"This is where I heal my hurt".

Paul Mitchell writes, "Ultimately, it is not dancing, drugs and partying that are keeping young people attached to the rave scene. It is the possibility that they will have their hurts healed there, that they will experience true compassion, justice and love."

Faithless - "God is a DJ"

Following are the lyrics to dance act Faithless' track,
"God Is A DJ":

"This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt

It's a natural grace
Of watching young life shape
It's in minor keys
Solutions and remedies
Enemies becoming friends
When bitterness ends

This is my church

This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt

This is my church

This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt

It's in the world I become
Content in the hum
Between voice and drum
It's in the church

The poetic justice of cause and effect
Respect, love, compassion

This is my church
This is where I heal my hurt
For tonight
god is a DJ
god is a DJ"

This track has had solid airplay on Australia's Triple J toward the end of 1998. Its lyrics state outright what a writer on this site has intimated: the dance scene, most especially the rave scene, is a substitute religion for many young people, a pagan ceremony where their innate need to worship is made visible.

Faithless' track ups the ante, naming not only the dance environment as a "church" - a church which fulfils the needs that the actual church would say only it truly fulfils - but also that the DJ is in fact God.

No doubt there is tongue-in-cheek in these pronouncements. But it is perhaps an accurate summation of the spiritual energy vibrating in the rave and dance environment. Who needs conventional worship or religion when experiential spirituality is apparently on offer in the rave and dance scene

Christians will answer that hypothetical question with the pronouncement that, like New Age spirituality, 'rave spirituality' is ultimately self-focussed and will wear out when the buzz of drugs, partying and dancing wears off, as it inevitably does, when it takes the place of God.

But perhaps the key to engagement between the church and the dance/rave scene lies in Faithless' song: "This is where I heal my hurt". Ultimately, it is not dancing, drugs and partying that are keeping young people attached to the rave scene. It is the possibility that they will have their hurts healed there, that they will experience true compassion, justice and love.

As many a burnt-out raver will tell you, they will search in vain. But the church has often marginalised so-called pagan expressions of worship rather than made the necessary connections with the desire to worship so clearly expressed. And the desire to worship is ultimately a desire to experience the fullness of life....

There is more life in the fingernail of God than in a million raves. But what exhibits more life, the church or the rave scene Yes, true sacrificial, selfless spirituality does not show the froth and bubble of pagan ritual, but in its disciplined approach to serving and loving God, need this spirituality be disconnected from, as Richard Foster put it (and the rave scene exhibits), the "discipline of celebration"
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Paul Mitchell