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"In Budapest while we were performing a guy jumped up on stage and a knife fell out of his pocket," says the band's founder, Pierce. "A fight nearly broke out, but people were still coming up to receive Christ."
Pierce, who grew up in the US, founded the band in 1985 while working with Youth With a Mission in Amsterdam. In the early days, the band was so bad that a friend said, "When you play, it's no longer music." The name stuck. Experience and personnel changes have made No Longer Music into a group that can rock with the best of them, but Pierce is determined to continue rocking for the worst of them, playing venues that have at least two things in common: plenty of people who need the gospel, and nobody else who's sharing it with them.
"Why is that so many kids never get to hear the truth? If you go to any urban centre anywhere in the world today they're listening to the same kind of music, hearing the same kinds of lies, but very few ever get an opportunity to hear the truth," says Pierce, who was nicknamed "Rock Priest" by a Russian journalist. "We need to communicate in the language of the people we're trying to reach. We need to be cross-cultural. And when you do that in a relevant way, the gospel is a powerful message."
No Longer Music's concerts feature a no-holds-barred presentation of the claims of Christ. The lyrics, which are both sung and displayed on screen, are aggressively evangelistic, and unquestionably Christian. "I hear Christians in the music scene saying that if we cross over to the secular scene, we can't be in your face about it, we have to be pre-evangelistic," says Pierce. "I think the world is not subtle, so why should Christians be? When we don't bring the gospel into it, we take the teeth out of it."
No Longer Music was the first western band--Christian or secular--to play Siberia, and their ministry resulted in the establishment of eight new churches there. The band wanted to play Serbia, but death threats against Christian workers have made this a bad time for such a visible ministry. Instead, the band's ministry arm, Steiger International, will send workers in to help establish a youth ministry in the country. In Singapore, where religious proselytism if forbidden, the band will establish a perfectly legal fan club. "Our fans study the Bible," notes Pierce.
The band held a June 30 fundraising concert in Pierce's hometown of Minneapolis to help kick off the international tour of their new rock opera "Passion (an act of)." The show, which Pierce describes as "grunge theatre", was choreographed by a 69-year-old woman from Prague who worked with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
"We try to show a modern-day idea of what a crucifixion would be, only we use an execution with a handgun," Pierce explains. "It talks about the things people in the global youth culture care about today--they're being sacrificed to broken homes, abused sexually, and have parents who don't care about them. It talks about the problems of this generation, and Jesus is the answer to it."
The rock opera is new, but the idea behind it is an old one for Pierce: take the gospel to nontraditional audiences in nontraditional ways. "There is real power in the gospel," he concludes. "We don't have to be ashamed of Jesus. There's no place we can't take the gospel."
EPNS
Return to the M.B. Herald Vol. 35, No. 15
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