High On Religion High School, College Students Sing And Swoon At Highly Charged Prayer Services

At 7 sharp, the band cranks up the hard rock, and the room starts to throb.

The place is jammed with kids in overalls, wispy goatees and scary-looking tattoos. Soon they’re singing, dancing and praying themselves into a frenzy.

And before long more than a few of them are lying in the aisles, out cold for Jesus.

This is First Assembly of God Church in Marysville, Wash., where 500 people, most in their teens and early 20s, come every Wednesday night to get right with God and be part of a Pentecostal phenomenon of faith healing and being “slain in the spirit” - a sort of charismatic swooning.

At a time when the experts are calling the younger generation cynical, blase and materialistic, teens are coming from all over Western Washington and beyond for charismatic prayer services every Wednesday and Thursday evening at First Assembly.

They come to this small town 25 miles north of Seattle to praise God with youthful enthusiasm and to marvel that this is one place where you don’t have to do drugs to get high.

In the five years since Youth Pastor Benny Perez has been stirring up what he calls his “lethal army for God,” attendance here has grown from 15 kids “who were spiritually dead” to this standing-room-only crowd of spirit-stricken worshipers.

With 500 on Wednesdays and 200 at the Thursday service for high school and college students, the youth worshipers roughly equal First Assembly’s core membership of 700.

Perez’s success is the buzz of Christians all over.

Two national Christian magazines have written articles, and Perez says Time magazine has approached him for a story.

What’s behind all this zeal for God and Benny Perez?

“Revival has broken out!” Perez shouts, explaining it to his congregants. They second that by punching the air with their fists and shrieking “Yeah!” and “Amen!” and “Praise God!”

Before the service, Perez warms up about 100 of his most faithful with what he calls “warfare prayer.” They gather in a back room and join hands for what starts as quiet reflection.

Soon it’s like being in the midst of a beehive. The whispered prayers escalate into a deafening babble of the unknown tongues that mark charismatic worship.

Many youngsters pace the length of the room, heads bowed, oblivious to the din about them and mumbling the words they say God puts in their mouths.

Perez says the spirit that causes these kids to speak in tongues brings them to First Assembly.

The kids say they come because Perez speaks to the temptations they’re fighting - alcohol, gangs, drugs and premature pregnancies.

Many say they’re from troubled and abusive families. A 14-year-old says her father is in prison. A 13-year-old says she brought her older sister tonight to be saved.

“I influenced her by telling her how cool this is,” she says.

“It’s changed my life,” says Rashell Turner, 14, of Lake Stevens, Wash. “I used to drink.

“And when my neighbors first asked me to come, I thought, ‘I don’t belong here.’ But Pastor Benny laid his hands on me, and I felt no matter what I did, God forgives me.”

Rashell found herself speaking in tongues for the first time two weeks ago.

“I was just on fire,” she says. “I went home and started preaching to my grandparents, I was so on fire.”

Angel Ver Heul, 12, of Lake Stevens says she was born with a heart murmur, “and God healed me.”

“There’s a lot of healing here with a preacher like Pastor Benny,” says David Talamantez, 19. “I’ve been delivered from a lot of different past worries.

“I’ve wanted to commit suicide before, and I’ve been delivered. I’m safe here.”

This may look like “a lot of teenage emotion,” Perez says, “but it’s really the authentic power of God.”

Perez, a slight 32-year-old with a thin goatee like so many in his audience, had his own emotional encounter with God.

He was 21 and planning to become an accountant.

“I didn’t want to be a preacher,” he says. “I told my mother I didn’t want to be poor and I didn’t want to be persecuted.

“I was going to have a beautiful wife, a white picket fence, a dog named Spot and 2.5 kids like everybody else.”

But at a youth retreat on a California beach, he says, “God began to deal with my heart. There was no music, no preacher preaching, no beautiful sunset.

“One of my friends and I knelt on the beach and I said, ‘God, I want you to do what you want with my life.”’

After that, he says, his friends and his mother had revelations in which God told them he should attend Bible school and become a pastor.

Perez says he’s popular with the kids because he “spends mega-amounts of time with them.

“I talk to them about their problems and their friends’ problems, like drugs, alcohol, girls getting pregnant, partying, depression and kids wanting to kill themselves.

“I don’t talk to them in theological terms. I talk to them in real terms.

“I ask them how does playing pingpong and Foosball all day change your life? That’s all they were doing. That won’t change them. But God will change them.”