Down With J.C.

In the movie Saved!, a satire of evangelical teens at a Christian high school, there’s a scene that brilliantly captures just how lame most efforts are to spin Christianity as hip and relevant for kids. “Let’s get our Christ on!” chirps Pastor Skip, an enthusiastic cheerleader for God played by Martin Donovan, somersaulting onstage during a pep rally for the Big Guy Upstairs. “Let’s kick it Jesus-style!”

For all his hangin’-with-my-homies shtick, the rappin’ pastor might as well be wearing a hemp necklace and a backwards ball cap, straddling a turned-around chair to drop some knowledge on the kids—a kind of cheeseball dorkery anyone who ’s ever been to a Young Life meeting knows all too well. It’s even more painfully evident in the music industry, where Christian rock bands have typically been regarded by the secular world with a sneer. After all, rock ’n’ roll—torchbearer of all things dark, dirty and wayward—is the devil’s music, and everyone knows he writes better hooks.

But across the country, churches, outreach centers and youth groups are looking for ways to meet teens on their level. They hope to make Christianity more palatable by portraying it as edgy—as cool as the video games and rock bands vying for their attention.

It’s a tough task. Turning a child on to faith is as easy as convincing him or her of Santa Claus. But teenagers? They’re a notoriously prickly, fickle bunch. They’re cliquish, fad-obsessed, hormonally challenged and skeptical, and their bullshit radar is perhaps never more heightened than at this delicate age. Hey, even if everybody’s doing it—Christianity is practiced by more than a third of the world’s population—it takes more than peer pressure to get a teenager to give up Halo 3for John 3:16. Christianity may be your ticket to salvation and life everlasting, but one thing it’s never been is cool.

None of this seems lost on Rocketown, the downtown all-ages club where free expression coexists—sometimes uneasily—with spiritual aims. Over the past four years, the Sixth Avenue music venue/skate park/coffee bar has managed to navigate the tricky terrain of faith-based outreach for disenfranchised teens.

Founded by contemporary Christian singer-songwriter Michael W. Smith in 1994, Rocketown began in Franklin as a 300-capacity coffee shop and teen center. It operated there for three years, booking mainly Christian bands, but it had difficulty attracting secular crowds—not surprising when you consider that nearly all the Christian labels in the country are located in affluent Williamson County.

Missionaries, though, aren’t exactly in the business of preaching to the choir. In 2003, the operation moved to downtown Nashville, to a 40,000-square-foot renovated warehouse at 401 Sixth Ave. S. In a post-Columbine world—Smith had performed and been deeply moved at one of the school’s memorial services in Littleton in 1999—the center made connecting with disconnected inner-city kids its main priority.

Having a 13,000-square-foot skate park—the largest indoor park in the state, and one of the 10 or 15 largest in the country—does not hurt. And the corner of Sixth Avenue and Shirley Street has proved an ideal central location. Kids from Nashville School of the Arts, Meigs Magnet School, Hume Fogg and MLK off Charlotte are all under three miles away; Hume Fogg students can easily walk the few blocks over, while others get bussed in or dropped off by parents.

But proximity alone is hardly a come-to-Jesus motivator. To reach teens who would be driven off screaming by Pastor Skip, Rocketown would have to create a place where they would actually want to hang out. It would have to book finger-on-the-pulse bands they’d actually want to hear—emo, screamo, hardcore, metal—many of which would not share the club’s Christian values. It would have to seem exciting first and enriching second, even if that meant friction between the club’s mission and its means. If such a thing were even possible for a perceived God squad, it would have to become, in the universal parlance of teens, cool.

“I don’t know if we’re making [Christianity] cooler,” says Ben Cissell, the center’s 32-year-old outreach director, the pastor of Rocketown. “But maybe we’re tearing down stereotypes. Yeah, I don’t know if we’re making it cooler, ’cause I’m pretty lame.” He laughs. “But hopefully we’re changing the perception of what a Christian should be.”

Rocketown doesn’t hide its faith-based agenda—“Culturally Relevant, Eternally Significant” is its slogan—but the club doesn’t hit you over the head with it, either. Pull up to the venue, located just across the street from a towing company and industrial warehouses, and it wouldn’t occur to you that this brick building with a graffiti-splattered wall has a higher agenda. Outside, a handful of longhaired skater kids in baggy clothes with skateboards in tow loiter around. A few puff on cigarettes. A metal garbage can in the parking lot reads, “Punch a Baby.”