PRESENTATION

I WAS CALLED TO REACH OUT TO THE UNDERGROUND…

To the people who do not seek to please the mainstream of society nor seek to live as they do! People who don’t dress like most people do, nor listen to the music that most people do, nor think the way most people do! They go against the grain! They are not part of the mass culture! They are not the mainstream! They are not part of the in-crowd! They are the outsiders and therefore they are snubbed, blackballed and scorned by the mainstream. They are the underground!

Well, I received the mission from someone who was treated exactly the same way! He had no form or comeliness, that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and forsaken by men, a Man of sorrows and pains acquainted with grief and sickness for He bore all of ours. In the same way the underground suffers rejection today, He was the One from Whom men hid their faces! Because He was not as they wanted Him to be. He did not appear with the royal pomp they expected of a king nor as they had expected of the Messiah. Instead of speaking what most wanted to hear, He spoke the truth! Instead of pleasing the religious, He pleased his Father! Then those who were deemed religious conspired together to wrongfully accuse Him nailing Him to a cross between two other men who also lived on the fringes of society. But He is no longer dead, He rose again and will soon return to forever rule this world. He continues to reach out to those that no one but He cares about! He has come for everyone that is His and will never overlook those who are different to the mainstream and are despised by it today!

It was He who came up with the mission of reaching out to these saying that God loves them the way they are and that God wants them with Him through love and always without the kind of coercion that rotten religion preaches or its prejudice which has already condemned them to go to hell.

In 1994, He gave me a band called Antidemon to spread the message through a style of music known as Death Grind Core. Many accepted the message, other bands with the same purpose also formed and a flock of Headbangers, Punks and Goths continued to grow day by day. I tried to get this flock to be cared for and received by conventional churches, but due to the prejudice and the refusal on the part of these entities in embracing diversity and accepting the way these people were dressed or the lifestyle they lived or the music they liked, it became necessary to establish a place for them! Because of the need to receive these people, a door was opened in October 1998 as a refuge and home for them! It was first called Zadoque Community and later renamed Crash Church. What started out as a small garage eventually expanded into a lounge where decoration was due to discretion! Heavy metal, punk rock and hard core shows and all kinds of underground music became the weekly options at this venue. On Sundays, there were meetings to talk about the One whose idea all of this was to begin with and who was the most underground of them all in the society of his first coming, Jesus Christ!

Thousands have been reached and hundreds have been transformed while spending time in this Underground Hospital! After getting healed, most have re-entered the mainstream, started their families, and remaining healed have gone on their way with their lives! But some have stayed and are the ones who receive and care for those in this house and the many who are still to arrive! For over 20 years, this door has remained open to those who are not understood by the mainstream and open to those who are rejected by religion and its representatives.

If you also are not perfect and do not feel as if you are part of the mainstream, you have your God-guaranteed place in this tribe of love.

WELCOME TO CRASH CHURCH.

Antonio Carlos Batista do Nascimento