“You’re certainly a hard person to get hold of,” I tell Jaeson Ma on the phone. “I’m sorry about that,” he replies with a slight chuckle. “I’ve been a little busy.” A little busy might be an understatement.
1040
I think back to the first time I saw him. The 300-person capacity lecture hall was packed to the brim, with every seat taken and a cloud of body heat pumping through the room. I found a free spot on the steps and looked up to see Ma passionately preaching to the hip-hop beat of his music, with eyes closed under trendy thick-framed glasses. The audience then chimed in to sing the chorus of his song ‘Love’: “I’ll put you in front of me, so everybody can see my love. This is my love. I know that I’ll be alright, as long as you are my guide.” After that, it took at least a month of calls and emails to layers of public relations representatives and executive assistants before I got the chance to speak to him.
Ma was completing a tour of 30 universities across North America, speaking in packed out lecture halls and auditoriums at Harvard University, University of Texas, University of Toronto and University of British Columbia, among others. On the phone, he tells me he saw 10,000 students commit their lives to missions. “It was more than a film tour or a music tour; it was a revival,” says Ma.
“Tiring but worth it. We’re just happy we could serve God and be a tool to catalyze new student involvement and initiative.”
Minutes prior to our conversation Ma had wrapped up a lunch meeting in downtown Los Angeles — no doubt making plans for future projects.
Glory
Ma also recently released a new concept album called Glory, which he describes as “not hip-hop.” “I wouldn’t even put it in that category,” he says. “I basically speak and preach over music so it’s kind of like spoken word but sort of more on the preaching end. It’s more than just music; it’s a message.” He hopes this album will inspire young people to live for a purpose bigger than themselves.
From a young age Ma was drawn to hip-hop culture. He tells me he started “rocking his Run DMC shirt in the fourth grade.” By junior high Ma was rapping and creating solo art pieces. He loved the “ability to express oneself creatively.” That form of revolutionary and rebellious self-expression was attractive for the young boy. “It made you want to go to the edge and try something challenging, whether that was urban art, graffiti, DJ-ing or rap,” Ma recalls. “I loved the music; really I just loved the swagger.”
In the beginning
While hip-hop had been a constant in Ma’s life, faith wasn’t. His mother was a devout Baptist, but he himself had a tough time accepting the rules, regulations and overall rigidity he felt was present in the church. With such a creative spirit, he was afraid of being put into a box and conforming. “I kind of had this image of God being like a big boss man up there in heaven that was going to punish me every time I did something wrong,” he says. “I just had a wrong concept and view of God. I had a wrong concept and understanding of church.”
Ma’s teenage years were spent in east San Jose, California, an area heavily populated by Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Filipino immigrants. Gangs were commonplace in his neighborhood. “I would never say that I was a gangster. I would just say my friends were in gangs. I grew up around gangs,” he says. “It was a part of my culture. It was a part of my life.”
Eventually the influence of his associations caught up with him. Ma was charged with grand theft and had a string of other convictions from prior misdemeanors. He came to a breaking point and finally knelt down and reached out to God. “I think I was at the point where I thought I had everything, but I recognized inside my heart that I had nothing, I was empty,” says Ma. “I really just turned to God, and I prayed.”
Turning Point
With full knowledge that he could go to jail, he turned himself in. “I just wanted to get clean and get rid of my sin,” he says. After that, he says, a miracle happened.
“They lost my court case for six months, they ended up postponing my case three times, and on the third time they found me not guilty even though I pleaded guilty to all [I was] charged for.” After he “got clean,” Ma discovered that he wasn’t able to bring his friends — fellow creative types and eccentrics — to church. But he also discovered he could bring the church to them. He started planting “organic churches.” How does this happen?
[quote]”Instead of trying to bring everyone into a building to make them look like you, talk like you, act like you, sing like you, bring the gospel to where the people are and let the gospel take root in the culture and language of that people,” says Ma. “I mean I can’t get a kid from the hood to sing a Chris Tomlin song. I need to just let him find Jesus and develop his own worship songs for God. That’s the same if I’m with a Zulu tribe in Africa or in a little town in Uzbekistan.”[/quote]
Backsliding
At this point, I’m thinking the story is sounding a little too perfect. How does a gang affiliate turn into a charismatic hip-hop pastor seemingly overnight? I ask him if he’s ever backslid. “I think I still backslide,” he replies. “No one’s perfect. That’s why we need the cross. We’re human. I think sometimes with Christianity” — he pauses as if searching to find the right words to phrase what he’s thinking in his head — “we think that humans are supposed to be perfect, but we can’t. “It’s a daily dying to yourself. It’s a daily asking God to give you the strength. For me, it’s been a lifelong struggle. I just try my best to walk like Christ. I do fail at times, but [I know] it’s not about what I can do for God, it’s about what he’s already done for me. My response to that is just gratitude.”
Grace
His advice to those who haven’t lived perfect Christian lives is refreshing when juxtaposed with the preachy, fire-and-brimstone fear-mongering often heard at fundamentalist churches.
“No one’s ever going to be perfect. No one’s ever going to know enough, be enough, but Christ is enough, and that’s the power of the cross,” he says. “Religion is man trying to reach out to God, but grace is God reaching out to man. It’s not about what we can do or how good we are or how we can somehow reach a certain standard. Grace is about getting what we don’t deserve. It’s about what God has done for us.” His message resonates with me as it has with many in my generation.
Future
For now, Ma is finished with touring. He’s taking a bit of a sabbatical from speaking engagements.
Instead, he will be moving fully into artistry and film-making. A musical based on songs from his album Glory is in pre-production. “I’ll still maybe do some speaking engagements here and there, but I’m transitioning into the marketplace, media arts and entertainment,” he says. “That’s the passion inside my heart.”
Jesus and Hip-hop
We resume discussion of Ma’s two great loves — Jesus and hip-hop. “Before I went to church, hip-hop was my church. It was my religion. Rap is something you do; hip-hop is something you live. “Hip-hop is its own culture, just the same as goth [culture] or hipster [culture],” says Ma. “Each culture needs its own expression of Christianity, and we can’t put everyone into one model or one mold.”
Perhaps it is this ability to recognize Gen Y’s need to show irreverence, to be unique and to get lost in our own non-traditional sub-cultures that explains Ma’s popularity. “That’s the beauty of Jesus — he’s incarnate. He came as God in the form of man. He came and took on our hair, our clothes, our food, and met us where we were at,” continues Ma. “At the end of the day, whether it’s hip-hop or whether it’s this or that doesn’t matter. To me what matters is that people are worshipping Jesus.”
(Photo courtesy of John Park)
This article is from the inaugural issue of Converge Magazine. You can receive Converge Magazine in your mailbox for a full year, for only $12 by subscribing today
