
listener? "For me, music is the microphone of translation. Music
makes the translation more accessible to others and plants the seed of
translation in them."
However, words and music aren’t enough for Atkins. His prayer for his
ministry is that God’s love transforms lives. How can he get that
message out in a marketplace crowded by great talents, sex-saturated
marketing, and million-dollar MTV videos? "My beats aren’t super
exceptional, my style isn’t as crazy as Method Man…but it’s the
stories of Scripture that are translated into their language that will
surprise young people. Even if a kid listens to the hard-core stuff with
friends, I’m satisfied if that kid goes into his or her room and listens
to my CD or a CD by some Christian hip-hop group, and uses that to help
filter the nonsense that’s hitting him or her everyday. And I think we
can break through the barrage by not being a part of it, by standing alone…."
People are responding to the difference of his approach. Atkins has
played more than thirty concerts in the last three years for churches,
community events, and youth conferences. After a concert in Maryland,
Atkins overheard a nervous teen telling his youth group leader that his
mom had forbidden him to listen to rap. With a smile, the youth group
leader said that he was sure his mom would approve of Atkins’s songs.
Following a recent concert in North Carolina, he received the kind of
feedback for which he prays: "I started getting emails from these
boys who wanted to be gangsta types, who said they had a whole new
appreciation for Scripture, because the translation had occurred to
them."
Chances are that Atkins’s translations of Scripture will not become
the standard in academic journals. However, hip-hop-loving teenagers
looking for something to blast through their car stereos probably won’t
play the NRSV’s book-on-tape. Fortunately, translations of the Gospel of
Christ are at home in Hindi and Swahili, Turkish and Spanish, the queen’s
English and hip-hop rhymes.
Atkins’s CD, LoveOne World, is available in the PTS bookstore. For
more information about Atkins and his ministry, or to schedule him for
your church or youth group, call 877-847-4829, email him at loveoneworld@hotmail.com,
or visit www.christworks.com/loveone/.
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