“I remember the day when the love of God landed in our town. He took all
the silent and broken hearts, fixed them up and gave them a sound.
“I remember the day when the love of God landed in our town. He took all
the silent and broken hearts, fixed them up and gave them a sound. You had almost
every different kind of kid from every different kind of social background.
Taking all the cool they had and praising God, as he spun them around. When
God came to town.”
Tose words by Gabriel Wilson are not just the lyrics to another song by
his Christian band called the “Rock N Roll Worship Circus.”
They also recount a very real time when the Holy Spirit swept into the lives
of teenagers in Wilsons hometown of Longview, Wash.
The song was birthed as Wilson began talking out loud to his band members during
a sound check one night. Although written in a matter of minutes, “Gift
of Cool” had been “brewing in me for awhile,” he says.
Justin Rossetti remembers the time Wilson cites. He was a high school teenager
at the time.
“I was brought up Catholic, but when I turned 16 years old, I wanted to
be extreme,” Rossetti notes.
He began using hardcore drugs. He also began hanging out at “rave parties,”
where youth used drugs and listened to punk bands.
Then, a small group of area youth pastors began to catch a vision for holding
their own version of “raves” two to three times a month.
“We used our worship raves as an option for the teens to come to,”
says Greg Sanders, who served as a local youth pastor during that time and currently
is a worship leader in Colorado.
“We decided we needed to get outside our walls, and we wanted to make
a genuine impact on our youth. … We loved on those kids. … Some guys came
stoned out of their mind. … Some had pink mohawks. But the churched youth
would love on them.
“The (Gift of Cool) talks about the so-called freaks who got saved …
(as they) started to fall in love with the Lord,” Sanders relates.
Sanders says he saw the lives of a couple hundred teenagers change during that
time.
“God was doing something really unique,” he says. “A lot of
lines were crossed.”
At the worship raves, football players, cheerleaders and golfers stood worshiping
God in song next to punk rockers and graffiti artists.
“It brought tears to my eyes,” says Todd Anderson, youth pastor at
a Christian church in Longview. “They didnt care what their friends
thought of them.”
Rossetti says curiosity and love of raves prompted him to attend one of the
worship events in early 2000.
“One night, my friends invited me to go to hear the Rock N Roll
Worship Circus with one of the best headliner punk bands, so I went,”
he recalls. “There were tons of people my age that I had seen around town.
Then, the Worship Circus got up and prayed and started (singing) worship songs,
and everyone was raising their hands. … Something inside me broke open.”
A few days later, Rossetti says he met with a friend from school who asked
if he was saved.
“She put it so simply – if I believed there was a God and (that)
he forgave me of my sins, I should ask him to be in charge of my life,”
he says.
That night, Rossetti says he asked God to make himself real as he went to bed.
“If Jesus was real, I wanted to believe in him,” Rossetti says. “I
asked him to show himself to me. I told him I wanted to believe in him, but
I didnt. I asked him to forgive me of my sins and wash me clean. I asked
him to come into my heart.”
Rossetti says his prayer was answered.
As if on a film projector, he says he could see his life crashing before him
with smoke and fire.
“I was freaked out,” he says.
Then, Rossetti says he heard a calming voice speak the words of John 1:1 –
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through
me.”
The next day, Rossetti met with Sanders and gave his life to Christ. “I
went home and threw away all the drugs and alcohol in my room,” Rossetti
says. “I threw away a stack of pornography and, from then on, served God.”
In the song, the “gift of cool” means any type of influence a teen
has, whether he or she is a skater, punk rocker or a golfer, Wilson explains.
“It was amazing to see that all these different stereotypes were using
their gift of cool to influence their peers to worship (and) to bring others
to Christ,” he says of the rave days in Longview.
Popular kids also were among those getting saved then, Wilson says. “The
very best musicians in the town were getting saved, and going to a drinking
party was uncool. … The raves were packed with worshiping teens.”
It was exciting, Anderson adds. “All of a sudden all the kids who wanted
to be rock stars now wanted to be worship leaders,” he notes. “They
came crying to the altar. All of a sudden. Jesus was the cool thing.”
(BP)
(For information on The Rock N Roll Worship Circus, visit www.worshipcircus.com)