The World of the Christian Mobile DJ (pt 1)

In the year 1986, I became a Christian DJ. I was in the tenth grade, and had a large Christian music selection. During these years, it was a tumultuous time in the Christian music industry. So many things were happeneing in the music indsutry let alone the Christian music industry. the Christian community was either for or against Christian Contemporary music, depending upon who you talked to. Some churches would have record burnings and forbade their congregants to listen any mainstream music, while others were cautiously open to the idea of it. The music secen was dealing with issues of "backward masking" , i.e. trying to find the devil in music that is played backwards. Honestly, what kind of weirdo would play their music backward? Most commercially available audio equipment at the time wasn't capable of playing a record or a cassette backward and then came the advent of the compact disc. Even today, most devices do not play music in reverse.
When Angel Flight Entertainment first got started it was called Angel Flight Ministries. I still have pictures of it as it was in 1986, the hulking music collection, the logo that had became the identity of the operation. During that year my mind was still not made up of whether i was going to be a DJ service or a band. I had an electric guitar that said Angel Flight on it. So how did I come up with the name "Angel Flight?" Basically, here is what happened. I was reading through the Bible one night in the gospel of Luke in refernce to the first Christmas Eve where it said that in the heavens appeared a multitude of Heavenly hosts, meaning the sky was filled with Angels. It is believed that Angels have wings so it would be presumed that they would fly.
Our first show was held at the local roller skating rink on the night that they hosted the "Christian Skate Night" I had a subscription to a popular magazine known as "CCM" which stands for Christian Contemporary Music and a subscription to a magazine known as "Heaven's Metal" I made it a point to keep up with the music charts in the back of the magazines, so that I would have the latest music for each Skate Night. Nobody had wanted to roller skate to hymns.
One of the most controversial music groups of the time was a group known as "Stryper" they were a Christian muisc group that was surviving in the mainstream market. They were very commercial and upscale for a heavy metal act. Most church people in the mid 1980's had a very difficult time trying to even understand this music group. They felt that their message was a perversion because of the way that they had chosen to convey their message. Stryper was a commercial act. It always was. The band members were costumes and make up that was slightly reminiscent of the mainstream metal act known as "KISS" Now Stryper's appearance did not take on what appeared to be a "demonic" appearance as did that of Kiss's Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley, but the costumes almost made them look like "Bumble Bees" with their yellow and black stripes all over everything. Many people placed Stryper in the genre with other mainstream groups like Europe, Poison, Styx, and Bon Jovi. Stryper was pop metal or "hair metal" they wouldn't really be in the same sub-genre of heavy metal as other groups like Iron Maiden, Dio and Metallica.
One of the controversial things about Stryper was that at every concert Michael Sweet, the lead singer would gather the band members together to distribute New Testaments to the concert goers and this became a trademark of the band. Stryper was one music group who was out reaching the unchurched and going where churches would not dare to go before them. Stryper was frustrated with the church though at their reaction to their music and ministry.
Stryper was not the only big name music group on the playing table though. The heavy metal market was a big major influence on the musical tastes of the young people at the time. Stryper was one of the few but probably one of the biggest positive influences in Christian music at the time. Some of the other groups of the time were the Rez Band, a.k.a. the Resurerection Band or REZ, they came from Chicago instead of Anaheim and were part of the Jesus People USA movement. REZ had husband and wife team Glen and Wendi Kaiser singing about things that would get a person to think about the world and the state of it. Rez dealt with life issues in their music , covering real life situations like abandonment, death, uncertainty, they covered hard line topics in their music such as suicides and divorce, war . REZ did this because they believed that the church was not going to step out and discuss these topics publicly and they needed to be addressed. REZ was not a metal band, but they were a hard rock band. Many of their songs did appear to be metal though.
Another big name band was a group known as Petra. Petra was a hard rock band that would take their music straight from the Bible. They didn't get stuck at the top of th charts as did Stryper, but their music was a little more subtle, they did praise and worship music in addition to their album releases. Hard rock & heavy metal seemed like almost a way of life in the 1980's but there were other artists as well that were not metal, to name some, Harvest, the Imperials, White Heart, DeGarmo and Key, Steve Taylor , Geoff Moore, Mylon LeFevre, Twila Paris, Amy Grant and Russ Taff.
But enough with the music scene, now about Angel Flight, for several years the plan had sat and stewed. The original name of Angel Flight had never deviated but the name did fluctuate. I had kept Angel Flight Ministries as it's name up until 1991. The idea for the operation got shelved for a while, several years in fact, and it became Angel Flight Communications ten years later.