Kanye West Talks Expository Preaching and Jesus on Joe Rogan Podcast

Musician and designer Kanye West appeared on the Joe Rogan Podcast on Friday, spending nearly three hours conversing with the famed interviewer about running for the presidency, design, record contracts, being bipolar, politics, abortion, family, Jesus, race, war, and everything else under the sun, frequently speaking in self-aggrandizing statements and sharing both good and bad theology.

The hotly anticipated conversation was everything listeners hoped it would be, with West talking nearly the whole time in a stream of consciousness. At times he made perfect sense and at others he struggled to explain his ideas and articulate them in the best possible and clearest way, resulting in a confusing mess. He describes his reasoning and the way he processes and shares information this way:

I think very three-dimensionally. I don’t think in the black-and-white lines that I’ve been programmed to think in. And I think in full color. So when I talk, I have to describe a thought in five ways. We enjoy food that has multiple seasonings in it. We enjoy music that has multiple instruments. So when I talk, it’s not a rant, it’s a symphony of ideas.

It’s in this spirit that we offer a few thoughts from West.

On making music for God

When I made Sunday Service, I completely stopped rapping, because I don’t know how to rap for God. All my raps always had nasty jokes. When I went to the hospital in 2016, I wrote, ‘Started church in Calabasas.’ As we left from 2018 going into 2019, I said; I’m not going to let one Sunday go by without starting this church. To start a ministry, I’m like the little drummer boy, where I’m saying, ‘This is all I got to bring, my drum.’ I might not be well versed in the Word, but I know how to make music and I know how to put this choir together. And all things can be made good for God. It quickly became the best choir of all time, because all the best singers moved to California…I was four months in before I gave my life to God. I wasn’t saved, I just had a calling, saying, ‘Just go make this church.’
God knocked me off my horse, literally called me and said, ‘Now I need you.’ Not that God needs me, but we need God. He called me to serve him. I was tired of serving the music industry, tired of serving filling up stadiums.

On expository preaching:

One of my pastors, pastor Adam, the way he preaches is called expository. It’s like one-to-one by the Word. I like all different kind of preachers but there are some type of preachers they get up, they have the bible in their hand, and they close the bible and they just talk for two hours.

And some do have anointing, but expository preachers go line for line, and for me it’s like I come from entertainment. I got so much sauce, I don’t need no sauce on the word. I need the word to be solid food that I can understand exactly what God was saying to me through the King James version, through this, you know, this translation or the English Standard Version.”

On Abortion:

People saw this clip of me crying. Some people didn’t know what I was crying about. I was crying about that there is a possible chance that Kim and I didn’t make the family that we have today. That’s my most family-friendly way to word that. The idea of it just tears me up inside, that I was a part of a culture that promotes this kind of thing.

One of the major statistics on the subject of life is that the greatest advocates for the A-word [abortion] are men from ages 31-37. That’s how old I was. I felt like I was too busy. My dad felt like he was too busy for me. We have a culture of that…In our culture, we’re doped up, and psyched out, and made to kill our children. We have to decouple the conversation of Planned Parenthood and women’s choice.

I’m Christian, so I’m pro-life. When I go into office, I’m not changing laws because I realize we live in an imperfect world and an imperfect society. What I will be presenting is a Plan A. We’ve already started working on a Plan A to change the connotation of orphanages, to change the connotation of foster care.
There were 210,000 deaths due to COVID in America. Everywhere you go, you see someone with a mask on. With A, the A word, A culture–I’ll say it one time, with abortion culture–there are 1,000 Black children aborted a day. Daily. We are in genocide. More Black children since February than people have died of COVID. And everyone wears a mask. So it’s a matter of where are we turning a blind eye to?

The whole interview is fascinating and be seen here or on Spotify. West talks further about Jesus and God speaking to him in a host of other contexts, all peppered throughout the interview, with some of it good and some of what he has to say very bad.

Continue to pray for West.