The financial stories of CHRIS COLE and artists After The Fall, Pray Naked and Rachel Friend

Evangelism
Musicians who target all or most of their material to the unsaved have long been the backbone of Britain's grassroots Christian music scene. Artists with particularly explicit 'come to Jesus' lyrics and who seize any and every opportunity to preach from stage and conduct altar calls often find themselves between a rock and a hard place as far as the CCM industry goes. For the majority Christian song lyrics making it onto albums tend to deal with some aspect of the Christian life, examining some biblical truth, exploring some aspect of social justice, or expressing directly love to God. Both praise and worship and exhortation of believers are of course perfectly valid ministries in the body of Christ and the CCM industry has grown largely by concentrating on these areas. Opportunity for musical evangelists to record tended to be few on the ground until the World Wide Message Tribe changed all that. By pioneering the use of dance music in evangelism they inadvertently discovered a large and growing following among Christians.

THE UPSIDE
1. Missions, prisons and schools still offer a huge opportunity for musical evangelists. The harvest fields are ready but the workers are few.

2. The thrill of seeing God moving by his Spirit to draw the lost to him has no equal in the transitory attractions of the secular scene.

3. Organisations like YFC, NGM and Mission To Schools offer hands-on experience and training to those musicians called to evangelism.

4. The musical standards of musicians working schools and prisons have shot up over the years. No longer is it a field of musical mediocrity.

THE DOWNSIDE
1. Musical evangelism, with its very real spiritual warfare aspects is no place for the struggling Christian. It has produced its share of spiritual casualties.

2. A lot of gigs, particularly in schools and prisons, bring no fee - not even expenses, with them and some alternative means of funding is required.

3. For most musical evangelists there are few opportunities to record.

Case History - AFTER THE FALL
Black country rock band After The Fall have been going 10 years. Although they've played some festivals, and in 1995 had an EP distributed by Kingsway. The bright lights have eluded Ian Stott and his faithful rock journeymen. When not fronting the band, lead singer Ian Stott sings in the Midlands cabaret circuit.

1. How many gigs have you played?
"Approximately 750. Every kind you could imagine."

2. What was your first gig?
"St Stephen's Church. Redditch. February 1987, in a service. We didn't have a drummer then so a friend who was a drummer came all the way from Wales to play three songs!"

3. What has been your biggest audience?
"That would be playing "Touching Glory' at the Sunday morning celebration at Cross Rhythms '94. We had all kinds of technical problems with the keyboards but it was still a wonderful experience."

4. What was your smallest audience?
"Two! A dear couple that I knew from work arranged a gig at Bromsgrove Rovers Football Club. But they forgot to do any advertising! We played the set to them and they said they thoroughly enjoyed it!"

5. What is the highest amount you've received for playing a gig?
"£250 to play for inner city kids at the Quinta Centre. Oswestry. It was our biggest ever flop! Most of the kids were black and wanted hip hop, not rock!"