EuDMS #5: Aki Gibson - Being Light in HipHop Communities

00:00:01: Okay, good morning everyone.

00:00:03: It's almost actually afternoon here in Finland.

00:00:06: My name is Aki Gibson and really I'm going to continue some of the sentiment that Daniel was just sharing about really living out that simple gospel of loving people in these different niches that wherever we find ourselves.

00:00:22: I'm going to be talking about the hip-hop context because that's What we're a part of here in Finland, I'm a tech worker, sort of a bivocational missionary, so a tech worker, but also a part of a hip hop group called Under the Underground.

00:00:39: And we are also a part of a broader creative network here in the capital region of Helsinki, Finland.

00:00:50: And there's a group, basically it's a group of rappers that came together.

00:00:54: Wrapping in English and Finnish and that somehow evolved into a studio that evolved into a college wildfire college Walk far.

00:01:02: college comm is the website.

00:01:04: There's.

00:01:05: there's a lot of things coming together between creativity and theology and so the movement is kind of brought it out.

00:01:11: We're in Helsinki kind of jumped over to Estonia and even some places in Southeast Asia.

00:01:18: So we're just a growing movement looking to network with other creatives.

00:01:25: And really, there's really not really a clear roadmap for what we're trying to do because we also are evolving into a tech incubator as well.

00:01:33: There's actually a partnership we have within Digitus this weekend.

00:01:37: There's a hackathon.

00:01:38: So there's a bunch of different efforts coming together.

00:01:42: And for me, though, in this kind of digital context where all the all the lanes keep changing and all the on-ramps keep changing you know for me where I found the the greatest clarity and inspiration is just simply back in the text.

00:02:00: you know coming back to the way that the early church navigated and adapted the movement to unique contexts and I actually shown here a picture of the The scene of the riot in acts, we're Paul and his and his companions so saturated emphasis and.

00:02:29: Really changed the conversation there that it that it that it turned into this riotous outbreak and I actually had a chance to go to Turkey and visit these these ruins and a lot of the other.

00:02:46: Asia Minor context because really it was from Ephesus that a beachhead it was established that that penetrated all of Asia Minor.

00:02:54: you know we read that account in Acts nineteen and it basically said that they they saturated that whole region within a couple of years.

00:03:03: and this this sort of pattern that you see in the text really has kind of given inspiration to kind of what we're trying to do even in the hip-hop context.

00:03:14: and it's You know, a long kind of conversation here to look at specific texts, but I'm going to just try to abstract it because obviously hip-hop may not be relevant for everyone here, but there's probably others that are creatives or content creators.

00:03:30: And I'm just going to kind of share kind of how we've navigated the mission journey in the hip-hop space.

00:03:42: And really, what you see kind of from Paul's example in Ephesus, he starts in the marketplace.

00:03:50: When he arrives at Ephesus, he brings Priscilla and Aquila, who were his fellow leather workers or whether they were making leather to make tents.

00:04:04: They had a shared business context.

00:04:06: And in that picture, actually, that I was showing, the marketplace.

00:04:11: is actually right sort of to the left of this arena.

00:04:17: So when that riot broke out, it was really just within short proximity to the marketplace, to Agora, where they possibly would have had their business dealings.

00:04:32: So you see a scene that takes place in the marketplace there, and that this is a story.

00:04:37: You also see Paul engage in in the synagogue a couple of times.

00:04:41: And each of these, as I'm staring into them, you could sort of abstract what's going on to your own context, because the marketplace is just really, it's an arena where there's insider engagement, and there's some type of rules of exchange during engagement.

00:05:02: And there's a lot of ways that we can apply this in the digital space.

00:05:05: There's a lot of different.

00:05:08: open forms of exchange that invite our participation as insiders.

00:05:14: And the synagogue, you know, he entered in a couple of times.

00:05:19: The first time when he was speaking in the synagogue, they were really hanging on his every words and wanted him to stay.

00:05:25: You know, he left Ephesus for a time, then returned.

00:05:28: And that second time he went into the snot, he was boldly reciting from the scriptures and then they kicked him out.

00:05:33: But really, To me, abstracting this, there's some type of storied community.

00:05:40: If we find ourselves in insiders in these forms of exchange, within those contexts, we could possibly find storied communities that invite our contributions.

00:05:54: And for me, this is all aligned with how we've been seeing our hip-hop, missional journey go.

00:06:01: But I'm just trying to explain from the the axe context, you know, how Paul established this beachhead.

00:06:08: And so once they got kicked out of the synagogue, then he took the disciples that he found and they entered into the school of tyrannous for a period of a couple of years, you know, in the scriptures daily.

00:06:23: And it's that daily context, you know, one of the texts that we have available, the Western text actually provides detail in the timing when that training was taking place.

00:06:33: And it was taking place during the hours when workers would have been on break because people couldn't really work under the sun at the hottest moment.

00:06:48: So during that break period, he was taking these disciples.

00:06:52: And it's a daily.

00:06:54: Training them and it.

00:06:56: and I think even when we think about a digital context, you know For me the digital context is the only place where I could think of about a daily Opportunity to engage in discipleship, you know, there's there's other in-person context.

00:07:11: You could get you know weekly rhythms and such.

00:07:13: but to me the digital context Offers something that's similar to what Paul had where he was daily reasoning with this disciple context.

00:07:20: and and as that movement kind of spread, you know, it really saturated the whole region with this testimony where the name of Jesus was made famous.

00:07:32: And there's a lot here, obviously, when we think about how we could use the digital tools to disseminate testimony and truth.

00:07:42: For our own journey, you know, what it means to be in the marketplace in this kind of context of hip hop is you know, I've found where we've kind of landed as a hip-hop collective is, you know, we find a lot of these open-verse challenges on TikTok and other platforms.

00:08:07: There's a platform circle that we participate in these sort of song contests.

00:08:11: And, you know, maybe in another creative context, that would look like a hackathon or whatever other opportunity is to kind of get into a collective of creatives and then participate in some type of creative challenge.

00:08:25: And that sort of has given us that insider status to go in, to go among the community and speak from.

00:08:33: And the testimonies that we've seen in the hip-hop space, like a lot of people when we think about creativity, you think about who is your creative stuff gonna reach as it gets populated on these platforms.

00:08:44: But the mindset that we've taken is, Who are the creatives that we're going to reach?

00:08:49: In other words, the fellow content creators, because oftentimes you're so focused on getting your content on the platforms that you don't realize along the way in the creation process, there's a networking that takes place that invites you into other creatives' lives.

00:09:05: And that's what happened for us.

00:09:10: Just to give a simple test, because I think I'm going to run out of time here, but I'll just give one test of mine out of the many that has been coming together.

00:09:18: We joined a song contest recently and in that context it was a global contest.

00:09:27: So people were joining from all over the world and it was artists and producers linking up and somehow as we searched example producers who we want to work with we just happened to stumble across another Producer who was here in our backyard in Finland literally in the same city and that turned into an interesting collaboration project and really the digital means.

00:09:53: Like I would have never met this guy if I was just roaming the streets of Finland trying to find other create you know creative producers and and he was the only guy from Finland in this challenge.

00:10:03: and so it's interesting because you know Digital gives you these opportunities to make in-person connections also in ways that in-person context doesn't even provide you with.

00:10:17: So just for time's sake, we're here in the Nordics just looking to network and collaborate with other creators, whether that's in the hip-hop context or other media context, and feel free to reach out because we're really trying to build something on the order of.

00:10:39: you know, an Inklings group, you know, we're creatives, you know, like C.S.

00:10:43: Lewis and Tolkien will come together and bring their creative projects together, challenge each other to grow, but also just encourage each other to get our stuff out there with a missional mindset to reach fellow creatives.

00:10:55: So I think that's the time that I was allotted, but happy to stay on in the rooms.

00:11:02: If there's other people that are engaged in hip hop or creativity or content creation, love to chat further.