Cover Story: You say you want a revolution

Jay Bakker’s at the forefront of a movement to give Christianity a new face. It’s young, it’s loud, it’s brash. But what’s he really saying and who’s listening anyway?

On a warm Friday evening, the sidewalk in front of 89 Ellis St. is littered with a colorful assortment of characters. A dozen or so teenage guys, most of whom look as if they’ve been relocated via time warp from a 1979 Clash concert, are milling around, occasionally chatting with a group of similar-looking girls sitting a few feet away. It’s a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban mall if not for the five or six apparently homeless men standing nearby, talking amongst themselves.

The building that’s drawn them all to this particular patch of urban real estate is oppressively nondescript: a faded, red brick structure surrounded by a small, asphalt parking lot and a 10-foot chain-link fence. The building houses Jay Bakker’s Atlanta-based ministry, Revolution.

Revolution is part of SafeHouse, an outreach ministry that takes a hands-on approach to a wide range of work with Atlanta’s inner-city population. Revolution though, has a particularly pointed mission: to bring the Christian message to an audience that’s been ignored, misunderstood and in some cases outright shunned by more traditional churches.

“We felt there was a huge void with the type of kids that weren’t being reached,” Bakker explains. “And the void was the punk-rock kids, goth kids, hippie kids, street kids, skaters, whatever. We realized these kids were not being welcomed by the Church at all and didn’t care to be. We just decided to create an atmosphere for these kids to come and hang out.”

Inside the dark basement of the building, a five-piece band called Point of Recognition plays aggressive, raging hardcore rock to a crowd made up mostly of the same kind of teenage guys loitering outside. Facial piercings, tattoos, dyed hair, band T-shirts, baggy jeans and wallet chains are de rigueur. The basement itself is a small, carpeted room with white walls, a low ceiling, and a stage small enough to give the band’s lead singer an excuse to spend the whole set stomping around through the crowd.

Punk and hardcore music was born and, according to purists, still lives in tiny rooms like this, and in many ways, this show isn’t any different from what’s going on in other makeshift, all-ages venues tonight in cities across the country. Then, before launching into the final song of their set, the lead singer catches his breath and addresses the crowd:

“We just want to thank you guys for coming out tonight. We don’t want to preach to you, but well, we’re a Christian band, we’re all Christians, and whether you guys are Christians or not, we respect your beliefs and want to thank you for respecting ours and listening to us.”

The small crowd yells back their approval and the band launches into a vitriolic, throat-shredding, anti-abortion song to close the show.

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“I actually ask the bands not to preach,” the 25-year-old Bakker says over lunch at Mary Mac’s Tea Room a few days later. “Friday night’s not our night to preach.”

Revolution’s shows feature a pretty even mix of Christian and non-Christian artists with a heavy concentration on punk and hardcore bands. Bakker’s open to having just about anyone perform though. “If Eminem wanted to play Revolution, we’d say, ‘Sure,’” he says. “I mean, we have atheist bands play here. It’s important for us to say, ‘We’re open to everybody.’”

This welcome mat also extends to fans. “I don’t care if you’re a Satanist, an atheist, a homosexual, whatever, we just love people as they are and welcome them.”

Not everyone is taking them up on the invitation. At 27, Jeff Heinrich is older than most of Revolution’s regulars, but with sleeves of tattoos up both arms and a fierce interest in punk and hardcore music, he looks a lot like one. Heinrich’s never been there though. Some of his friends go both to shows and to Revolution’s weekly Bible studies, but Heinrich, who’s the founder of an independent record label called Jawk Records, has never made it any farther than the asphalt parking lot out front. “I go to meet kids after Bible study or to flyer for shows, but I don’t go in.”

Though Heinrich was a Christian until he was 17, he’s now an atheist. He’s devoted much of the last 10 years of his life to the punk and hardcore community, and feels there are some hefty strings attached to the hip, user-friendly face Bakker’s putting on Christianity.

“They want to get you in there, befriend you and talk to you about Christ,” he says. “I think Jay believes in all that and it’s sincere, but it’s just a marketing tool. We’ve come to the point where religion has pissed off and pushed away so many people, they have to do something to get people interested again. They don’t want to bombard you with that Christian message but they’re there for a reason.”

Bakker doesn’t deny he’s got a message he wants people to hear, but he believes it’s a significantly different message from the one that’s turned people away from the Church for years. “I don’t want to manipulate people to Christ. We’re trying to create a revolution amongst the Church, in a way. Looking at the Church and saying, ‘Stop being fake, stop judging people and start being real. Open your hearts, open your minds.’”

He contends that most people confuse Christ with the rhetoric that comes from right-wing groups like the Christian Coalition. “I’m not for those groups because they don’t speak for me. People always focus on, ‘don’t drink,’ and ‘don’t be gay,’ and ‘don’t do drugs,’ and ‘don’t have an abortion,’ and ‘don’t sin.’ There’s so much of man’s tradition built into that, it doesn’t even resemble who I know Christ is.”

Heinrich gives Bakker credit for his more open-minded approach to Christianity but still has deep misgivings about the punk image Revolution portrays. To him, punk and hardcore are not about a look or a sound. They’re lifestyle choices.

“To be punk is to reject dogma and the Judeo-Christian ethics given to us by the Christian establishment,” he contends. “It’s about choosing a path for yourself, not a path someone else laid out for you 2,000 years ago.”

Bakker disagrees. “Jesus was a punk rocker,” he says with a laugh, noting that the phrase actually sounds like a Ramones song. “He had a reputation as a drunkard who hung out with sinners.”

“We’re not a bunch of 50-year-old guys saying, ‘Let’s reach the youth!’” Bakker continues. “When I was 16, 17 years old, I was hanging out with punk kids thinking one day I’d like to help these people. But I didn’t know how.”

Of course, to some, like Heinrich, the very idea that these punks need help is evidence Bakker’s message is just a tattooed and pierced version of the same old story. “I don’t have anything against Jay, but he [says] Revolution is a ministry to the disillusioned youth. That’s kind of disgusting. Who’s to say I’m disillusioned and these kids who are squatter punks are disillusioned and that he’s morally right?”

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Revolution is not alone in its mission to minister to this previously unserved population. In and around the city, alternative ministries are popping up with more and more frequency, attracting growing numbers of teens and twentysomethings with sounds and attitudes that veer away from what’s been traditionally offered by mainstream churches, not to mention away from mainstream “Contemporary Christian” pop stars like Amy Grant and Stephen Curtis Chapman.

Every Friday and Saturday night, in a tiny space in Little Five Points, musicians, poets and performance artists grace the stage of the bohemian-looking IF Coffeeshop, a place proprietor Ken Evans hopes will introduce people to Christianity and open up lines of communication between Christians and non-Christians in a neutral, relaxed atmosphere. Every Monday night at the Calvary Assembly of God Church in Dunwoody, a ministry called Greenhouse holds a discussion group where teens and young adults can talk about their lives in a biblical context. On the weekends, Greenhouse uses the same space to host a wide swath of Christian bands, everything from punk and hardcore to funk and alternative-rock.

One Way Inc., a ministry run by and for high school and college students, operates the Street Light Cafe, a coffeehouse located in the basement of the Midtown Mission Church near Georgia Tech. Teen Planet, a Christian venue affiliated with Church In The Now, holds a combination Bible study/concert night on Fridays in Conyers. Club Goshen is a Christian dance club/music venue run out of an old movie theater in a Stone Mountain strip mall.

“There’s a great shift taking place right now,” explains Philip Bray, executive director of SafeHouse Outreach. “The traditional denominations are losing members by the scores.” Bray’s a stocky, gray-haired former drug dealer and gang member, who kicked a thousand-dollar-a-day coke habit and became a pastor, opening up SafeHouse back in 1983.

“You’ve gotta reach people where they’re at,” he continues. “A person who feels like an outcast — and in the traditional church’s eyes, they look like an outcast — when they go into those churches, they’re treated like an outcast. That’s totally gotten away from the message Christ gave us which is to embrace the outcast.”

It was Bray who offered Bakker a lifeline back in 1996, giving him a job and a place to live at a time when he was still reeling from the public battering his family took in the ’80s.

Oh yeah, his family.

It’s hard to talk about Jay Bakker without opening that can of worms, and certainly, his recent autobiography, Son of a Preacher Man, has cast even more interest in that direction. Bakker, of course, is the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the husband and wife team who helped make televangelism big business in the 1970s and ’80s with their PTL ministry. It grew into a multi-million dollar behemoth, complete with the world’s largest Christian theme park/retreat, Heritage USA. All that came tumbling down in the late ’80s following discoveries of financial misdeeds and adultery within the PTL. His parents lost the ministry and later divorced, his father served five years of a 45-year sentence in federal prison, and Jay descended into a chaotic swirl of drugs, alcohol and despair. Moreover, his family was demonized by the Church, burning painful and long-lasting scars into Jay’s own psyche. In his book, Jay maintains his father was convicted not for his actions but for his lifestyle. He sees himself as “a guy who has every right to hate the Church [yet] is still doing ministry.”

On a rainy Tuesday night, Bakker is staring out an upstairs window at SafeHouse, toward the street below. Tonight is his weekly Bible study. It’s supposed to start at 7:30, which came and went 10 minutes ago. He’s on the lookout for stragglers. “It never starts on time,” he mumbles.

The room is dark; the rest of the windows are covered with flags and banners and the only real light comes from small lamps and candles. Posters adorn the walls — The Misfits, The Incredible Hulk — and Social Distortion’s Live at the Roxy, plays not-too-loudly on the stereo.

Bakker’s a small, wiry guy with intense eyes, tattoos up and down his arms and piercings in his lip and eyebrow. His family’s well-publicized ordeals make many who don’t know him suspicious of his motives and quick to assume he’s a slick huckster. He’s not. He’s almost embarrassingly sincere and has a self-deprecating wit that’s disarming. His natural charisma does make it tempting to cast him as something of a cult-of-personality figure, but most here see him more as an older brother than an awe-inspiring leader. He wanders the room, joking with those who’ve already arrived, while a kid sits on the couch browsing through Bakker’s CD collection. The group is mostly made up of folks in their teens or early 20s, and several look familiar from last Friday night’s show.

The study opens with prayer requests and a goateed kid in his early 20s asks the group to pray for his best friend. He feels his friend, who’s not a Christian, is close to “coming to Jesus.” He wants his friend to play bass in his band but before he can invite him to, his friend must accept Christ. The request is jotted down on a notepad with a few others and included in the group’s opening prayer.

The session is structured as an open forum, but Bakker clearly leads it. In fact, as it progresses, the study becomes something of a sermon. Bakker swells with emotion, railing against infighting and legalism within the Church at large, and calling for a new Reformation. Moved almost to tears, he is indeed the son of a preacher man and the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

Underneath it all, Bakker’s message is almost impossibly simple: God loves and accepts us no matter who we are or what we’ve done. “God’s love isn’t based on how we live our lives. We’re not saved by works. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. So it’s not about living a good life. Salvation is a free gift.”

While, on the surface, none of that may seem all that revolutionary, Bakker argues that many traditional churches have strayed from that basic message, instead enforcing rules that, even when consistent with God’s message, seem to get in the way of people hearing it.

“Some churches say you need to have a good haircut or you can’t have tattoos,” he says. “That’s man’s tradition. That’s man’s law. When you put it on the Church saying, ‘This is Jesus,’ you’re making Christ’s death in vain. You’re saying Jesus’ death wasn’t good enough. Being a Christian’s about saying, ‘I’m screwed up but Christ loves and accepts me for who I am.’

“It’s really not a new concept at all,” he continues. “Martin Luther, the great reformer of the Church, thought along this process hundreds of years ago. It’s reform.”

“It’s a gimmick,” says Randall Tinear, publisher of a California-based magazine called The Angry Thoreauan. Tinear has a hard time buying into Bakker’s message. He’s an ordained minister with the Church of Universal Life but is not a Christian and, through his magazine, has been an outspoken critic of Christian-rock and organized religion in general. The music and the image, he says, “brings in the kids and after that, they try to feed them their religion. All good businesses have to have some way to bring them in. A church is a business ultimately and a business cannot remain successful if it fails to bend with the times.”

Although Bakker resists being positioned as the Church’s alternative marketing department, even those who support his work often view it as just that.

“He’s speaking to an element of the population the traditional church has probably not addressed, either out of fear or a total lack of understanding,” says Dr. Scott Weimer, pastor at the North Avenue Presbyterian Church — the church, incidentally, where Bakker and his wife Amanda were married in 1999. “Even if the traditional church was interested, we probably aren’t very well-equipped to present the Christian message in a way that could be heard by that population. What Jay’s doing is unique and, I think, desperately needed. Otherwise, the Christian church loses its voice altogether with those young people.”

Weimer’s point is valid: Bakker is getting his hands dirty in places the Church isn’t reaching. But the cynical implication some skeptics make, that places like Revolution are the product of graying church board members, focus groups and marketing specialists, holds no water. In fact, most of these ministries don’t look much like businesses at all — not successful ones anyway. Few have their own full-time facilities, and most are held together on a shoestring budget, with sweat and duct tape. Revolution’s Friday night shows have the feel of a band playing in your friend’s basement, while the IF Coffeeshop’s bohemian “cool” comes largely thanks to do-it-yourself construction made necessary by a limited budget. On show nights, the volunteer staff at Greenhouse ties a “Greenhouse” banner below the church marquee and cooks meals for the bands. The ministry’s two founders, both college students, make no money from their operation. In fact, it costs them money.

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Greenhouse is tucked in the neatly trimmed suburban enclave of Dunwoody. At 8:30 on a Saturday night, an emo-folk duo called A Becoming Walk takes the stage, with perhaps 40 people looking on. There’s a handful of the punk and hardcore kids who made up most of Revolution’s audience scattered around, but for the most part, the crowd here looks like an average sampling of suburban high schoolers. The room is a relatively massive space. Normally used as the church’s “children’s” room, it has a high, slanted ceiling and a large stage. A recent show featuring local hardcore favorites Luti-Kriss packed in close to 500 people.

Above the stage is a fairly sizable movie screen. Baz Luhrmann’s stylized 1996 update of Romeo & Juliet was being shown on it before the band took the stage, and for some reason no one’s thought to turn it off. As the band sings about temptation and faith, Leonardo DiCaprio chases Claire Danes around a swimming pool above their heads. As they offer praise to Jesus, DiCaprio, John Leguizamo and Harold Perrineau, trade gunfire and Shakespearean prose on a California beach. The rush of juxtaposed images is positively surreal. It also seems fitting. The standard knock against Luhrmann’s film was that there was something about seeing Shakespeare updated for the MTV generation that didn’t quite sit well. Similarly, it’s hard to get your head around Jesus getting a modern makeover.

Jake Lehner is a 21-year-old engineering student at DeVry. He met Raven Henderson, 20, when she was a student there in 1999. They started Greenhouse together shortly thereafter.

Henderson moved to Atlanta from Columbus, Ga., and had a hard time finding friends who were into the same things she was — Christianity and music. Lehner, a transplant from central Florida, was going through the same thing.

“I had a job and was going to school, so I had things to occupy my time,” he says. “But I always thought about it — the lack of friends. Even the acquaintances I did have, none of them were really Christians. I didn’t have anyone to share my faith with for a year before I met Raven.”

Both Henderson and Lehner have been frequent visitors to Revolution and share Bakker’s more open-minded version of Christianity.

“You don’t have to put on any special clothes for God,” Lehner says. “A lot of churches point fingers and accuse people of not living their life right. Being a Christian isn’t about that. It’s about being loved and accepting the fact that there is a God who loves you.”

“It’s about being really accepting of everything,” Henderson adds. “Not just doing this for numbers but actually getting to know people.”

To that end, they’ve recently started a weekly discussion group called “Gathering,” where people can come and talk about whatever’s on their mind. It’s smaller than Revolution’s Bible study, and there’s a more laid-back vibe, with as many references to Rocky and “The X-Files” as there are to the New Testament. Like any ministry though, Greenhouse is made up of people, and people bring their personal experiences, opinions and prejudices, often making it hard to make ideals like acceptance and tolerance a reality.

No one knows this better than Henderson, who, as one of the few blacks involved in the scene, often has to grapple with the cultural ignorance built into the minds of many white, suburban teenagers.

“I’ve never not been welcomed,” she says, choosing her words carefully, as she sits on the church steps after the night’s Gathering. “But, sometimes, I’ve been too welcomed. Like a mascot.”

She pauses and looks at the rest of the group sharing some laughs about 25 feet away. “I don’t know if anyone within the group mentioned tonight that I was ‘acting white,’ ” she says. “The usual joke is, ‘Raven’s a white Jewish boy.’

“The thing is, I came around them and they saw this,” she continues pointing at her skin, “and assumed how I was going to be. But when I opened my mouth and shared interests with people, it surprised them. And I hate that because I get that all the time. We’re supposed to be about something bigger than race. We’re supposed to be about God, and if we can’t get past that ...”

She stops abruptly. She doesn’t want to paint her friends as racists — they’re not — but their perspectives are limited by the environments they grew up in. The phenomenon is hardly peculiar to Greenhouse or Revolution or alternative ministries in general. But as Henderson herself points out, there’s something troubling about the fact that for all their talk of unconditional love and acceptance, they “can’t get past that.”

According to Mark Nicks, drummer and vocalist for the Tennessee post-punk/emo-core trio Cool Hand Luke, the dilemma filters into other aspects of the scene. He’s a Christian, but in his three years of playing Christian venues throughout the Southeast, including Revolution and Greenhouse, he’s grown frustrated with the scene’s cliquishness.

“There’s a pure scene side where you have to look, act and talk the right way or you’re not ‘in the scene.’ And if you get drunk, you’re out. We’re going to point fingers at you and do things equally as sinful, but we’re not going to see it that way,” he sighs. “We’re all on the same team here. We’re all trying to win souls and lift God up, but it’s not really like that most of the time.”

The root of the problem, Nicks says, is that, like many other scenes, people are often attracted to the trappings rather than the message. “It can be something you do to fit in or because you like the music and the scene, more than because you see Jesus is your savior. I think if kids put less emphasis on music, and more emphasis on what the message is, when this scene fades away, their faith won’t.”

Of course, putting less emphasis on the music, opens up a whole new set of problems. “It’s hard. We do this to reach the lost and you have to have some reason for them to come,” he says. “Because if you’re not a Christian and you hear that some band is going to hold worship, you don’t want to go. And for a lot of kids, going to a show is the only way they’re going to hear about Jesus.”

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Maybe the message of acceptance isn’t really understood by everyone at places like Revolution and Greenhouse. Maybe, in fact, the message itself, just translates the Church’s age-old dogma into a language a new generation can understand. But even if that’s the case, what’s the harm?

Plenty, answers Jeff Heinrich, the punk-rock atheist.

“It’s kind of a $2 answer to a million-dollar question,” he says. “Youth is a time to discover who you are, to rebel against what your parents want you to be, what society wants you to be. They’re losing out on making the decisions and finding out what’s right for them, instead of what’s right for Jesus. They’re losing their rebellion.”

But to Bakker, rebellion is not, in and of itself, an end worth attaining. “I’m not trying to be a rebel for rebel’s sake. I don’t care about being a punk. [But] we are rebelling against people who are closed-minded. We’re rebelling against people who are saying you have to live this way, act this way, dress this way and be this way to be a Christian.”

And, while Bakker does argue that sin has consequences, damnation isn’t one of them. The choices you make — about abortions, adultery, homosexuality, whatever — can affect your life, but that doesn’t make you any less worthy of God’s love.

Heinrich says the whole concept of “love the sinner, hate the sin,” assumes an agreement on what actually constitutes sin. “It’s cool that you accept homosexuals but my viewpoint is there’s nothing wrong with being a homosexual. You’re not sinning, and they shouldn’t be saying you’re doing anything wrong. Because to be told you’re sinning is a way of trying to make you feel guilty for who you are. And that’s totally what Christianity’s about, guilt.”

In fairness, not even Christians necessarily agree on what are or are not sins. Though many Christians classify homosexuality as a sin, a significant portion disagree. Bakker, though, goes a step farther. He says they shouldn’t be making such classifications at all — at least not collectively.

“It’s an individual thing,” he says. “If you think something’s a sin, it’s a sin. If you think something’s wrong, it’s wrong. We can’t put everybody in this box. It’s between you and Christ.”

If there’s anything truly revolutionary about Revolution’s message, this may be it. That sins are not an agreed-upon list of rules as outlined in the Bible, but rather an understanding between each individual and God is an idea Bakker admits upsets many in more traditional churches who believe it gives people a license to sin. After all, if a doctor at an abortion clinic truly believes he’s doing nothing wrong, by Bakker’s logic, he’s not. Right?

“I guess so,” he concedes uncomfortably. “I guess if you don’t know something’s wrong, it wouldn’t be wrong. I trust God that much in people’s lives. Because I don’t want to control people through legalism. I want to allow God to move in people’s lives in a really special way.

“Physically, something happens when you accept Christ into your life,” he continues. “You lose tendencies to do certain things. Now, you’re not perfect overnight. You’re not like, ‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t lust, I don’t masturbate — life is perfect.’ But those things become less and less important.”

Bakker says that was the case for him: He found the desire to stop drinking only after he realized God loved him regardless. But he recognizes that with others it doesn’t always work that way. “You’re never free from the conflict of sin. There’s always struggles, but you do have the forgiveness of God.”

The assumption though is that God will guide people who accept Christ in the same direction he’s guided Christians before them — away from abortion or adultery or alcoholism. And Bakker takes an even bolder step in saying that, for some people, the path may be different.

As progressive as the idea sounds, it’s not without problems. In fact, Revolution’s parent ministry, SafeHouse, runs a “family resource center” intended to offer unwed pregnant women alternatives to abortions. “If they choose to get an abortion — and this is what makes us totally different — we’ll go with them,” says Pastor Phillip Bray. “We’ll show love, acceptance and forgiveness.” Forgiveness.

The fact that SafeHouse offers alternatives to abortions assumes a judgment about abortion. No matter how noble intentions may be, our actions are always defined by judgments.

Bakker though still insists that salvation has only one requirement: to accept that Jesus died on the cross for our sins — whatever they may be — and loves us unconditionally.

“It’s not about judgmentalism, it’s not about sin — I don’t even feel comfortable talking about those things. My thing is just to help people fall in love with Jesus. That’s what my ministry’s based on. Loving people, accepting people and allowing them to figure all these other things out on their own. That’s what separates me from other ministers. I just want to show people who Christ really is. I believe he is the only answer.”

But if Christ is the only answer, what happens to Bakker’s message about open-mindedness? Isn’t there something fundamentally incompatible about preaching acceptance and open-mindedness while simultaneously insisting that there’s only one path to salvation?

“I don’t think there’s anything incompatible about it because I don’t believe in other gods,” Bakker says. “I’m not one of those guys who says there are different paths to different things. I’m not selling enlightenment. It would be great for me to go, ‘We can both be right. My friend can be a Satanist and I can be a Christian and everything will be fine.’ But that’s not what I believe.

“I see your point though,” he continues. “It’s hard to reconcile. It seems a little closed-minded but I believe that’s because Jesus is the one, true God. And if I’m being closed-minded, I won’t apologize for that part of my closed- mindedness because I feel like Christ is the only answer.”??