c. 2000 Religion News Service

METAIRIE, La. _ Months after they seared the American consciousness as an outbreak of apparently pure evil, the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., have been recast as a Christian morality tale told in rock music and intense, chaotic video that for months of Friday nights has been drawing thousands of young people to the sanctuary of a church here.

Conceived originally as a one-weekend alternative to Halloween, “Beyond the Grave: The Class of 2000” is still running with the approach of spring, and, to the surprise of its creators, still attracting 1,000 to 1,500 mostly young spectators to its weekly showings at Victory Fellowship Church in this New Orleans suburb.

What they get, many young people say, is church that does not feel like church, although “Beyond the Grave’s” evangelical call to personal conversion is explicit.

Its use of video and music, thudding through a theater-quality sound system, speaks their language; its angst-ridden high school setting, where preps, geeks, Goths and Christians jostle for handholds on the social ladder, resonates with their world.

It has blood _ blood pooling under sprawled bodies, blood spattering into shooters’ faces, so much blood parents with small children are warned before the lights go down.

And although it’s from an original script fashioned by Victory Fellowship music minister Ty Tyler, it includes the now-mythic martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, the Columbine HIgh School student who may or may not have declared her belief in Jesus Christ just before her killing in the school’s library.

But with all its multimedia sophistication, “Beyond the Grave” has a traditional heart: It ends with a familiar altar call, in which audience members are asked at the play’s end whether, as Bernall reportedly did before her death, they’re prepared to give their lives to Jesus Christ.

Typically, 75 to 100 young people troop up to the stage each Friday, said the Rev. Frank Bailey, Victory Fellowship’s pastor.

And every Friday dozens accept the church’s invitation to don some church-provided jeans and T-shirts and accept baptism on the spot in a pool manned by Victory Fellowship staffers ready to reap the harvest.

“Beyond the Grave” is both old and new _ old in its traditional message, but also new in its attempt to appropriate Columbine as a teaching moment.

Although the Columbine shootings were a horror everywhere, they quickly acquired a special resonance among evangelical Christians. Four of the shooting victims were evangelical Christians, and Littleton’s Trinity Christian Center, a nondenominational church, was host to four funerals broadcast live on CNN.

There, and at civic memorials after the tragedy that attracted tens of thousands, evangelical pastors forsook the politely ecumenical language of public grief and drove home the meaning of the event in their own terms: the overhanging evil of popular culture, the necessity of personal salvation, the heroism of Christian witness and the certainty of glory for those who hold firm to Jesus Christ.

In particular, Bernall’s death has become celebrated as a touchstone of faith to be modeled by young Christians.

“I’ve been to lots of national youth conventions over the last year where Columbine is always brought up, usually in the context of some kind of role-playing,” said Mike Yaconelli, founder of Youth Specialties, a for-profit ministry in El Cajon, Calif., that assists church youth ministers with seminars and resources. “And whenever that happens, kids immediately calm down and get serious. They connect to that.”

A few years ago, similar morality plays might have used sudden death through a post-prom traffic accident as the lens through which to examine characters’ life decisions.

One such staple was “Judgment House,” a warhorse of the genre produced for years by and for teens at many churches, said the Rev. Allen Jackson, associate professor of youth ministry at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

But at Victory Fellowship, the crucible is Columbine.

And so far as they know, that’s new, Jackson and Yaconelli said.

The play premiered Oct. 29 and the church hasn’t been able to close the production since, Tyler said. It’s supported by audience donations.

The play will certainly run through March 10, and perhaps longer, depending on demand, Bailey said. On that date in March, South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown, who has expressed an interest in taking the play on tour with him nationally, will be in the audience.

Shortly after 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, from the first moment Tyler on piano, a drummer and bassist begin banging out “They That Wait,” audience members hit their feet in the main sanctuary, hands waving overhead or clapping to the beat.

With the lights down, the play begins with the hard fact, projected overhead, that since 1996 more than 100 students have been shot in their schools.

Over the next 90 minutes, 25 to 30 members of Victory Fellowship’s youth group act out quick scenes that introduce six diverse characters and sketch the tensions among cliques at the school.

Music from groups like Jars of Clay and The Crystal Method pounds away in the dark between set changes.

The shootings come in an explosion of on-stage gunfire, augmented by video clips shot next door at Victory Fellowship’s school: quick cuts of screaming, panicked teen-agers stalked by a handful of pitiless shooters.

Near the end, Bailey appears on stage in a series of short sermons, each setting the stage for the coming judgment about to unfold for each of six victims who have either reached, or fallen short of, heaven.

“They come, often, because they’ve heard we have a cool band, or because of the light show or the smoke machine,” Tyler said. “But what they get is an encounter with God.”

“I thought it’d be boring,” said Julian Sams, 14, who traveled from Slidell to see the play with friend Herman Brewer and Herman’s mother, Ralanda.

“Sometimes I’d go to sleep in church, but this was entertaining. Well, it was entertaining and serious, both.”

DEA END NOLAN