Mike Day, singer and guitarist, gathered his rock band around him.
Dressed in a faded black T-shirt, jeans and skateboard sneakers, he bent his shaved head. "God," he said, "I hope these songs we sing will be much more than the music. I know it's so difficult at times when we're thinking about chords and lyrics and when to hit the right effect patch, but would you just help that to become second nature, so that we can truly worship you from our hearts?"
A few minutes later the band broke into three songs of slightly funky, distorted rock with heaving choruses, and the room sang along: 1,500 or so congregants of High Desert Church here, where Day, 33, is a worship director. This was Sunday night worship for the young-adult subset of the church's congregation, but it was also very much a rock show, one that has helped create a vibrant social world in this otherwise quiet desert town.
There has been enormous growth in the evangelical Protestant movement in the US over the last 25 years, and bands in large, modern, nondenominational churches - some would say megachurches - like this one, 140km northeast of Los Angeles, now provide one of the major ways that Americans hear live music.
The house bands that play every weekend in High Desert Church - there are a dozen or so - scavenge some of their musical style from the radio and television. They reflect popular taste, though with lyrics about the power of God, not teenage turmoil.
They are not aiming for commercial success. Church-based Christian rock - often referred to as CCM, for contemporary Christian music - does not exist primarily to compete in mainstream culture; it exists first to bring together a community.
"When you start a church," said Tom Mercer, 52, the senior pastor, "you don't decide who you're going to reach and then pick a music style. You pick a music style, and that determines who's going to come."
High Desert Church has a sprawling concrete campus that includes a lavish auditorium, a gym, classrooms and office space for its 70 employees. Once a traditional Baptist church, it moved toward nondenominational and evangelical Christianity in the mid-1990s and experienced steep growth. Now more than 8,000 people attend services here at least twice a month.
A number of factors encouraged the church's expansion, Mercer and others say. For one thing, there are more people in Victorville to receive the gospel: Since the early 1990s the region has been experiencing a population surge, as city dwellers have moved north from Los Angeles County, seeking lower real estate costs.
For another, in 1993 the church hired Jeff Crandall, the drummer for a Christian punk band called the Altar Boys, as its music director.
Crandall, 46, spent more than a decade crossing the country in vans, playing in churches, nightclubs and high school gyms, fighting the battle for a more progressive and aggressive worship music. "I knew that the future, even in the early '80s, was with bands in churches," he said. "I liked hymns as a kid, but I just didn't see myself waving my arms and directing them. I've always been one of those guys who tries to figure his own way."
Bands for all ages
What he did was to pack the church with rock 'n' roll. He organized a rotation of bands, so the volunteering musicians - drawn from the largely commuter population of Victorville and its surrounding towns - would not exhaust themselves by playing to multiple services. And then he let them play, loudly.
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