Extreme devotion

It's not the Colts that Clint Lathrop is cheering as he hurls himself to his feet in front of a crowd of 44,000 at the Indianapolis RCA Dome. The high school sophomore and cross-country runner is screaming "I want the cross!"

Although Clint enjoys his church Bible study, he is more shy than showy when it comes to religion. And though friends know him to take a risk now and then, it isn't on a dare that the teenager declares himself unequivocally for God.

"I had gotten on the wrong path," Clint, of suburban Indianapolis, says the next day. "I had put myself in situations – being impure, dishonoring my parents a lot, being a rebel. Last night I saw my wrongful ways.... I felt like I had to stand up. I felt God was calling me."

Clint's voice is among the hundreds that yell out, one at a time, from distant reaches of the sold-out stadium on a recent Friday night. They are responding to preacher Ron Luce, who urges them from his plexiglass pulpit to reconsider the priorities of popular culture – "stuff," popularity, sex, money, even athletics.

"The generation that the world cannot change is the generation that can change the world," he intones over a sound system that seems to be on steroids.

It's opening night of "StandUP: the Invasion," the centerpiece event of Acquire the Fire's 2001/02 stadium tour. The program is part of Teen Mania, a nonprofit ministry that Luce founded in 1986. Its current swing wraps up this weekend in Pittsburgh, after drawing 250,000 in 34 cities, according to ministry staffers.

StandUP is old-time religion, supersized. It's the big-league venue, packed to the rafters, with headliner acts and superslick packaging. It moves at channel-surfing speed, its production sophisticated, its message driven home on – among other things – sweatshirts, visors, CDs, videos, and books. But what might look like x-treme evangelism is at heart a new-millennium packaging of an old-millennium message: The world and its vices may seem like salves for life's wounds, but only a friendship with Jesus saves.

Luce asks the teens to eschew solutions that might seem easy. He likens their lives to their cars, and urges them to let Jesus drive. And he quotes Matthew's gospel (16:24): "He who would follow me must die to himself and take up his cross."

That makes all kinds of sense to Clint. "Ron was speaking, saying I need to give the keys to God. For me, that was it, right there. That was my calling: Let God start the ignition. As soon as I did it, I was lighter. My soul was lighter."

As he claims the cross, Clint joins the stream of teens making its way toward the massive stage from all reaches of the football dome. Some stumble. Some link arms. Makeup gets smeared and tissues get wadded up in hands. Hundreds and hundreds come forward, take a knee, and huddle, as the rest of the stadium prays over them.

The altar call is classic; the smoke machines an up-to-date touch.

"I know it sounds ridiculous. I know it sounds like a cliché," says Melody Molnar of the altar call. Recently out of high school and just back from a mission trip to Cambodia, she recalls her own experience of finding God four years ago. "It totally changed my life. I was the popular girl at school – the partying, the boyfriends. I was always insecure that I wasn't dating the right guy."

Now she doesn't care what others think. "I believe we are created for a purpose and to a plan – to serve others and to show them the love that God has given to us."

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