What's up with the son of Jim and TammyFaye. i was at a friends house watching the boob-tube last night and saw a wierd promo for a new show called One Punk Under God.

looked kinda interesting

It's a miniseries on cable, which means i won't see it. There's a feature on Jay, and the miniseries on MSNBC. Clickithere: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16154770/


_________________
The humble improve....

-Wynton Marsalis

Hi, I know he (their son) has his own ministry and he reaches out to people who
may not typically feel welcome in the church. I think his ministry was called Resurection
something. There are web articles available online.
Oceanwaves 8)

One Punk reveals an unlikely minister
PTL upbringing gives Jay Bakker an unconventional view of religion

McClatchy Newspapers/December 12, 2006
By Aaron Barnhart
For Jay Bakker, the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, loving God meant always having to say you were sorry.

"I had this idea of an angry God, that everything I did was bad and wrong," he says about his childhood, which until the age of 13 was spent living, literally, in a theme park, Heritage USA, built by the millions of dollars the Bakkers raised through their Praise the Lord ministry.

Despite his seemingly idyllic upbringing, "I thought I was losing my salvation," Bakker says. Those feelings of guilt only intensified in 1987, when a sex and accounting fraud scandal brought the PTL empire crashing down.

Eventually his parents would divorce, Jim Bakker would go to prison and Jay would spend his teen years adrift in a haze of drugs and alcohol.

Now rehabilitated and married, Jay Bakker, who turns 31 later this month, is a minister of the Gospel himself. Tattooed, pierced, unordained, unshaven and unconventional, Bakker preaches out of storefronts to mostly 20- and 30-somethings who, like him, find the old-time religion has nothing to say to them.

And like his father, Bakker is on TV, though only for a few weeks. One Punk Under God, a documentary about his life, airs for six weeks beginning at 8 tonight on the Sundance Channel.

Q: What was it like growing up inside Heritage USA, a theme park with a 500-room hotel?

A: My life was very guarded, but we had a lot of fun at Heritage, too. We'd run all around playing cops and robbers. Some little old lady would come around the corner, and we'd be like, "Freeze! Miami vice!"

Q: You don't seem to have a lot of traumatic memories of that time.

A: I have traumatic memories of when we lost PTL.

But, you know, I was heavy as a kid. I got made fun of a lot. That was hard.

There were kids who said stuff. There was this (DJ) who would always make fun of my mom on morning radio.

There were still tough times. I got in trouble, got punished, spanked. I had to go pick my own switch once.

Q: What was that year like for you, the year it came apart?

A: I was losing my friends. I wasn't able to go back to school. I wasn't able to play with some of my friends because their parents worked for my parents, and Jerry Falwell (who was brought in to run the church) didn't want anybody to be seen with the Bakkers.

We went to live in Gatlinburg, Tenn. My dad owned that house in Gatlinburg. He owned the parsonage. Jerry Falwell kicked us out. They had the (Heritage) security guards make sure we didn't take anything out. I remember sitting in my room as a little kid crying because I couldn't stay in my house anymore. We were forced to leave, and I couldn't understand why.

I saw my dad cry for the first time. He was on the phone with Jerry Falwell, and he was saying, "I'm only asking for one thing. Take care of the partners. Just make sure you take care of the people." And he was bawling, and that scared the daylights out of me. My dad always had a heart for people, but I never knew how much.

Q: When you look at other TV evangelists, was your father like them or not?

A: Well, in some ways he was, and in other ways he wasn't. I mean, (there were) the constant telethons because you have to pay television bills and staff bills. But if you put his show next to Christian television today, there weren't a lot of gold and white and red Las Vegas-looking sets. It was, like, stucco and a couch (on the set). My mom did shows on penile implants and did interviews with people who were dying of AIDS in the 1980s when nobody was. They did comedy. They had a live band. It was almost like Johnny Carson.

Q: Your dad also hopped off the Pat Robertson-Jerry Falwell political express.

A: He did. I remember he was asked by George (H.W.) Bush to be mentioned because he had a lot of pull at the time. And he was like, "No." People were so fed up with all that stuff (preachers in politics) that a lot of people's anger was pushed toward my family. But they weren't involved in politics.

Q: I would think after all you went through, the one occupation you would cross off your career list would be "minister."

A: See, me and my dad and my mom, we've all had our downfalls and our conflicts, but my dad instilled in me to help people. I remember after PTL fell, he took me to the toy store and said, "I want you to pick out a bunch of toys. They're not for you." We went and spent Christmas with this really poor family. It made a huge impact on me. When I realized what grace meant — the unconditional gift, the undeserved favor, the reflection of God in our lives, and that God loved me no matter who I was or what I'd done — I realized I was going to be a minister.
Oceanwaves

"
The Punk-Christian Son of a Preacher Man
New York Times Magazine/January 23, 2005
By John Leland
In an Atlanta coffeehouse one night last summer, Jay Bakker squinted through patchy stage lights and asked for prayer requests. It was the regular Wednesday-night Bible study for Revolution Ministries, and about 30 people, most of them in their 20's, sat at scattered tables and listened. Bakker wore green Vans, jeans, a Johnny Cash belt buckle and a black Social Distortion T-shirt, revealing arms tattooed to the wrists. A silver ring protruded through his lower lip, and black discs stretched both ear lobes. ''My friend Mitch got shot in the face and is in critical condition,'' one waifish young man with choppy brown hair said. ''I found out he pushed someone, and the guy shot him.''

Bakker, whose full name is Jamie Charles Bakker, acknowledged the prayer request and added one of his own, for his mother, whose cancer had spread from her colon to her lungs and throat. At 29, he still faintly recalls the cherubic kid who appeared almost from birth with his parents, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, on their syndicated television show, ''The PTL Club,'' then disappeared during the family's sexual and legal scandals in the 1980's. ''We're just trying to love people with no agenda,'' he told the group. ''That's hard, to be a Christian and have no agenda, and it's hard for people to think of a Christian with no agenda.''

This was an important night for the ministry, he announced. The Masquerade, a multistory rock club, had invited them to hold their weekly services there, with cocktail waitresses and a full bar. Though the club is secular, its three levels are called Heaven, Purgatory and Hell. Bakker said that Revolution's service would start on the middle level, Purgatory, but that if they drew enough people, they could move downstairs to Hell. He spoke without rhetorical flourish, moving the lesson informally from an Alanis Morissette lyric to the Old Testament story of Abraham, apologizing when he felt he was getting too preachy. A booth in the back sold T-shirts and buttons with the ministry's slogan, ''Religion Kills.''

''Maybe this is what the postmodern church is supposed to look like,'' he said. ''For the first time I feel we're having some peace in this, we're starting a church where there is no church. We're not the first to do this, but for Revolution, it's a big step.''

It was a big step for Bakker as well. He was 2 when his parents started Heritage USA, a 2,000-plus-acre Christian theme park, and 11 when the family's empire crumbled amid revelations that his father had had sex with a staff member named Jessica Hahn. In the years since, Jay Bakker has been a teenage alcoholic, a skate punk, a Christian pariah, a high-school dropout, a Gap employee and, for a while, a singer in a Social Distortion cover band. He wears this journey on his sleeves, literally: the tattoo on one wrist reads ''Broken''; on the other, ''Outcast.''

Revolution, which he founded with two friends in 1994, is his response to the family legacy. His father, who served five years in prison for defrauding investors, is now back on cable television with ''The Jim Bakker Show,'' a low-budget production taped in Branson, Mo. His mother, who has become something of a gay icon, resurfaced in 2003 on the high-camp reality series ''The Surreal Life,'' bonding with Vanilla Ice and the porn actor Ron Jeremy. Bakker's older sister, Tammy Sue, has battled depression and is now a singer and minister based in North Carolina. After the Bible study, as Bakker considered his young congregation, he weighed the tribulations of growing up Bakker. ''I think it opens more doors than it closes,'' he told me of the family name. ''The younger people don't really know who my family is. Or they know my mom was on 'Surreal Life.' They know her from that, not 'PTL.' The older people know me from the jokes on 'Saturday Night Live.' A lot of them were very standoffish at the beginning. But they know that I haven't ever asked them for anything or tried to get anything from them. So there's a lot of having to prove myself to certain groups of folks. But that's O.K. I understand.''

Bethra Szumski, 33, a tattoo artist, said she came to Revolution in 2002 with a low opinion of Christians, whom she found judgmental. She told me she believed in God, not in church or religion. But she was drawn to Bakker because he was wrestling with his own problems and because he did not judge her. ''Under my own resources, I'm incredibly ineffective to do anything except self-destruct,'' she said. ''He said salvation wasn't anything I could find on my own. Jesus had atoned for me.'' At Revolution, she said, the teaching never strayed far from this core idea of grace. ''We hear that a lot, it's really repetitive, but I need to hear that every single week.''

Revolution is one of several thousand alternative ministries that have emerged in the last decade, meeting in warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs, private homes or other spaces, in a generational rumble to rebrand the faith outside of what we think of as church. To travel among them is to feel returned to the alternative-rock scene of 15 years ago, just before Nirvana and Lollapalooza put it on the map. Instead of criticizing major record labels, these ministries criticize megachurches; instead of flattening the status of the rock star, they flatten the status of the pastor. They cluster in cells rather than in denominations or arenas, and connect through D.I.Y. zines online. They are a counterculture on two fronts: at odds with both their secular peers and conventional churches.

''We've all been damaged by fundamentalism or the traditional church,'' said Bakker's assistant pastor, Matt DeBenedictis, who came to Revolution after being a roadie for various rock bands, Christian and secular. ''I know so many people who won't call themselves Christians but are following God and Jesus -- who walked away from seminary or Christian rock bands, and who feel completely outcast.''

On a sluggish afternoon at an Atlanta strip mall, I asked Bakker about the influence of punk rock in his ministry. We were in a shop called Timeless Tattoo, where Bakker was getting an afternoon's worth of minor touch-ups. Though the shop has no religious affiliation, a couple of the staff artists play in Christian punk bands; another had played with Bakker in the Creeps, their Social Distortion cover band. Bakker took several passes at the punk question, never mentioning music. ''Those are the people that reached out to me when the Christian world rejected me and my family,'' he said of the punks and skaters. ''That's something about punk-rock ethics. Your friends have your back. We share our lives together, and there's a loyalty there.''

In contrast to his father, who larded his show-biz patina thick, Bakker is unpolished and self-effacing. He has mild dyslexia, which makes it hard for him to write, and as a child he suffered from an eating disorder. Recently he stopped taking the antidepressant Paxil, which had caused him to gain weight, and started taking a little Zoloft instead. ''We are who we are, and that's got a lot to do with punk,'' he said. ''We try not to live a lie or have a false perception of ourselves, that we're holier or better than other people. We don't try to live up to the standards of mainline Christian society and the pressures they put on you.''

He talks of punk now as a mixed blessing. Some of his younger friends, he said, think it's punk to use heroin or play anarchist, as long as their parents are supporting them. But he also sees in punk the integrity of the misfit or the wounded, a recurring theme in both his conversation and his ministry. Like their pastor, the members of Revolution share a generational consciousness of their hurts: of family dysfunction or drugs or traumatic church experiences. ''We're seekers of truth, really,'' he said. ''I think punk rock has something to do with that. We're looking for truth, looking for answers. We're disillusioned with the way the system works, and we want to see the system changed. I don't want anarchy, but I want a new system, one that runs and works and is for the people.''

As a child, Bakker said, he thought of his father as ''a businessman slash entertainer'' and of his own life as unreal. His closest friends were his security guards, and even they left him when the ministry crashed. ''I've had so many of my heroes in grace slam my parents, or not be associated with me because of my parents,'' he told me. We were at a suburban coffee shop near the home he shares with his wife, Amanda, a pretty, wary woman with dyed red hair and a tattoo of Jesus on one arm. As a recovering smoker and alcoholic, Bakker doesn't smoke cigarettes or drink, but he usually carries a cigar with him.

His biography, which forms the narrative center of his ministry, is an object lesson in what Ryan Dobson, the heavily tattooed son of James Dobson, founder of the conservative group Focus on the Family, calls ''the Christian tendency to shoot our wounded.'' When Jim Bakker went to prison, the family became objects of public rebuke in the televangelist world they helped create, and a punch line for comedians everywhere. Like Elvis Presley, the Bakkers were poor rich people, and when they fell, their son's adolescence crashed on top of him.

''Jamie Charles got on drugs really bad, he was drinking real bad,'' his mother told me the first night I met her at the Masquerade. ''When we lost 'PTL,' people were not only mean to us, they treated our children terrible. And I thought, How can adults treat little kids so bad? The sadness of it was what happened to our children.''

On a 1992 visit to prison, when Bakker was 16, he had to tell his father that Tammy was leaving him for a family friend named Roe Messner, the architect of Heritage USA. When he was 18 and not yet sober, he briefly attended a school for aspiring pastors, where he clashed with the other students. ''He had jet black hair, Doc Martens, and he was going into a dorm with these preppy Christian kids,'' said Kelli Miller-Myus, a classmate of Bakker's there. She invited him to leave the school and help her and another friend, Michael Wall, start an alternative ministry among the skateboarders and punk rockers of Phoenix. Bakker jumped at the offer. Like missionaries in a foreign country, they saw these untapped tribes as a ''mission field,'' a native culture more appealing than the one the school was trying to impose. ''I always felt drawn to them,'' Bakker said. ''And they didn't seem to have a reason to need God. They had plenty of reasons to reject God, but they didn't have any reason to want God, especially Christ. So I felt those people needed and deserved to be loved and cared for.''

His tattoo habit dates from this period and has become a connective strand in his family life. He got his first, ''Revolution,'' when he was 18; his father did not approve, he said, because ''it reminded him of prison.'' His mother became interested through her son, though. Last fall, when I met Tammy Faye, she had just administered her first tattoo, on one of Jay's friends. ''I thought I was going to throw up,'' she said, excitedly. ''I was so scared that I was going to hurt him. I was shaking so bad the cross was crooked, and I straightened it out when I calmed down a little bit. And I signed it, 'TF.' ''

Running through Jay Bakker's conversation are twined themes of grace and family. His 2001 autobiography, ''Son of a Preacher Man: My Search for Grace in the Shadows,'' is largely a spirited defense of his father and a rebuke of Jerry Falwell, who took control of ''PTL'' after the Bakker family scandal. Bakker speaks about his own troubles as injuries inflicted upon his family by Christians and the church. ''What Revolution's doing -- that all came out of what we went through,'' he said.

The insults his family endured give his ministry identity and narrative. ''I don't know if I ever would have learned about God's grace,'' he said. ''My dad forgives them all. For me, I still struggle. There are times I pray for those folks, but there are times I'm angry. But I've got to forgive them.''

His mother's resurgence might seem like a mixed inheritance -- both a kitsch rehash of the family's humiliations and a mascaraed triumph over them. In the 2000 documentary ''The Eyes of Tammy Faye,'' narrated by the transgendered singer RuPaul, she refuses to be photographed without her flytrap eyelashes, saying: ''Without my eyelashes, I wouldn't be Tammy Faye. I don't know who I'd be, but I wouldn't be me.'' Bakker says of his mother: ''She does funny, campy stuff, but it gets people. She's a different type of minister. She's where Jesus would be. People condemned her, and she never changed. That's been a strong encourager to me to be myself.''

Where his father punctuated every broadcast with a signature ''God loves you, he really does,'' Bakker offers a similar message in a different language. ''We're not about issues,'' he said. ''We don't get on bandwagons. In the church today, the only two things that matter are abortion and homosexuality.'' He shied away from taking a position on either of these issues. ''I'm not saying something's right, something's wrong,'' he said. ''I don't have a right to judge. God's called us to love people no matter who they are or what they've done. . . . You can't change people. You can for a little while, but eventually they'll rebel or be hurt or realize what's going on. I'm not in that rat race. I'm just in the game to say, 'This is who Jesus is, he loves you for who you are and hopefully you see that in my life and you see the positive things that are coming from it.'''

Stu Damron is one of the people drawn to Bakker's ministry. He introduced himself to me at the coffeehouse Bible study as ''the only conservative Republican'' in the group. At 49, a Southern Baptist minister, he has neither tattoos nor an interest in punk rock. His college-age son led him to Bakker and Revolution. ''What I saw him doing was what I had not seen, which is just loving people,'' Damron said. ''In my Southern Baptist church I said that but didn't mean it. And didn't know how.''

For opening night at the rock club Masquerade, Bakker's mother drove down from North Carolina to preach at the service. She wore a pink leather jacket and slacks, and used a knockoff Louis Vuitton note pad. After five months of chemotherapy, her cancer is in remission. Bakker buzzed anxiously around her, a quiet son in the presence of a mother who is used to a lot of attention. The crowd was large enough that they had been bumped up from Purgatory to Heaven, a larger room. Revolution's tattooed regulars mingled with old ''PTL'' fans and members of Tammy's considerable gay following. ''The gay community is so open to my mother,'' Bakker said. ''She's really helped vindicate this family in a way that I don't think she realizes, and I don't think my dad would ever expect.''

Her sermon began with an off-color joke about suicide and moved easily between campy self-denigration and a motherly message of grace, all punctuated by her staccato laugh. ''I was hurt by our society, by the church, by Christians,'' she said. ''I was humiliated in front of the world. Can you imagine what it's like to walk by a drugstore and you're on the cover of every single magazine except Bride's -- ha, ha, ha!''

In the dim light of the rock club, she was both a curiosity and that generic totem of the current television age, a Survivor. Her sermon, which wove family stories among the Ten Commandments, ended with an auction and a barbecue. The crowd bid on Tammy Faye's shoes, cosmetics and other miscellany. News cameras and a documentary-film crew recorded the action. For Jay Bakker, it was all a part of his ministry's work. ''So much of what we do is just hanging out with people,'' he said. ''Some people wouldn't consider it ministry, because we're not trying to evangelize. I tell people that God knows we'll fail.''

At the height of their success, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker reached more than 13 million people a week through their own satellite network, and Heritage USA claimed to be the third-biggest theme park in the country. By comparison, Revolution draws a weekly attendance in the dozens, mainly people who have bounced around churches or religious schools. If it grows to 200 people, Bakker said, he'll ask part to split off and form another ministry. His father's desire for growth, he said, and the need for money to support that growth, ultimately undid him. ''I don't want to get too big,'' he said. His ministry raises its budget of just over $90,000 a year, which includes Bakker's and DeBenedictis's salaries, through its Web site, which sells buttons, T-shirts and CD's of the weekly services, and also solicits donations. Bakker does not pass the plate at services. ''For me, this feels like a lonely place, and hard,'' he said.

During one of our conversations, I asked Bakker what he had learned from his father, and he said that he always made sure the bands that played for the ministry were fed and paid. This seemed a minor inheritance, but when I thought about it, one that was well suited to his ministry. There are worse things to remember than treating people well. At the Masquerade, he closed the service with an invitation to come back next week and a reminder to tip the bar staff. And then the D.J. took over, filling Heaven with his transcendent noise.


To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here."

This article and the prior one were copied from Rick Ross' website
http://www.rickross.com

Oceanwaves (my opinions do not necessarily coincide with Rick Ross) 8)

8)

"Bakkers' son has a ministry of his own



Jamie "Jay" Bakker preaches to a vastly different group of followers

Enquirer.com/October 16, 1999
By Greg Barrett
Atlanta -- When he drops to his knees at night, when it's just him and God in the quiet before sleep, Jamie Charles "Jay" Bakker refers to Him as "Dad." It just feels right. Far more personal than, say, "Lord" or "Our Father who art in heaven...."

"Seems to make sense," he says, then shrugs. "I mean that's who He is, you know."

This intimacy defines the gospel according to Mr. Bakker, whose informal theology and non-denominational Revolution church is as much about matchmaking as ministry. "I want you to fall in looove with Jesus," he stresses to a dimly lit room crowded with 32 rapt listeners, many of whom resemble Mr. Bakker - dark clothing, multiple tattoos, pierced ears and lips and eyebrows.

"I want you to have an intimate relationship with Jesus, to know Jesus on a personal level ... to feel the illogical, unconditional love that Jesus Christ offers all of us."

Preaching from the upstairs floor of a two-story brownstone here, in the shadow of downtown high-rises, two blocks from a strip joint, is the only son of Jim and Tammy Faye, charismatic leaders of the now-defunct PTL (Praise the Lord) television ministry - he of the slight build and round cherub face; she of the long eyelashes and bouffant hair.

But Jay Bakker's seven-month-old ministry is vastly different from the pew-and-pulpit church of his youth. This is coffeehouse evangelism, a casual introduction to God that Bakker attempts to yoke to salvation. Seed planting, he calls it.

"God will meet these kids wherever they are at in life," says Mr. Bakker, who at 23 is a shade younger than many of his charges. "If they will just accept God's love, embrace it, it will change them from the inside. It is the message for the lost."

MTV called Mr. Bakker this fall for an interview. So did Nightline, Dateline and the Today show, Newsweek and Time magazines. When a former prince of conservative Christianity re-emerges in the public eye looking like a punk rocker and preaching a hip brand of gospel to a motley flock, "it's a sizzling story," says Bakker family spokesman David Brokaw, unintentionally selling the story while deflecting interview requests. "He just wants to be left alone with his work."

Yet, in an effort to reach his ministry's target ("punks, travelers, skins, goth, homosexuals, ravers, homeless, straightedge, etc.," says a Revolution flier), Mr. Bakker agreed to an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. The Sept. 16 story stirred attention in the general media with this gem gleaned from the last paragraph: "I dropped out of high school. I can barely write. I'm white trash. I wear leather bracelets and tattoos. But God has given me a gift - to relate to people and see the common sense of the Bible."

Versions of the quote showed up in newspapers from Los Angeles to Detroit to London. Seeing this, Mr. Bakker cringed. "Everyone is printing that I can't write, but they don't say why. They don't say that I'm dyslexic."

Reading from Galatians during a Bible study in October, he makes no effort to hide the genetic flaw that frequently causes letters and numbers to appear flip-flopped: "But when Peter came to, to ... OK, help me here."

"Antioch," someone hollers.

"Thank you. See, I would've said Ant-chio"

A troubled teen-ager
Unlike Jim Bakker, who has divorced, remarried and begun a new ministry in Charlotte, N.C., Jay Bakker typically dodges attention. During his father's fall from grace, reporters cast the first stones: Jim Bakker admitted to an extramarital tryst with church secretary Jessica Hahn only after The Charlotte Observer reported it in 1987; two years later he was convicted on 24 counts of fraud for bilking PTL supporters of $158 million.

The night after Jim Bakker was sentenced to federal prison (45 years, later reduced on appeals to 41/2), his choirboy 13-year-old son began drinking alcohol.

For nearly a year, Jay and older sister Tammy Sue, now married with two children and helping with her father's ministry, watched in horror as late-night talk shows and TV comics jabbed shticks at their wounds. "This family was literally destroyed ... and everyone was laughing," says Mr. Brokaw, a Los Angeles-based spokesman hired by Jim Bakker following Mr. Bakker's release from prison in 1994.

The first time Jay spent an entire day alone with his dad was only after his father was incarcerated, recalls Jim Bakker in his 1996 tell-all I Was Wrong . By then Jay was 15 and drinking excessively, taking LSD, smoking marijuana and running with skateboarders and punk rockers.

Even after graduating from a Bible school in Arizona and starting the Phoenix branch of Revolution in 1994 with classmate Mike Wall, Jay was drinking heavily. He moved to Atlanta in 1996 where he met his wife, Amanda Moses, and moved in with a childhood friend, the Rev. Donnie Earl Paulk, who has an outreach ministry similar to his.

Mr. Paulk, 26, also the son of a preacher, would sit with Mr. Bakker in nightclubs while Mr. Bakker got drunk. He'd listen but never criticize. Today, Mr. Bakker credits Mr. Paulk with having the greatest influence on his spiritual development.

"He taught me that God's love is unconditional," recalls Mr. Bakker, who felt so guilty about his drinking that he once believed God hated him. "If sins could keep us out of heaven, no one would go to heaven. What God wants from us is a relationship."

Disciple to the troubled
Right now the prodigal son of the PTL is sipping orange-carrot juice and reading from the New Testament, holding his Bible under the ominous green glare of a lone lamp. Others at his weekly Bible study drink soda, juice or bottled water, though from their comments it appears many are acquainted with a stronger brew.

"For when I tried to keep the law, I realized I could never earn God's approval. So I died to the law so that I might live for God," Mr. Bakker says, reading from Galatians, then looking up to expound.

"You see, we can never earn our way into heaven. If you believe you can earn salvation then you are saying Jesus died in vain. We are all going to sin, every one of us; it is in our nature. ... That is why Jesus died on the cross for us, for you, for our sins."

The mood is carefully manipulated: low lights, lava lamp, bean bag chairs, hand-me-down couches, heavy-metal rock posters, black and red Revolution banner with skull and crossbones. "It just seems cool," explains Mr. Bakker, who is wearing baggy dress slacks with a chain attached to his wallet and belt loop, dark T-shirt, canvas Converse shoes, long sideburns. The look of the nonconformist.

There's something about Mr. Bakker that draws an unlikely crowd to the Bible - his relative fame, benevolent message, life experience, something. The cavernous room at the Mount Paran Safehouse, a mall of inner-city social services that doubles as his church, is full. Word-of-mouth keeps it this way every Tuesday for his Bible study, even on this night when gusts send a cold rain horizontal.

Professional body piercer Justin Green, 29, a heavily tattooed Revolution regular who told the room, "I love God totally, but I still want to drink," is most comfortable here. So are his friends.

"Instead of a (conventional) church, this is the place I bring people from the (tattoo) parlor who are going to church for the first time," he says. "This isn't as intimidating for them. ... It's a beginning."


To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here."

(last article from those found about Jamie (Jay) Baker from http://www.rickross.com)
There are pobably a lot more articles about him on the web.

Oceanwaves