InterVarsity Alumnus Jessie Thomas Listens to Jesus on Set, at the Table, and Everywhere Else

God uses Jessie Thomas’ passions for food, media, and people to make himself known across a wide range of roles. 

We sat down with her on the InterVarsity World Changers podcast to hear how her experience as an InterVarsity student prepared her to follow God with openness and trust — even on the set of the Food Network show, Chopped! 

Surrendering Everything ... Including Career

Jessie grew up in New York City in a South Asian Christian family. Her parents were church planters who could trace their Christian heritage back to the apostle Thomas. While faith was a huge part of Jessie’s early life, it didn’t become real and personal to her until she got involved in InterVarsity as a college student in Amherst. 

InterVarsity staff workers and volunteers modeled a lived-out faith that inspired Jessie to study the Bible more deeply. As Jesus became the center of her life, she decided to surrender everything to him, including her career.

Following God in her career led her down many paths — advertising and PR, seminary, church planting, ministry leadership, filming cooking segments for a local TV station, homeschool teacher, podcaster, personal chef, InterVarsity volunteer — but perhaps the most pivotal career choice was when she found herself working for the Food Network during the pandemic.

Food as a Means of Connection

Repeatedly in Scripture, food shapes moments where people encounter God — manna in the wilderness, Jesus calling himself the bread of life, meals shared around tables, and communion. Jessie has always seen food as a means of connection. 

While her responsibilities have changed over the years, cooking has remained her one consistent hobby. Over two decades, she estimates she logged nearly 10,000 hours in the kitchen, preparing meals for family, students, church members, friends, or neighbors. 

Before the pandemic, Jessie was working for an organization that didn’t engage her passion for food but did engage her passion for people and justice. Her job at Christian Community Health Fellowship gave her the chance to travel extensively to help healthcare students intersect faith, justice, and vocation. Unfortunately, this work came to an abrupt halt when the pandemic began. 

Around that same time, a producer Jessie knew from a previous job reached out and asked her to film cooking videos from home. Because she was already home and cooking in her spare time, she agreed to do it. It wasn’t long before those videos caught the attention of a celebrity chef connected to Food Network’s Chopped. 

Chopped was normally filmed in New York, but the pandemic forced production to relocate to Tennessee, where Jessie was living at the time. The chef invited her to join a six-week in-person shoot, and she said yes!

A Quieter Form of Ministry

While Jessie was excited to work on a Food Network show, she never expected the set to become a place for life-changing ministry moments to unfold. 

Many of her coworkers arrived from New York frustrated and exhausted. Their city had been hit hard by the pandemic, and working in an industry with little job security only heightened their anxiety about what might come next.

Jessie also sensed something deeper going on. Some of the crew’s impressions of Christians had been shaped largely by media portrayals, and they had few examples for what compassionate faith looked like. 

So, after years of teaching and leading, God invited Jessie into a quieter form of ministry — one that involved sitting with others during 12-hour production days and listening to their stories of anger, anxiety, and church hurt. 

After listening, Jessie shared openly about how her faith shaped her own life:

her work with healthcare justice, her past job experiences, and her decision to move to Appalachia to serve communities there. Every career choice, she explained, was guided by Jesus’ hand in her life.

She could see something shift in her coworkers as she shared. Some of them responded honestly: “When I think about people who go to church, I hear a lot of noise and negativity. But you’re talking about caring for people.”

In these conversations, Jessie never tried to defend Christianity, the church, or evangelicalism. Instead, she simply talked about following Jesus. 

“We should not be dependent on technique,” Jessie said. She believes living out the gospel isn’t just about convincing others to recite the sinner’s prayer or having the right presentation, but being “dependent on Jesus, on the Holy Spirit, and just being open.”

It’s been five years since her Chopped experience, and she maintains a lot of those relationships today. 

All Our Interests for His Kingdom

After filming ended and her coworkers returned to New York, new doors opened. Jessie was invited to submit recipes to The New York Times and Food & Wine. She also launched a podcast centered on worldview where she interviewed people from a wide range of backgrounds. Many of her guests didn’t follow Jesus, but the goal was to help Christians learn to listen well and love people where they are. 

When that season ended, another began, and just like every season Jessie found herself in, God used her passions for his glory. 

She’s helped design a cooking kitchen for a clinic in a food desert, taught cooking classes for children who may one day enter the culinary world, and continues her work supporting healthcare students while volunteering with InterVarsity’s graduate and South Asian ministries.

“I was the kid that wasn't good at any one specific thing, but I had lots of interests,” Jessie said. “That's the thing that I want to communicate to people. God is going to use whatever way he wired you to build his kingdom and surprise you with joy.”

Jessie’s story reminds us that God delights in using all our interests, talents, and gifts, and that faithfulness means trusting him wherever he takes us. 

Find the rest of Jessie’s story here. And join us in praying for world changers like her as they reflect Christ’s listening heart to the world.