Christian music or not? Christian venues or not?

This past weekend, my band was invited to play at a local festival called the NecroFlash somewhere just south of Ft Worth, TX. A little description about this festival, it lives up to it's name. It's a celebration of all things horror, zombie, undead, and of the occult; and is being held at a place called the TerrorDrome, a huge gore fest if you will. Granted, our music sounds a bit dark, the lead singer and I both came out of this type of background and we wanted to jump on this one right away. The timing and distance forced us to turn it down, but we still let the venue coordinator know we want to try again next year.

This whole chain of events prompted a question I want to pose to you guys, is this a venue that Christians need to be playing in?

Here's some of my thoughts. First, while myself and our singer came from this background, we're no longer a part of it. Sure, we're punk and metal and all things musically rock & roll, but our outlook on life as well as our message are polar opposites based on our relationships whit Christ. That being said, why play there?

While all of our members are in fact Christians, we've chosen to not label ourselves a Christian band, instead, let our message speak for itself. All our lyrics are out there online somewhere as are most of our songs, either in MP3 or video format, for all to listen to. Our music is very truthful. In "Red" we discuss the evils of pornography and the addictive road to death it leads people down. In "Stolen" we go back to Proverbs and listen to Salomon's warning to his son to stay away from the adulterous woman lest his very life be stolen from him.

Move forward to "Talitha Kum" and we hear Jesus talking to the little girl, to rise from the dead... this song's a direct answer to the death some of us have died from living in a world of addiction, myself included. In "Captivated" we talk about how God's presence and the life and love of Christ have captivated our very beings, consuming us and fulfilling every empty space that's been wiped clean after having been raised again from the dead.

"Fire..." well, it kinda speaks for itself. The consuming desire to want to be like Christ and follow him into whatever path and journey he has for us. Imagine Ezekiel, preaching to a lost generation and describing his passion and fire.

That... is the message we take with us wherever we play. We don't all have tattoos, we're not all goth looking, we don't all have long "metal" haircuts, but we make a good mixture and we each represent some, untouched, unclean and unwanted level of society where many churches simply can't go. Does it make a difference?

I think so, you see, after seeing all our lyrics, and hearing our music, the venue coordinators for the NecroFlash still invited us to play. They were willing to put us at any time slot they could to get us there but it simply wouldn't work out as we have a previous engagement.

While I love playing venues like the Door Clubs in Dallas, Plano and Ft worth, my desire is to play the bars, and festivals that other ministries don't go to. I want to eventually play the Family Values Tour, Lalapalooza,  or the Van's Warped tour. These are my people. These are the kids I grew up with, the lost souls, forgotten and written off simply because they're different.

Each generation has them. The 50's wrote off the hippies, the hippies wrote off the Gen-X'ers and so on. Find me one generation that has absolutely zero value in Christ's eyes and I'll show you someone with zero vision for the church and zero love for those that God loves.

Johnny Z