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Hard-core for Christ: Churches cater to "gutter punks"
Hard-core for Christ: Churches cater to 'gutter punks' across U.S.
HURST – Hands clasped, elbows pulled into his chest, Clay Warren rocks to the rising call of electric guitars, pounding drums and guttural voices. The sound cascades across the crowded room, rattling the windows. Tattooed hands turn upward over mohawks and lip rings.
In front of the crowd, a tall man with a clean-shaven scalp holds a microphone. As the cacophony reaches a crescendo, he bellows: "Let me hear your battle cry!" The young men and women respond with screams.
Heavy metal guitars, lyrics about burning flesh, and the faithful crying out to bathe in Jesus' blood might trigger an exodus at traditional churches. But it packs them in every Sunday at the nondenominational Deliverance Bible Church in Hurst.
The man at the microphone is Cleetus Adrian, 32, the Moses for this motley parish. He's known simply as Pastor Cleetus. His earlobes are stretched. His arms, legs, hands and neck are covered in bright body art. And he has a metal spike below his bottom lip.
Mr. Warren, who joined the church after finding God while in a drug recovery program, said: "When people see us coming, they don't know what to think. Then when they hear us talking about the Lord, they really don't know what to think."
The brand of Sunday worship service provided by Deliverance Bible Church, like a growing number of youth-oriented worship services across North America, appeals to self-described "gutter punks," the outcasts of their generation.
Deliverance has four locations in Texas, one in Chicago, and one on the way in Seattle. Similar groups such as Rise Above Ministries in San Antonio and the Revolution Churches in Atlanta, Charlotte and New York City mean thousands of young men and women are rocking small storefront churches every Sunday.
While the movement is certainly growing, it's impossible to know exactly how many people are involved, said Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which has studied religious organizations and trends across the country for 30 years. "We can't ask these kinds of questions on a census. So calculating actual numbers is very, very difficult."
The Hurst church says it hosts an annual conference of ministries called Nation of the Underground, where thousands of Christians come to be "refilled, refreshed and released."
"In every metro area in America, there is at least one church that appeals to heavy metal fans," said Dave Travis, executive vice president of Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church-growth think tank.
"It's a subculture," he said. "As each new generation of believers gets excited about their faith, they invent new churches for their lifestyle. American Christians are very entrepreneurial in reaching young people."
The Sundance Channel is paying attention to this trend as well. It recently aired the six-part documentary titled One Punk Under God , about Jay Bakker (son of Jim Bakker) and his struggle to plant a church for outcasts in New York.
Mr. Thumma, a sociologist of religion, said that Deliverance Bible Church is part of a vast movement of individualism in American Christian churches that started several decades ago. He said U.S. Christians have a tendency to adapt their spiritual experiences to their lifestyles, whether they're gay, bikers or gutter punks.
"These congregations that have arisen around subgroups in evangelism – and what probably started with the 'Jesus people' in the late '70s to early '80s – have gotten more diverse, doing it in their own idioms and their own ways," Mr. Thumma said.
And the Internet has helped these groups band together.
"What we have here is incredible niche marketing that is more authentic to the subgroups, be they grunge, heavy metal or into body piercing," he said. "People are saying not everyone has to wear ties and jackets. And if you don't, you can still be a Christian."
Seven years ago, when Pastor Cleetus and his wife, Nichole, started the ministry, it consisted of five people in a local YMCA. Now, it has hundreds of members who meet in a strip mall, in space tucked between an upholstery store and a garage door company.
The church hosts a weekly Bible study, regular street preaching, periodic 24-hour prayers and a children's church. The members have evangelized to the homeless in Los Angeles and are raising money for clean-water systems in the Sudan. Pastor Cleetus said he knows some dentists and wants to reach out in the mid-cities by arranging free dental work for the unemployed and recovering drug addicts.
Front and center at the sermons and Bible studies is Mr. Warren, 22. He grew up in Huntsville, where he says he was in and out of rehab and in trouble with the police. Facing possible jail time for drug charges, he took his lawyer's advice and entered a faith-based recovery program.
He prayed for help quitting drugs and turning around his life around. "God reached in and touched me, and I could feel the change," he said. "I could recognize the change."
When he left the recovery program, Mr. Warren began attending prayer meetings with a friend and eventually started attending a Baptist youth group in Huntsville.
His zeal compelled him to decorate his body in spiritual messages. His first tattoo was an image of the ichthys (sometimes called the "Jesus fish") on his rib. Soon he had religious art from his ankles and wrists to his neck.
"Even before I was a Christian, I was bold," Mr. Warren said. "But when I became a Christian, God stepped that up a notch."
But he was questioned about his tattoos by youth leaders and older members of the Huntsville church, and that made him feel unwelcome. Then another friend told him about a church in Hurst with hundreds of other punks with the same religious thirst. He drove up to see for himself.
They had similar stories. One young man was in the process of becoming a Mormon when elders asked him to cut his dreadlocks.
Mr. Warren felt a sense of deep fellowship. For months, he made the seven-hour round trip between Huntsville and Hurst each weekend. "I never experienced fellowship at another church, not the same kind," he said.
He said his probation officers also saw a change in him, and they consented when he asked to move to Hurst so he could spend more time at Deliverance Bible Church.
Pastor Cleetus said some of the church's members might not be alive today if they hadn't found God. "If they weren't coming to church and if they didn't have God in their lives, who knows where they would be," he said. "A lot of these kids would be dead by now. I'd probably be dead by now."
At 6-foot-5, Pastor Cleetus is a lean but imposing figure, a tall canvas for the religious art that covers most of his visible flesh. He has two sons, 6 and 2 years old. He has had to tell his oldest boy that he isn't allowed to get a tattoo yet.
The son of a more traditional preacher, Pastor Cleetus has no certified seminary training or religious schooling. When he was in his early 20s, he would go to underground punk concerts night after night and look out upon a sea of lost faces. He felt like a shepherd gazing at his flock of black sheep.
At the time, he played in a Christian metal band. He left the band to start Deliverance Bible Church. He still sings and plays guitar during church services.
Music is an inextricable part of the hard-core Christian youth movement. Listening to bands with such names as Demon Hunter, No Innocent Victim, Our Corpse Destroyed and Inked In Blood is part of the lifestyle and bond that unifies this group.
"Everyone is passionate about music, the kind of music they listen to," Mr. Warren said. "Music fuels all of this. It's set up that way by God."
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Warren took a caravan of young Oklahomans to a pizza place in Bedford. Before eating, the group asked for prayer requests from others in the restaurant. Most of the patrons were quiet, but one man asked for a prayer for his ailing father. They linked hands, bowed their heads and asked God to assist the stranger's father with his pain. By the end of the prayer, the man was on the verge of tears. He thanked them profusely before leaving.
The next Friday night, Mr. Warren and several others traveled to Deep Ellum to preach on the streets, to try to "turn that place upside down for Jesus."
"For a long time, I thought I was going to heaven because of my goodness," Mr. Warren told a man outside a club. "But then I found out all sinners have a place in the lake of fire. Repent and believe. Turn away from your sin and be saved."
They preach to the open air, approach drunks in bars and evangelize to men and women in lines outside clubs at shows. They say they are regularly punched, yelled at and spit upon.
"Our words are not easy to hear," Pastor Cleetus said. "We aren't trying to make people feel better about themselves. We want people to feel bad because they are bad. We don't want to dance around it."
Mr. Warren intends to follow Pastor Cleetus into the ministry.
He has a day job on a demolition crew. But a year ago, he enrolled in Deliverance Bible Church's school of ministry, a one-week crash course in evangelism. "I was wondering what God wanted for me, and as soon as I heard Cleetus talking about the school of ministry, I knew this was it," he said.
Now known as Pastor Clay, he works with the children's church, adjacent to the main worship room. He dreams of planting a church in Venice Beach, Calif., where he has done street preaching. "God put it on me to go to the pulpit," he said. "I'll definitely be a preacher at some point."
He also has some new tattoos: On his neck is a gavel with a crown and the words "ALL WILL BE JUDGED." On his hand are the Ten Commandment tablets. And, on the inside of his lip, he has the letters J-C-H-C.
It stands for "Jesus Christ Hard-Core."
Hard-core for Christ: Churches cater to 'gutter punks' across U.S.
HURST – Hands clasped, elbows pulled into his chest, Clay Warren rocks to the rising call of electric guitars, pounding drums and guttural voices. The sound cascades across the crowded room, rattling the windows. Tattooed hands turn upward over mohawks and lip rings.
In front of the crowd, a tall man with a clean-shaven scalp holds a microphone. As the cacophony reaches a crescendo, he bellows: "Let me hear your battle cry!" The young men and women respond with screams.
Heavy metal guitars, lyrics about burning flesh, and the faithful crying out to bathe in Jesus' blood might trigger an exodus at traditional churches. But it packs them in every Sunday at the nondenominational Deliverance Bible Church in Hurst.
The man at the microphone is Cleetus Adrian, 32, the Moses for this motley parish. He's known simply as Pastor Cleetus. His earlobes are stretched. His arms, legs, hands and neck are covered in bright body art. And he has a metal spike below his bottom lip.
Mr. Warren, who joined the church after finding God while in a drug recovery program, said: "When people see us coming, they don't know what to think. Then when they hear us talking about the Lord, they really don't know what to think."
The brand of Sunday worship service provided by Deliverance Bible Church, like a growing number of youth-oriented worship services across North America, appeals to self-described "gutter punks," the outcasts of their generation.
Deliverance has four locations in Texas, one in Chicago, and one on the way in Seattle. Similar groups such as Rise Above Ministries in San Antonio and the Revolution Churches in Atlanta, Charlotte and New York City mean thousands of young men and women are rocking small storefront churches every Sunday.
While the movement is certainly growing, it's impossible to know exactly how many people are involved, said Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which has studied religious organizations and trends across the country for 30 years. "We can't ask these kinds of questions on a census. So calculating actual numbers is very, very difficult."
The Hurst church says it hosts an annual conference of ministries called Nation of the Underground, where thousands of Christians come to be "refilled, refreshed and released."
"In every metro area in America, there is at least one church that appeals to heavy metal fans," said Dave Travis, executive vice president of Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church-growth think tank.
"It's a subculture," he said. "As each new generation of believers gets excited about their faith, they invent new churches for their lifestyle. American Christians are very entrepreneurial in reaching young people."
The Sundance Channel is paying attention to this trend as well. It recently aired the six-part documentary titled One Punk Under God , about Jay Bakker (son of Jim Bakker) and his struggle to plant a church for outcasts in New York.
Mr. Thumma, a sociologist of religion, said that Deliverance Bible Church is part of a vast movement of individualism in American Christian churches that started several decades ago. He said U.S. Christians have a tendency to adapt their spiritual experiences to their lifestyles, whether they're gay, bikers or gutter punks.
"These congregations that have arisen around subgroups in evangelism – and what probably started with the 'Jesus people' in the late '70s to early '80s – have gotten more diverse, doing it in their own idioms and their own ways," Mr. Thumma said.
And the Internet has helped these groups band together.
"What we have here is incredible niche marketing that is more authentic to the subgroups, be they grunge, heavy metal or into body piercing," he said. "People are saying not everyone has to wear ties and jackets. And if you don't, you can still be a Christian."
Seven years ago, when Pastor Cleetus and his wife, Nichole, started the ministry, it consisted of five people in a local YMCA. Now, it has hundreds of members who meet in a strip mall, in space tucked between an upholstery store and a garage door company.
The church hosts a weekly Bible study, regular street preaching, periodic 24-hour prayers and a children's church. The members have evangelized to the homeless in Los Angeles and are raising money for clean-water systems in the Sudan. Pastor Cleetus said he knows some dentists and wants to reach out in the mid-cities by arranging free dental work for the unemployed and recovering drug addicts.
Front and center at the sermons and Bible studies is Mr. Warren, 22. He grew up in Huntsville, where he says he was in and out of rehab and in trouble with the police. Facing possible jail time for drug charges, he took his lawyer's advice and entered a faith-based recovery program.
He prayed for help quitting drugs and turning around his life around. "God reached in and touched me, and I could feel the change," he said. "I could recognize the change."
When he left the recovery program, Mr. Warren began attending prayer meetings with a friend and eventually started attending a Baptist youth group in Huntsville.
His zeal compelled him to decorate his body in spiritual messages. His first tattoo was an image of the ichthys (sometimes called the "Jesus fish") on his rib. Soon he had religious art from his ankles and wrists to his neck.
"Even before I was a Christian, I was bold," Mr. Warren said. "But when I became a Christian, God stepped that up a notch."
But he was questioned about his tattoos by youth leaders and older members of the Huntsville church, and that made him feel unwelcome. Then another friend told him about a church in Hurst with hundreds of other punks with the same religious thirst. He drove up to see for himself.
They had similar stories. One young man was in the process of becoming a Mormon when elders asked him to cut his dreadlocks.
Mr. Warren felt a sense of deep fellowship. For months, he made the seven-hour round trip between Huntsville and Hurst each weekend. "I never experienced fellowship at another church, not the same kind," he said.
He said his probation officers also saw a change in him, and they consented when he asked to move to Hurst so he could spend more time at Deliverance Bible Church.
Pastor Cleetus said some of the church's members might not be alive today if they hadn't found God. "If they weren't coming to church and if they didn't have God in their lives, who knows where they would be," he said. "A lot of these kids would be dead by now. I'd probably be dead by now."
At 6-foot-5, Pastor Cleetus is a lean but imposing figure, a tall canvas for the religious art that covers most of his visible flesh. He has two sons, 6 and 2 years old. He has had to tell his oldest boy that he isn't allowed to get a tattoo yet.
The son of a more traditional preacher, Pastor Cleetus has no certified seminary training or religious schooling. When he was in his early 20s, he would go to underground punk concerts night after night and look out upon a sea of lost faces. He felt like a shepherd gazing at his flock of black sheep.
At the time, he played in a Christian metal band. He left the band to start Deliverance Bible Church. He still sings and plays guitar during church services.
Music is an inextricable part of the hard-core Christian youth movement. Listening to bands with such names as Demon Hunter, No Innocent Victim, Our Corpse Destroyed and Inked In Blood is part of the lifestyle and bond that unifies this group.
"Everyone is passionate about music, the kind of music they listen to," Mr. Warren said. "Music fuels all of this. It's set up that way by God."
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Mr. Warren took a caravan of young Oklahomans to a pizza place in Bedford. Before eating, the group asked for prayer requests from others in the restaurant. Most of the patrons were quiet, but one man asked for a prayer for his ailing father. They linked hands, bowed their heads and asked God to assist the stranger's father with his pain. By the end of the prayer, the man was on the verge of tears. He thanked them profusely before leaving.
The next Friday night, Mr. Warren and several others traveled to Deep Ellum to preach on the streets, to try to "turn that place upside down for Jesus."
"For a long time, I thought I was going to heaven because of my goodness," Mr. Warren told a man outside a club. "But then I found out all sinners have a place in the lake of fire. Repent and believe. Turn away from your sin and be saved."
They preach to the open air, approach drunks in bars and evangelize to men and women in lines outside clubs at shows. They say they are regularly punched, yelled at and spit upon.
"Our words are not easy to hear," Pastor Cleetus said. "We aren't trying to make people feel better about themselves. We want people to feel bad because they are bad. We don't want to dance around it."
Mr. Warren intends to follow Pastor Cleetus into the ministry.
He has a day job on a demolition crew. But a year ago, he enrolled in Deliverance Bible Church's school of ministry, a one-week crash course in evangelism. "I was wondering what God wanted for me, and as soon as I heard Cleetus talking about the school of ministry, I knew this was it," he said.
Now known as Pastor Clay, he works with the children's church, adjacent to the main worship room. He dreams of planting a church in Venice Beach, Calif., where he has done street preaching. "God put it on me to go to the pulpit," he said. "I'll definitely be a preacher at some point."
He also has some new tattoos: On his neck is a gavel with a crown and the words "ALL WILL BE JUDGED." On his hand are the Ten Commandment tablets. And, on the inside of his lip, he has the letters J-C-H-C.
It stands for "Jesus Christ Hard-Core."
