-[indistinct chatter] -[laughs]
-Right here? -[man] Okay.
[light music playing]
-[Dillon] There we go. -[man] Okay, good.
Perfect. Okay.
So this is the response to season one from Jim Bob and Michelle.
[dramatic music playing]
[reading] "The recent documentary that talks about our family is sad.
[newswoman] Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar are coming out swinging,
after a bombshell documentary claims to expose their family secrets.
[reading] "In it, we see the media and those with ill intentions
hurting people we love." [normal] Wow.
[reading] "This documentary paints so much and so many
in a derogatory and sensationalized way."
It was such a victory for victims of religious abuse.
It's very accurate.
I feel like it was very validating for me.
[reading] "We have always believed that the best chance
to repair damaged relationships or reconcile differences
is through love in a private setting."
Oh, he ticks me off.
He just does. I just...
Oh, man. I want to tell him what's up so bad.
What a ride it's been.
-It's like season one was a holy hey-do. -[laughs]
Let's talk about the most shocking revelations
from the Duggar families' new docu-series on Prime.
Messy, y'all check this out, so we can talk about it.
I am not okay.
[Amy] Oh, my word. Social media just exploded.
All of these people that were not in the IBLP craziness
could relate in some way.
[woman] I need you to understand that this is the tip of the iceberg.
This is literally just the beginning.
[Amy] So many stories of just really crazy belief systems.
And it's not about church. It's not about religion.
Coming up with "new rules". It's not necessarily biblical or from God.
-It's just man-made-up bullcrap. -Crap.
[laughs] It is.
And even when they say, you know, "In the name of Jesus,"
it's not always that way.
[director] All right, y'all. Shiny Happy People, season two.
Here we go.
[electronic music playing]
When I got a text saying that this show was happening,
the first thing I wrote back was, "I knew this day would come."
Do you ever have a memory that you know other evangelicals
and ex-vangelicals share?
This is literally all of my Teen Mania baggage.
[laughs]
There was this ministry called "Teen Mania".
-Teen Mania. -Teen Mania.
Teen Mania Ministries.
[director] Did you ever hear about Teen Mania?
It was so crazy and so weird.
They were told that they were going to this big concert.
And it's a really great place to just like meet other Christians.
That's exactly what we were told.
-Did you go? -Because I went to one.
Oh, okay.
[Dillon] How do you know you're in a cult if that's your normal?
[Amy] I mean, you don't.
Until someone comes along and... [laughs]
-"That's not good." -[laughs]
-Yeah. -"This is a cult."
[booms]
Teen Mania was the biggest Christian youth organization in America.
And the founder, Ron Luce, he's the ringmaster.
This is God. This is an encounter with the son of God.
"Do you love God, or do you love God?"
-[yells] -[screams]
There was three main branches of Teen Mania.
Acquire the Fire.
-It was like Coachella for youth groups. -[laughs]
[woman] Music's playing. Lights are going. Fire shooting off.
This was kids producing stadium shows.
[Phil] There was the Global Expeditions mission trips.
Don't you want to go around the world and save people for Jesus?
They also ran the Honor Academy, which was a Christian boot camp.
You were the Marines of this movement.
There was a lot of acceptance there.
That's who I wanted to be with. Those were my people.
We believed we were changing the world.
-[cheers] -But then... it gets weird. [laughs]
[clears throat]
[man] You're about to undertake the most intense training
I know of in the body of Christ.
[Ron] Look at you guys, you look great! You're an army!
[Mica] Nobody ever tells you,
"Hey, don't get in any coffins while you're still alive."
[man] Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, verbal abuse,
refusal of medical treatment, rolling in vomit.
[Phil] They opened me up nine inches. I was days from dying.
Then he says, "You bare on your body the marks of a world changer."
Jesus said we'd be persecuted, but not by his own people.
It was a scam with increasingly disgusting motives.
You were not only a child of God, you were also part of a political project.
We must either fight or become slaves.
What if we said we want our voice to be heard instead of your voice to be heard?
This was fascism in front of me on a massive scale.
Teen Mania was part of a broad movement
created by big, heavy political players to blow up the order as it is.
This is the generation that was raised to seize power.
-Welcome to the end of democracy. -We own the country, not them.
Their long term plan is to amend the Constitution.
I don't think our country could survive that.
This is a war. Which side are you on?
They have to be stopped.
[theme music playing]
[chatter]
[slate claps]
Start me with the easy ones while I'm a little nervous, I can ease into it.
[director] Oh, it's all going to be pretty easy.
Easier than taking the cult down. [chuckles]
[laughs] Yeah.
[soft music playing]
[Mica] I grew up around Tampa, Florida.
[Mica] I mean, for me, I loved Florida because I liked the warm weather.
And I liked swimming, and I liked going to the beach.
My dad died when I was 11.
I'm an only child, so I grew up just me and my mom.
My main source of community was my church.
I was at church six days a week. Seven, if I could be.
I even read the whole Bible cover to cover in a year when I was 15.
Youth group was a must.
Every Wednesday, Sunday after church, we'd always hang out.
Those were my friends.
[Corey] Youth group started at age 13.
But if you were emotionally ready, 12.
I was. [laughs] My parents were pastors.
My nickname was Rev, because they wanted me to be a pastor.
so they would call me, "Hey, Rev, how are you doing?"
You had to be involved in some type of ministry aspect of the church,
whether it be choir, drama.
My first ministry was dance,
and dance became such a place of expression for me.
It was like a physical representation of what I was feeling on the inside.
[stirring music playing]
Those are special times because we were all...
connected.
[Jedidiah] We were evangelical millennial kids, so we were the good kids.
I always grew up feeling like Hollywood did not understand Christianity.
Whenever I would see it in a movie, I was like,
"This is like a bad caricature, and it has none of the positive spirit."
It feels like mocking,
or it just feels like this person has never met a real Christian before.
Hey, dig this.
[singing] ♪ God said to Noah, "There's gonna be a floody, floody" ♪
Wow. Very much that.
And it's the nineties. We're flooded with culture.
-I dare you to impeach me. -[laughs]
With consumer culture, cartoons, magazines, movies.
Like, it was wild.
[announcer] Right here, we have 50 single women.
Right here, we have 50 single guys, on MTV's Singled Out.
Hello, Stephon, my name is Sonya, and I want to get on ya.
[screams]
[rock music playing]
[Joshua] There is a real sense of like being assaulted
by these secular ideas in the media.
This was the height of MTV.
Pop culture was promoting sexual promiscuity
and other ideas that were ungodly.
Secular culture was kind of a gateway where, you know,
if you just crack your door open a little bit to the devil,
then he can just barge right in.
-[birds chirping] -[religious music playing]
[light music playing]
[Sarah] Growing up, I listened to mostly Christian radio.
We also listened to some NPR.
I heard it referred to once as National Perverted Radio.
[dings]
I grew up listening to James Dobson. He's a psychologist.
He had a radio show called "Focus on the Family",
that was mostly about how to have a happy family, how to raise your children,
all from an evangelical point of view.
He is the reason that many, many evangelical kids
were subjected to corporal punishment.
-There's a whole generation... -Yeah.
...that would like to catch me in a blind alley. [laughs]
Dobson went on to become much more politically active.
I remember growing up, hearing about how we needed to pray
that God would restore America's Christian character.
Family people who are just ordinary folks.
They're especially worried about a culture
that is at war with what they believe.
Hollywood, the rock music industry, television, and so on.
[Sarah] It came from a sincere concern that the culture was corrupt.
There was a lot of discussion of spiritual warfare
and of having to fight a battle against evil.
It was what drove us in so many ways
to try to infuse Christianity into the larger culture.
We were trying to save the world, not just ourselves, but the whole world.
[yells]
["Gin and Juice" by Snoop Dogg plays]
[April] If the world is liking this style of music,
then we need to be giving that style of music as an alternative,
but with like a secret Jesus message. [laughs]
[rapping] ♪ Tell me who's in the house ♪
♪ JC ♪
We're calling Jesus "JC"! That's so cool.
[rapping] ♪ He was born to a virgin named Mary ♪
♪ On Christmas Day, he bled And he did die on the cross ♪
Why do I remember that? I don't know. [laughs]
But I thought I was cool because I was like, "I'm rapping like Carman."
It was very much,
"Let's create the Christian corollary, and then maybe we can beat MTV."
We ain't nothing but a bunch of Jesus freaks!
♪ What will people think when they hear that I'm a Jesus freak? ♪
I was like, "Yeah, Christian Rock, is it." Awesome.
I think I was too young.
I was a spiritual world-changer warrior.
-You were just a kid. -Little kid.
-That's why you're so mean to me. -That's why we didn't get along.
Our sibling rivalry was intensely religous.
[laughs]
♪ I dreamed I went to heaven ♪
♪ You were there with me ♪
Our dad is Ray Boltz, who is a Christian singer.
His music was often labeled as like inspirational Christian music.
♪ Thank you for giving to the Lord ♪
[Phil] He became like a evangelical celebrity.
We had our own little celebrity ecosystem
that was so much better than the the ungodly world out there.
I've been writing about varieties of religious expression for about 25 years.
At the time, I was writing for Rolling Stone magazine.
I had been working on a long project
about these very elite, political, Christian conservatives,
and I'm calling them "political" because that was their priority,
more than religious.
By the nineties, close to one in four Americans were white evangelicals.
It was a huge voting block.
And evangelical leaders have been very effective in mobilizing voters.
9 million new voters were motivated in 1994 to come out,
and they gave power to the Republicans.
We were angry about the direction of the country.
And it felt like an exciting time.
But the promises of those politicians didn't come true.
[Dobson] The Republican Party made promises.
It ran essentially on a pro-family, pro-life, pro-moral agenda.
That's what they talked about. Then to get in office,
and then deal with none of the issues that they had promised is, is a betrayal.
That's the big political turn. A wrong was done.
I'm going to fight harder for this, and we will win in the end.
I believe I'm not the only one that will say enough is enough.
But I believe millions of other people will also.
[Jeff] James Dobson brought together
other politically-minded religious right leaders.
They had this idea of retaking America.
They're thinking, "How do we build not just to elect somebody right now,
but how do we do the long program?"
It's time to take this up a notch.
Basic idea is how we pursue this on many, many different fronts.
Part of the mission was to train up a generation
that would restore the world and the nation back to godliness.
We need to take America back to being a Christian nation.
They were hungry for youth.
You needed someone who could reach that army of kids.
How do you win a culture war? By building a culture that will wage it.
And that's what Ron begins.
[engine starting]
Hello! [stammers] Sir, please, I'm in a real hurry.
What does it mean to love God with all your heart? Any idea?
[chatter over speakers]
It's to dedicate your whole life to God.
[Ron] Well, I got to get back.
Who are you?
Hi, I'm Ron Luce.
Ron Luce is a very passionate person.
It was great to see young people stand up and do something for God.
An insanely intense person.
-We need a revolution. -Ron was on fire.
Ron was almost like a godlike, mythic figure.
-He was on the... -Fire by Nite.
[big band music playing]
[man] Fire by Nite was like MTV on your Christian TV station.
Rock bands, guests, and Ron Luce was like a guest host.
He gets a segment called "What's Hot".
He's a Christian culture tastemaker.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Striper, the heavy metal Christian group,
is now openly drinking and smoking.
We're reporting all this so that you can really check out.
If they were Christians, are they still? And what kind of message is coming across?
He was a household name in my house growing up.
He had a great mullet that just would move.
He would shake, like, oh... "I got to tell you."
I must go up to throw him down. I'm gonna rip him up and tear him down.
And chew him up and shove him down and mess him up and mow him down.
I mean, it was very, very, very exciting.
We were smitten.
He laid out the path to go.
"Yeah, it's okay for you to be crazy for Jesus!"
I live for God! And I won't back down!
He is very focused on God, but also very like, "We need God."
[grunting] "You need to get serious about your faith!"
Everything is so intense, and God is... [grunts]
I had never seen anything like that.
He felt natural and real. He's angry youth.
See if we can find any young people that can tell us who they think Jesus is.
I think Ron's genius was as a media strategist, a showman.
-Hey, how y'all doing tonight? -I'm doing good.
Who do you think? Who's Jesus Christ?
-Who is he? -He's my savior.
I'm into God and stuff. Yeah.
I don't really know what I consider Jesus Christ.
I'm really not all into that.
There are thousands and thousands of teenagers and young people
that have had their life
radically transformed, changed from dark to light.
MTV is the poisoning of America's minds.
It's poison. It gets in your brain, gets in your ears, and it's like cancer.
It begins to tear at your heart. Tear at your self-esteem.
Make you walk away from God, make you think he's not even real.
-[Liz] Ron hated MTV. -Hated MTV.
He's talking about how bad MTV is.
And I'm like, "Yeah, it must be really bad."
We petitioned our parents, like, "We want to block MTV."
[Liz] We said, "Mom, we can't have this on our TV.
We need to make a stand,
and we need to make a stand against the cable company that's including it.
-And so... -There's a boycott.
[Ron] God's looking for young people.
Stand strong in your high school on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.
It is possible.
He and his wife, Katie, decided that they were going
to begin their own venture called Teen Mania Ministries.
[light music playing]
With me today, I have Ron Luce of Teen Mania Ministries.
-Hi, Ron. -Hi.
I had to look here to get the name right.
For people who aren't familiar with Teen Mania Ministries,
tell us a little bit about what that's about.
Well, Teen Mania, we take teenagers on summer mission trips all over the world.
Last summer, we took like 1100 wild, turned on, radical teenagers...
At the beginning, Teen Mania's goal was to get teenagers on mission trips,
go out into the world and tell all these unreached people
about the good news of Christ.
Actually, we're gonna take the gospel to the highways and byways
where people from all kinds of different walks of life come.
[Corey] Ron's belief was that once every nation had a chance
to accept Jesus into their hearts, that Jesus would come back.
So by sending everyone on these mission trips, he was speeding up that return.
We're on a boat, and we're sailing all over the Black Sea
with a bunch of wild Teen Maniacs on their free day.
You guys having a great time here or what?
[cheers]
Our very first summer, we took 60 kids to Guatemala.
I'm right here in Mexico.
We got teenagers witnessing Tarok worshiping Buddhists
and winning them to the Lord. It's great, Blaine.
[man] Ron, I know...
I would want to remind those of you interested in going with us this summer,
Fire by Nite, Teen Mania summer missions trip.
You better get your application in right away.
They would travel from state to state, youth group to youth group.
There would be a fire and brimstone message geared to teenagers,
geared to that MTV generation.
Then they would ask people to come on mission trips during the summer.
[Jeff] Even when he's on a small stage, he understands that each youth pastor
is a building block for the bigger stage he's going to move on to.
[Ron] God's looking for a young generation that'll see
through the games that the world tries to shove down your throat.
We're talking about a new generation
that just doesn't try to get away with stuff anymore.
[Jeff] He understood how to capture the youth
because the wounds of his youth lived with him.
[Ron] I can't remember one good memory as a child.
I mean, it was pretty bad. My parents were divorced when I was seven,
and I lived with my mom for most of my life.
There was abuse going on in the home,
and sometimes I went to school with bruises and that kind of thing.
[Jeff] He grew up rough.
At 15, he ran away to find the father who had abandoned his family.
And there's this idea, "If I can just find this good father..."
[Ron] It's the very first night I'm with my dad,
he says, "Now, son, if you're going to try any of that pot stuff,
you should be sure and bring it home, so we can all try it together."
And so I brought it home, and we all smoked it together.
And my life got worse until a friend of mine invited me to go to church.
[Jeff] He describes this packed out little church, filled with energy.
He encounters, as he says it, the angry Christ.
[intense music playing]
He's excited.
He comes back, he tells his friends, "They've been lying about Jesus."
He's not a sissy. He's found this manly man.
I came back the next week and totally committed my life to the Lord
and walked away from all the worldliness and just got on fire for God.
He's making himself a soldier of Christ, until he comes home one day.
And as he tells it, all his things, his barbells,
his car magazines, are out on the street.
And his stepmother has given his dad an ultimatum.
She says, "I don't want a Jesus freak around."
[Ron] If you're feeling broken and lonely,
maybe you've run away from home, and you feel all alone.
If your family's falling apart,
you feel like your parents don't give a rip about you.
[Jeff] He's telling this story of being rejected
by both his mother and his father.
I want you to know something, that God loves you.
The Bible says that in your mother's womb, he created you.
He knit you together.
The family he finds for him is the one that he built,
ultimately of his own followers.
[chatter and laughs]
[Ron] I was so proud of so many of you who committed to destroy
all of your secular music.
[cheering]
You got to lose some of your friends that are causing you to be lukewarm.
It's time for war, no more Mr. Nice Guy. It's time for war.
It's time to fight and win the war for the souls of man.
It grew very quickly to larger churches, and then into stadiums.
Teen Mania was really a bridge at a critical moment in American life.
He was trying to build what he described as this army of God,
this core of young folks who were extra committed.
They were, in his vernacular, soldiers for God.
They say, "Man, it was those young people of the nineties.
They did it, man. The gospel to the ends of the earth. They did it."
[cheers]
They then branded that experience and said,
"Oh, this isn't just Ron Luce coming to speak
at your youth group as a guest speaker.
This is now an event that we will invite multiple youth groups to.
We will come to your town. It is a tour, it is an event."
And then it becomes Acquire the Fire.
I remember being at my youth pastor's house,
and him pulling out a VHS tape, putting it in and saying,
"Let's watch this."
And it was an Acquire the Fire promotional video.
[Ron] Y'all need to give it everything today.
Welcome to Acquire the Fire!
The Acquire the Fire is not just a bunch of singing and preaching.
-We got bombs and video clips and... -[booms and cheers]
We got music, a live band, live sketches.
It's like a 21st century presentation of the gospel.
This is like a Christian atomic explosion with teenagers.
[booms]
I didn't really know what to expect.
Everyone who talked about it, everyone who'd been to it,
was excited to go back.
[chatter and cheers]
I think I was 12, the first Acquire the Fire that I went to.
[Zachariah] These went on all over America.
I believe there was about 60 of them per year.
I think I went to my first Acquire the Fire when I was 11.
I went to a lot of Acquire the Fires as a kid.
It was like the thing to do with your youth group.
You're going to see these cool bands that you've never heard before.
You're just immersed in music.
I'm a professional musician, probably because I went.
Loved all of it.
My first year, we had seats in the very front row.
Friday night was this...
-[intense music playing] -[crowd] Ten, nine, eight...
[Liz] The lights went down. There was this dramatic music.
Remember, some Acquire the Fires, he would show up on a motorcycle.
-Yeah, that was cool. -He's going to make an entrance.
Ron Luce came on stage, and he said something to the effect of,
"Are you ready to rock your face off for Jesus?"
[cheers]
Acquire the Fire is like Coachella for youth groups.
-[laughs] Oh, man. -Christian youth groups.
[rock music playing]
I remember the Newsboys played.
Audio Adrenaline, Five Iron Frenzy, all the big Christian bands.
[Jedidiah] The music was such a big part of it because the music inspires emotion.
I mean, you see people in the Taylor Swift concert sobbing.
That is the same feeling we had all the time,
singing to actual God.
I loved the dancing and the screaming. Everyone's shouting together.
Music's playing, lights are going, there's been fire shooting off.
It was so much different than regular church or any other teen event
that I'd gone to before, that was very corny and cheesy.
This was not hokey at all.
[hip hop music playing]
[Jeff] The other thing that's making it fun
is that there really were kids producing these events. Stadium shows.
I mean, every role that you can think of was being filled by teenagers.
An army of interns.
[Corey] They were performing, setting up, tearing down, selling merchandise,
connecting with the youth pastors.
Pyrotechnics were the responsibility of an 18-year-old kid, which is wild.
Basically, I turn some keys and flip the switches, and it all blows up.
[screams]
They were highly trained, of course. [laughs]
Interns were the coolest people.
[Jeff] They've got the headsets. If you're 13 years old,
that's certified, that's official.
[man] Interns, you guys are awesome.
-Hey, interns! -Thank you, all you interns.
I don't know you guys, obviously, but I love you all.
I'm interning next year with you. With you!
It's an old cliche to say that rock and roll is like a religion,
but what it is, is a mass ritual.
[cheering]
But this is better than a concert
because he's giving you the full range of experience.
You know, a stadium full of teenagers.
The air is thick with pheromones, and so many things are happening.
We can feel all these emotions.
It's such a visceral experience.
You get goosebumps or chills, and you think that's the Holy Spirit.
[intense music playing]
Ron Luce's preaching was very dynamic and exciting.
[Ron] This morning, I'm going to ask you to do something very courageous.
It's time to have a passion and a fervor that is so deep seated in your heart.
God, I love you, and nothing will shake me.
I hate what's evil. I hate what's wrong.
He's looking for an army, people.
You just knew that weekend, your heart was gonna beat faster,
the excitement was there.
I was always looking forward to it because of that energy that he always brought.
[Ron] That's my commitment to you, and when you do that...
Ron Luce gave me permission to be passionate.
And we'll just get to where it's just insane.
We'll get to where we're just so full of God, it's insane.
My heart is so full of God that...
-[grunts] -[cheers]
Thank you for everything you do.
[Ron] I'm proud of you.
[Liz] It was the same kind of star struck feeling you get for a celebrity.
-[Phil] Yeah. -Just, oh, my gosh.
I'm in the same presence as this person that everyone thinks is cool.
Everyone thinks is important.
After my first Acquire the Fire,
I have a distinct memory of laying on the floor in my cousin's bedroom,
and I am telling her my whole life is changed.
"It's not just hype."
That was what they always said. It's not just hype.
And I found a place where I felt like they understood the fact that...
I cared deeply about...
...saving the world,
and they were saying, "Yes, we can help you do that."
And you can have this deep meaning.
I think that was the thing that Acquire the Fire really did well,
was it always inspired teenagers.
It gave a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging,
which is a basic human need.
[Ron] Think deeply about what I'm about to ask you.
And then comes the altar call.
[Phil] It'd be a darkened auditorium. There'd be a bright, white glowing cross.
Ron Luce would have everybody turn around in their seats,
and be on their knees, praying.
He would build it up and say, "Okay, if you're making a commitment..."
[Ron] I'm asking you to put your old self on the cross
because only when you die, that you really begin to live.
It was cry out in the darkness, "I want the cross."
[Ron] Take up your cross now.
[yelling]
[crowd] I want the cross! I want the cross!
[Dani] You need to get right with God tonight.
This is your opportunity, right now.
[Corey] Things will get really serious.
And if you know right now, that in your heart,
the spirit of God is telling you that you should go,
that you should help speed up the return of Christ,
Right now, I want you to lift your hands, lift your hands right now.
I remember crying a lot,
to be surrounded by thousands of other people who felt the same way as I did.
The excitement was really there.
[Dani] If you feel the Holy Spirit tugging on your heart, come forward.
Goes into the whisper.
I was on my knees, on the floor, weeping.
[Dani] And you had kids crying, you had people bringing things to the front.
At one point I think we found birth control pills.
We found things that people were giving up,
the things that they were giving up.
[April] When you're sitting there, and they're talking about
"God wants to forgive you for all the bad things that you've done,"
and the thing is, at 12, I hadn't done anything bad really.
But I am just bawling over it,
and begging God to forgive me for not being good enough.
[Ron] He has seen every tear you've cried.
He's going to put you back together. I know, because he put me together.
[April] You know, acquire the fire.
When God sets you on fire, you are his vessel.
You had all these kids here ready to change the world and do something good.
We were all ready to do whatever it takes by any means necessary
to just save the world.
[narrator] So what do you do now that you're all fired up?
Take your fire and change the world.
Teen Mania's global expeditions take young people just like you
all around the world, every summer...
[Carrie] After the altar call, they would talk about summer missions.
Anyone who was interested in going would leave the auditorium.
You would go, leave your seat, go to that particular room.
They would show a video about global expeditions.
God wants to use you, not just everybody else.
He wants to use you, not just to rescue your youth group,
not just other people, other Christians in general.
He wants to use you to change the world.
Get an application, fill it out, choose a couple countries
you might want to go to and get that thing in the mail.
The project is spreading this movement, which requires funds.
And let me tell you what, most young people say,
"Well, I can never get the money." You can get the money.
Anybody can get the money.
God doesn't have a problem getting you the money.
You just got to find out who's pocket is that money in.
-I'm going to Paraguay. -I'm going to Nicaragua.
-Albania! -Chile!
I'm going to Ukraine.
I'm going to El Salvador!
Join Teen Mania for a trip around the world!
[cheers]
[Phil] Teen Mania and Acquire the Fire gave us the autonomy to say,
"Oh, I can go to a place that's not organized around my parents."
And then they say, "Do you want to go around the world without your parents?
With the coolest 23 year old you've ever met?"
Yes, I want to go to that. I want to go to there.
[Ron] Go for it! Get out of your chair.
Get out of the country, leave town, get on a plane.
Go on a mission trip. It'll fill you. It'll chill you.
It'll thrill you, it'll turn you upside down and then right side up again.
It'll give you a vision, a sense of destiny and purpose for your life.
[Phil] Go, ye, to all the world and preach the gospel
and make disciples of the nations.
So that was the peak, right?
It was very spiritual, and it was also kind of awesome.
So Teen Mania Ministries invited Dad to write a song and film a music video
to promote global expeditions recruitment.
[singing] ♪ I have a heart, I have a voice I have a testimony ♪
♪ I am a follower of Christ He is the one and only ♪
I could sing it.
[singing] ♪ He is the one and only way to heaven ♪
♪ I want everyone to know, oh ♪
-♪ I will tell the world ♪ -♪ He is returning ♪
♪ Until everyone on earth has heard ♪
♪ I will tell the world ♪
[laughs]
My first experience on a Teen Mania trip was going to Bolivia.
[singing indistinctly]
Jesus has such an impact here. It's incredible. It's incredible.
[Phil] My parents were trying to convince me to go only for one month,
and I was like, "No, no, no, I'm serious. I go for two months in the summer."
I was like, "More people will be saved."
I went to Juarez, Mexico.
I was an interpreter at a children's orphanage.
[Mica] The main way of evangelizing on these trips is through dramas.
We have costumes and makeup, and we act out a drama
that's set to music and the native language of whatever country we're in.
You see, this drama is a picture of the truth.
I was playing the Pirate King, a lead.
[Mica] I was the Latin dancer.
My character follows Jesus, but not before getting beaten by the devil.
There was always a drama with a Jesus character.
Every picture I've ever seen of anybody's mission trip,
the Jesus character is always a blond, good looking boy.
I was a Christian mime, the mime troupe.
[Mica] And the mimes are the set pieces,
and so they've got to be like completely still.
During dramas, the team leaders would tell the mimes, "You cannot move."
Like if you move to wipe sweat out of your eye,
you could distract someone, and then they won't hear
the message of the gospel, and then they will go to hell.
"Do you want somebody to go to hell
just because you couldn't hold it for another minute?"
That's what's going through your mind when you're holding these poses.
The pressure literally of the world is like on your shoulders,
and you're like, "I can't move. I got to hold up."
I internalized the idea of people are going to hell.
It is eternal suffering beyond your possible comprehension.
You can actually do something to stop that from happening.
And so the only moral and ethical decision was to participate in this movement.
[Phil] Numbers were very important.
They wanted to report at the end of the summer
-how many people had been saved. -Yes!
Look at the difference you made.
In four ministry days, we had over 700 salvations.
Over 900 people were saved.
[Jeff] Ron was always telling his kids,
"You're world changers, you're world changers."
For a lot of them, it worked. They believed it.
Everyone in the village came up, and the whole village was saved.
They were tearing down their temples and like...
building churches in their places. And it was just amazing!
All of the millions of people who weren't so lucky to see a mime troupe of teens,
I guess they're all just burning in hell for all eternity.
Sorry about that.
We also smuggled Bibles.
Some girls would have dresses, and they'd have little pockets.
They put them under their dresses.
Some people would put them in bags, under things.
[man] What kind of things have you seen happen during your trip this year?
We have seen tremendous miracles of healings,
eyes that were all messed up, coming clear and legs growing out.
It was just so neat that God used us to pray for this lady, and she could see.
It was really neat.
There was a woman, one of her legs was much shorter than the other,
and someone in our group said, "We're supposed to pray for her leg to grow out."
And we had been praying.
We're so intense, and we were praying, but God wasn't healing her.
And then you go, "When do we stop?"
I just remember feeling so embarrassed that her leg didn't grow back.
Why didn't it happen? I had faith, I guess I didn't have enough faith.
And I felt so guilty.
Sacrifice itself became almost a goal.
So we would have the street dramas where people are mock-beaten.
And you would get students who were doing like ascetic elements.
We would have students who say, "Well, I'm not going to wear my kneepads.
I'm going to go hard for the gospel. I'm going to physically suffer more."
The motto was, "Die empty every day."
This is a very safe trip for your young people.
I have three children and just had my third little child just a few weeks ago.
And I'm very conscientious about sending,
parents sending their babies to another country.
And I go to these different countries during the summer, and I see young people
just like yours on the mission field, 13 and 14 and 15 years old.
And I go, you know, somebody trusted God enough
to let us have their babies for a month, to let God use them.
And we don't take that trust lightly.
I was in rural India. I started feeling really sick.
But we had this book called Where There Is No Doctor.
So it says this is how you dress a wound. This is how you fix a broken bone.
Here's how you do a head injury. Here's how you deliver a baby.
And the book says, "It might be appendicitis."
I had emergency appendectomy in Hyderabad, India.
The approach to my appendicitis was, let's say it was vintage.
They opened me up about nine inches, take out my appendix,
sew it back up, that proceeds to get massively infected.
And I develop a case of Mersa.
I'm leaking infection, but Mom and Dad aren't getting like real information.
"Oh, Phil's fine."
[Liz] But there's a parent volunteer who had been taking care of him,
and she got a hold of our mom and said,
"You need to meet him at the airport with an ambulance
and go to the hospital as soon as he arrives in the country.
And eventually they put me on commercial flight
at the end of the month to fly back with the team.
And I spent three weeks in the hospital after that,
with a 600 milliliter abscess that had to be drained.
My doctor, his baritone, just goes, "What the hell were you doing in India?"
And I was like, "I was telling people about Jesus." [laughs]
The call went out to pray. Ray Boltz's son might be dying.
So Ron Luce comes by to visit.
You know, the guy in charge.
I was very excited, even in my fevered, bedraggled state.
I had this little guest book, and he writes Galatians six.
"I bare on my body the marks of Christ."
And he changes it to "the marks of the world changer".
And it's silly to get like choked up a lot over it.
But I thought, "Oh!
like this has value, this suffering has worth."
They tell you you're elite, you're changing the world.
The real outcome of these trips, they are creating soldiers.
Eventually, I mean, you just got to say,
"Okay, God, whatever you have coming for me."
I felt like I'm going to go further and harder.
I'm going to give more of myself.
And so I started saying, "Oh, I think I want to do the internship."
[narrator] The Honor Academy, a one year internship for committed young adults
who are driven to find their purpose and make a difference with their lives.
The three main branches of Teen Mania were the Acquire the Fire events,
Global Expeditions. That was where they got a lot of their revenue.
And then the third part was the Honor Academy.
[Jeff] I think a real pivot point for Teen Mania and for Ron Luce
was the development of what he calls the Honor Academy,
this sort of training school, this finishing school for his elite.
This is a period in time when televangelists decide,
"I need my own college."
Liberty University and Regent University, and Ron is thinking along those lines.
[Zachariah] So Teen Mania Campus was in Lindale, Texas,
which is in the middle of nowhere.
It was this enormous East Texas property.
[Jeff] He's training young people, but he also needs a core of labor.
I mean, there's just real practical work that needs doing.
So he'll get students.
You're going to go there to learn, and you're also going to go there
to produce Teen Mania, and you're going to pay for that opportunity.
-It's an internship. -[Mica] When I graduated high school,
it just seemed like the natural next step to me to go to the Honor Academy.
It's going to be like Acquire the Fire 24-7.
It's going to be awesome.
Going to a place where everybody else was like me and was just as obsessed
with being bold for Jesus and being on fire and changing the world.
Those were my people. That's who I wanted to be with.
But the idea that this could somehow be bad for me,
that doesn't even really enter your mind.
And I got there, and it was definitely different than what I expected.
[suspenseful music playing]
But let me ask you something, what are you willing to give up for the Lord?
What is your life?
The time may come when God is going to ask us all to give up
the comforts that we enjoy and go to live for him in a different way.
We don't know what is down the road,
but it seems like some heartache and suffering is in store.
[screaming and yelling]
We were believers, but we knew something was weird.
I was a teenage telemarketer, for Jesus.
It was the same lesson plan every class, obedience.
There was no questioning of authority.
Suddenly, some people in military garb told us to run.
[yelling]
That was crazy.
[overlapping chatter]
[Mica] I didn't know that Teen Mania had done anything wrong for a long time.
I thought that I was the problem.
They were taught terror and taught to pass it along.
We were at war. We were going to rise up with a battle cry.
[Ron] Let me hear your battle cry tonight.
[cheers]
I didn't hear you, let me hear your battle cry tonight!
I started seeing Ron align more with the political movement.
We've got virgin, teenage America, being raped on the sidewalk.
[Phil] If you build that army,
eventually you have to give them their marching orders.
We're here as teenagers just to stand up, as the leaders of this cultural war.
When you join the military, you lose your whole identity.
Well, the same thing happens when we're in Christ.
We need to strip off the old identity.
I'm not going to survive if I stay here.
I was going to come in and quell this attack from Satan.
Oh, really? You're going to deny that this happened to me?
They were raising martyrs, and they were recruiting children.
You were expendable.
And maybe the most valuable thing you could ever do is die.
[credits music playing]