Confessions of a Jesus Freak
‘Jesus Freak,” an album hailed by some as “the Sgt. Pepper’s of Contemporary Christian Music,” turns 30 this year.
“It’s hard to think of a more groundbreaking, genre-expanding, or era-defining album,” Christianity Today said of dc Talk’s 1995 release, dubbing it “the most important Christian pop album of all time.”
Music critic Adam P. Newton said the songs resonated with him and other God-loving Gen-Xers. “It was our album,” he said. “And the lyrics were ones you could hear your youth pastor preach about.”
But what many may not know is the unlikely role that a member of a Church of Christ, Mark Heimermann, played in the project.
From Lipscomb to Amy Grant to dc Talk
Heimermann spent his formative years in Syracuse, N.Y., a place known more for salt mining than salvation music.
He grew up listening to Bach, Beethoven, the Beatles and much more. Classically trained, he learned the trumpet and piano at age 5. Then came the violin and the viola.
Mark Heimermann in the studio.
He sang along with four-part harmonies at the Liverpool and East Side Churches of Christ. He performed with state choirs and became president of his high school chorus. “We were like the von Trapps,” he said, comparing his family to the one made famous by “The Sound of Music.”
Are you a “Jesus Freak?” What did dc Talk’s 1995 album mean to you and your faith? What did it mean to your church? Share your answers with us at [email protected].
He received a full scholarship from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn., to sing and play piano in the university’s band, Windsong. He worshiped with the Ashwood Church of Christ and other congregations in Nashville.
After his freshman year, he left college and joined his brother-in-law, Chris Harris, in creating jingles for Pepsi, McDonald’s and other companies. “I learned how to write hooks and hire musicians,” he said. “It was really a catalyst to launching my production career.”
In 1985, he began playing keyboards and singing backup vocals with Contemporary Christian Music artist Michael W. Smith and then with Amy Grant, who also has deep roots in Churches of Christ.
He turned down a big-money offer to go on another tour with Grant and took a run at record production in hopes he could spend more time with his wife and children. No money, he thought, was worth missing these moments.
His gamble paid off. After successfully creating music for kids with Harris (the Prism Series), Heimermann began to produce up-and-coming artists, including a Christian hip-hop group known as dc Talk, made up of Toby McKeehan (TobyMac), Michael Tait and Kevin Max.
Heimermann knew nothing about that kind of music. He loved Queen’s soaring vocals, Steely Dan’s musicianship and Stevie Wonder’s grooves.
After helping dc Talk with their “Nu Thang” album, he began writing songs with TobyMac on a new project, “Free At Last,” expanding the band’s genres to include rock, gospel and R&B.
By this time, dc Talk had become a train, he said. “You had to decide whether you wanted to ride on it or not.”
Their music videos aired on MTV, and appearances on “The Tonight Show” followed. Heimermann was happy to watch from his sofa at home.
The inspiration for ‘Jesus Freak’
In 1991, Amy Grant broke into mainstream pop music stardom with her ninth studio album, “Heart in Motion.” Her top-40 hits, including “Baby Baby,” “Every Heartbeat” and “That’s What Love is For,” while uplifting, didn’t explicitly mention God.
For dc Talk, a similar move seemed inevitable. But TobyMac told the group, “When and if we do cross over, we’re going to take the cross with us.”
One night, while Heimermann drifted between sleep and waking, an idea for a song came to him, he said. “It felt a little supernatural.”
The idea was to transform the insult hurled at Christians, “Jesus freak,” into a bold declaration of faith. By the time he was awake, he had the musical hook for the song, he said. “I called Toby that morning, all excited, saying, ‘I think I have a big idea.’”
“When and if we do cross over, we’re going to take the cross with us.”
From there, TobyMac’s “gears started moving,” and he came up with a rap section and the guitar riff, Heimermann recalled. “I wrote the bridge. It was really a collaboration.”
Mark Heimermann works in the studio with members of dc Talk, including Michael Tait, far right.
But when ForeFront Records executives heard the song, they were nervous about possible backlash. “I found out later,” Heimermann recalled, “that they went outside to the picnic table and said, ‘Guys, it was a nice run.’”
Although the executives had some apprehensions, “they trusted us 100%,” he said, “and it paid off.”
The “Jesus Freak” album featured smooth harmonies, raucous rap and grunge guitars, shattering expectations for what Christian music should sound like. The title track became a defiant anthem that teens embraced in droves.
What will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus freak?
What will people do when they find that it’s true?
I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus freak
There ain’t no disguising the truth
“Jesus Freak” broke the rules, too, for subject matter. “What Have We Become?” tackled racism, suicide and society’s self-indulgence. Harmonies combined with raw honesty in “What If I Stumble?” The catchy cry for reconciliation, “Between You and Me,” became a crossover hit on Top 40 radio.
“The band was really good at reading the moment and speaking to a generation of teenagers in a language they were receptive to,” said Joel Heng Hartse, who penned the Christianity Today article and a memoir about Christian rock. “The lyrics to ‘Jesus Freak’ spoke not only to the cultural alienation being experienced by Gen-Xers, but by Christian teenagers at the time.”
The album debuted at #16 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for another year and a half. “Jesus Freak” dominated Christian radio with six of its seven singles hitting #1 on various stations. And the band, which once performed in high school gyms, now sold out arenas.
The success didn’t surprise Heimermann, who believed the album could be a game changer. What did surprise him was when “Jesus Freak” won the Dove Award for Best Song. He was even more pleased when the album won a Grammy for Best Rock Gospel Album.
A less-than ‘Supernatural’ follow-up
Heimermann worked with the band on their 1998 followup, “Supernatural,” but he knew it had no chance of matching their prior success when an executive for the band’s new label, Virgin Records, criticized the song, “Red Letters,” a reference to Jesus’ words in the Bible being printed in red.
There is love in the red letters
There is truth in the red letters
There is hope for the hopeless
Peace and forgiveness
There is life in the red letters
In the red letters
After listening to the song, the Virgin executive leaned over to a ForeFront Records executive and asked, “What the hell are the ‘Red Letters’?”
When Heimermann learned of that conversation, he said, “I knew this was going to kill the record.”
“Supernatural” fell short of the triple-platinum heights that “Jesus Freak” reached, and like the Beatles, dc Talk split up a few years later.
‘What could be better?’
After producing “Supernatural,” Heimermann sat on the porch of the new home that he and his family had built in the wealthy suburb of Franklin, Tenn., thanks to the truckloads of money he made as a Christian music producer and songwriter.
It was the summer of 1998, and he had a glass of red wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. As he gazed at the Cumberland Mountains, he thought, “Man, I have everything, and I’m doing it for the Lord. What could be better?”
Moments later, the Holy Spirit met him on the porch, he said. “He asked me to follow him, and I knew what he meant — for me to follow him off this mountain of success that I didn’t build.”
A view of the Cumberland Mountains from Mark Heimermann’s Tennessee home.
Rattled by the encounter, he woke his wife. “I got a visit from the Lord,” he told her, “and I think everything’s about to change.”
His new journey gradually led him away from the Christian music industry as he poured himself into God’s Word. What did the Lord really want from him? He had read the New Testament several times, but like more than two-thirds of Christians in the U.S., he had never read the Bible from cover to cover.
The more he spent time in the Old Testament, the angrier he became because he had been taught that reading this collection of 39 books wasn’t that important. “I was a little mad at my heritage,” he said.
Mesmerized by these stories, he realized how much he had missed. It felt like walking into a movie in time to catch the happy ending, “but you get robbed of all the character development and how we got to this place where we even needed Jesus,” he said.
The more he meditated on the Bible, the more that one theme screamed through the pages: idolatry. He began to see his own idolatry, the world’s idolatry and the idolatry that had crept into Christian music.
When Jesus cleansed the temple, he turned over the money changers’ tables and drove out the animals, saying, “Get these things out of here. Stop turning my Father’s house into a marketplace!”
The music producer sees parallels with today. “We’ve made a marketplace out of worship.”
Lots of praise, little worship
Heimermann’s journey, however, was just beginning.
Not long after his first encounter, he said he received a second message from God: “I’m being praised to death. Somebody worship me.”
He spent his days studying Scripture. What did the Lord mean when he called us to worship him?
Many Christians refer to each Sunday’s gathering as “worship services,” but study led him to a different conclusion. “We’re really good at praising God and ministering to the body,” he said, “but almost none of it is worship. Praise and worship are the opposite.”
Not long after his first encounter, he said he received a second message from God: “I’m being praised to death. Somebody worship me.”
The posture of praise is one of God’s people standing before him, arms extended toward heaven, but the posture of worship is much different, he said. “The word for worship is shachah in Hebrew and proskuneo in the Greek, and it means to bow down, to prostrate yourself in reverence and awe.”
Mark Heimermann
The American church abandoned that kind of worship a long time ago, he said.
The first reference to worship can be found in Genesis when Abraham obeyed God and put his son, Isaac, on the altar. “That word ‘worship’ there is about sacrifice,” he said. “He’s going to sacrifice something precious to him as an act of worship to God.”
An angel halted Abraham from doing so, and God provided a ram for the sacrifice.
In the story of Exodus, “God taught Israel how to worship him at Mount Sinai,” Heimermann said. “There wasn’t a band. There was no music. It was about sacrifice.”
When Jesus taught the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, “he’s trying to teach us worship,” he said. “It’s about sacrifice, it’s about sincerity, and it’s about truth from our innermost being.”
The Lord’s Prayer is all about worship, he said. So are prayer and fasting, he said. “Worship is a diamond with many facets.”
The apostle Paul urged the believers in Rome “to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship.”
The way Heimermann sees it, “we have been led astray,” he said. “We’ve lost the true sacrificial meaning of worship.”
‘Stop the Music’
As part of his worship to God, he is now recording music inspired by the Last Days described in the Bible. “I’m usually singing Scripture,” he said. “Some of it is me interpreting, and some of it has no words.”
For instance, he has created a musical interpretation of “what the living creatures sounded like in Revelation,” he said.
He hopes to release that music for free, and he plans to share what God has revealed to him in a book titled, “Stop the Music: Unveiling American Christianity’s Worship Crisis.”
The title of his first chapter? “The Calling of a Jesus Freak.”
“The Lord called me to be a Jesus Freak,” he said. “I had to learn the difference between believing in Jesus and following him.”
Are you a “Jesus Freak?” What did dc Talk’s 1995 album mean to you and your faith? What did it mean to your church? Share your answers with us at [email protected].
JERRY MITCHELL is a journalist and the author of “Race Against Time,” which tells the story of how some of the nation’s most notorious murders came to be prosecuted decades later. He participates in mission trips to West Africa and worships with the Skyway Hills Church of Christ in Pearl, Miss. He serves as a member of The Christian Chronicle’s national board of trustees.
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