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CBN.com – "My name is Rufus Morris. I’m the President and CEO of Kingdom Entertainment Companies. My vision for Kingdom Entertainment is to entertain, inspire, and educate."
As an entreprenuer in the entertainment industry, Rufus Morris is on a mission to transform youth culture for God. But Rufus had a different motivation in the early 1980s. His mission and dream was to make “money” in the hip-hop industry.
"They used to call me “Skratch." I was a rap recording artist. I'd come from the Run DMC era, the Fat Boys, Big Daddy Kane, and people like that who are some of the people we performed with in shows. That’s kind of the era," he remembers.
"I was young. I was young in the industry. I owned night clubs, a small chain of music stores, radio stations, and recording studios. You know, I was “ghetto-fabulous,” as they would like to say. I was a neighborhood celebrity. Even back then, as I obtained these thing they always gave me temporary gratification. I always wanted more. It was like the pursuit of wanting more. If there was a hot car, I got it. I’d have it for a while, then lust and greed set in. The next hot thing I'd want."
Stronger than his greed, Rufus began struggling with issues surrounding the hip-hop scene.
"I always felt a tug of war in my soul and within my heart with some of the hard core hip-hop and the music I used to sell. I was prospering, but at what cost? I watched my store clientele where I use to sell the music, and CDs, where the industry use to become very negative. And I watched my clientele go from mostly adults to now youth buying this negative content. Selling this music to these youth that are listening to content that I knew was going to create images and things inside them... they would go out and mimic the violence and things. At my night clubs, there were shootouts and stabbings."
"Here I was, I left at 15, with $18,000 in an evening. But someone got stabbed at the end of the night or someone got shot. Because of the lifestyle and the people around me, that was part of the game. The people around me were like, 'You’re just running a business.' You didn’t start that fight! But did I create the environment? Was the music we were playing with the violence and lust in it ... was it contributing to the teen pregnancy and to the youth violence?"
"I just felt like after obtaining a certain level of material possessions, I still felt like there was no substance. Is this life just about getting money and accumulating things? There had to be more to life than just that. I gave up everything that attached me to the world."
Rufus rediscovered his Christian roots and rededicated his life to Christ. A passage of Scripture challenged Rufus to surrender everything to God.
"I read in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus said, 'Whatever you let go for the sake of following me'... be it cattle? He said, 'I will return to you a hundred fold in this lifetime and eternal life.' I said, 'Lord, based on your Word, I’m going to do just that.'
God is restoring that dream and promise He gave Rufus through his new company, Kingdom Entertainment.
"In the center of everything I'm doing now, is Christ. Every dream, it’s so awesome ... Him being the center of it all. It gives me purpose. It gives me the joy because I truly know today that there is no way for you to enjoy things, without Christ."
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