Karl Allison journeyed to darkest Manchester to investigate radical new ministry THE WORLD WIDE MESSAGE TRIBE.

The World Wide Message Tribe

Deep in the heart of Manchester, there's a band who are reaching so many local school kids with the Gospel that they could soon be as popular as Bobby Charlton. Cross Rhythms first noticed The World Wide Message Tribe when they were sent a privately recorded album for review. Everyone who heard it agreed that the gloriously titled Take A Long Hike (With The Chosen Few)' was the freshest British Christian dance collection they'd heard. No one, however, seemed to know anything about WWMT outside of Manchester.

Band member Andy Hawthorne explains: "God has called us to work in the Manchester schools. There's a million kids here for us to reach with the gospel and so we concentrate on Manchester, whatever happens. We turn down 90% of the requests we get to go elsewhere. We don't have much to do with the Christian music scene; we're just getting on with what we've been called to do."

Andy's colleagues are Mark Pennells and Zarc Porter who worked together in a band called Made Perfect. Although they'd known Andy for many years, they began working together about three years ago when Andy ran a huge youth mission at the Manchester Apollo, and Made Perfect joined the likes of Mike Peters and David Grant in witnessing to thousands of kids during the week. Soon after, the band split up, but it was clear that something permanent was needed in the area. Zarc set about setting up a studio and began recording several of the big Manchester rave bands, whilst Mark decided to work fulltime in the local schools. A trust, The Message To Schools, was soon established and now employs Mark and one young lady who does the admin and the follow-up work. Just last September, they formed The World Wide Message Tribe specifically to help with this work,. "We go into a school just about every week of term," says Andy, "and run a self-contained mission. We do lessons and assemblies and build up to a Friday night concert." Mark continues, "The live work is very different to the album. It's still dance music, but we use other singers and dancers. With all the effects and video screen, it takes up to 30 people to put the show on."

"I run a fashion business," says Andy, "so I have to know what's going on, because fashion sits so closely alongside music. Through his studio, Zarc is always one step ahead: the people he's working with now will be in the charts in a month's time. So we're able to keep the band right up to date. We constantly produce new material."

It sounds almost too good to be true. Three Christian musicians who've found the perfect set-up for regularly reaching completely un-churched young people. So, just how well does it work? "We generally get about half the school there on a Friday night and we're used to seeing 20-30 go to be counselled. On one occasion we had about 450 kids there and I asked all those interested in becoming Christians to move into the library. About 300 of them piled in!", says Mark. Andy continues: "It was a riot. The headmaster sent all the yobboes back in, shouting 'You boy, you're not to become a Christian - go home!'"

But with such wonderfully contemporary evangelism, how do the new young converts react when they attend church for the first time and find out it's nothing like the music that accompanied their conversion? "It depends on whether they responded because God spoke to them or simply because they enjoyed the show," says Mark. "We get a mixture of the two. If they've made a genuine commitment, then they'll go to church and they'll grow." Andy continues: "The long term aim is to get a regular service going that is as credible as our Friday night show." Mark: "The difficulty is in educating people to use this music in worship. If it was all teenagers worshipping together then it could work, but a mixed age congregation would wonder what had hit them." Andy: "Well, it would be a problem if the grannies liked our music!"

I wondered how difficult it was to write Christian rave tracks considering how little space there is for lyric-writing within the rave format. Zarc: "Yes, a lot of rave records are lyrically very simple - maybe just one phrase. So it's actually quite easy to replace the disturbing lyrics of bands like The Shamen with lyrics that are wholesome and that have a simple Christian meaning."

"If you write a meaningful lyric and use it in a school, the kids are not stood there thinking, 'Hm, I'm really getting into this deep and meaningful topic'," responds Mark. "They're enjoying the dancing and the atmosphere. So if they can have one punchy hook going through their brain at the end of a song, that's got to be better than a deep topic that they've completely missed."

And what of the future? "We're only touching the tip of an iceberg at the moment," says Andy. "Our long term aim is to have more than one team working in the area. We'll be looking out for talented young Manchester Christians who can slot into this whole thing. We're hoping to do a new album and maybe a big gig in the summer, but our main aim is just to carry on in the schools. We want the music to be as good as possible, but everything is a servant to evangelism. We always explain the songs and we always preach at the end of the evening. In terms of seeing people come into the Kingdom, it's working."