‘BUILDING HIGHWAYS IN THE SKYWAYS’ : OLD-TIME RELIGION MEETS HIGH-TECH MEDIA WORLD

WASHINGTON —  Show biz, high tech and media sophistry coexisted alongside Bible thumpers and old-time religion this week as about 4,000 religious broadcasters gathered down by the Potomac riverside to share old and new ways to spread the Gospel.

While the Bible Believers Baptist Church Bookstore of Clearville, Pa., was hawking hand-written tracts for $1 apiece at the 42nd annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, Cablewave Systems was selling coaxial cables to the same crowd.

“Christian broadcasting is not a human enterprise,” insisted NRB executive director Ben Armstrong. “It’s almighty God building highways in the skyways.”

Still, the evangelists and the rabbis, the pastors and the preachers and priests and all the otherworldly broadcasters who met here this week showed they were deeply influenced by the TV emcees, deejays and talk-show hosts of this world, too. In fact, the showbiz quotient of NRB is now so compelling that “Entertainment Tonight” sent a TV crew to the convention, to tape a segment that aired Wednesday evening. A white-on-blue banner hanging over the Adelphon Inc. booth on the convention exhibit floor spelled out one of the unofficial themes of the convention. The Texas antenna manufacturing company brought in prospective buyers for its 640-foot “rugged though pleasing in appearance” radio transmission towers with a pair of banners proclaiming: “Satellite Technology for Christ.”

“There was a lot of positive reality, I think,” NRB director of membership services Jon Bosworth said Friday, following the final day of the weeklong convention. “If they (religious broadcasters) get off dead center on an issue, such as the starvation in Africa, they can be a mighty power the way they’re supposed to be. But they’re going to have to have a lot of integrity to stand for what they really stand for . . . and stop playing games.”

The “games” are about politics, power and even pop music, and they seem to recur every year, according to those who have attended several conventions. Prayer sessions and Bible-study workshops drew the smallest congregations while the biggest crowds packed the auditoriums for a parade of political and religious celebrities, ranging from a Scripture-quoting President Reagan to Pat Boone singing about aborted fetuses.

Beneath its polyester mea culpa surface, religious broadcasting has become big business--and not just to the Moral Majority.

Almost 10% of the 9,000 AM and FM radio stations operating in the United States now broadcast religious formats full time, according to NRB executive director Armstrong. With 53 such stations, California is second only to North Carolina (with 54) in the number of full-time gospel radio outlets. Just last month, 50,000-watt KWVE-FM in Costa Mesa went from profane to sacred when the 25,000-member Calvary Chapel bought the station for $2 million. Beginning this spring, the word of Bruce Springsteen gives way to the Word, period.

Though many are low-power stations with a range of only a few miles, religious TV stations are also on the rise, according to Armstrong. NRB’s annual Directory of Religious Broadcasting, now in its 15th edition, lists 92 religious TV stations operating in the United States. Two years ago, there were only 65.

Religious broadcasters can no longer be ignored by the secular media, insisted NRB officials, citing activity at the convention as evidence. “ ’60 Minutes’ was even there this year,” observed Bosworth. “I don’t know how it’ll turn out. You never know until it’s on the air with them whether you’re going to get a pat on the back or a kick in the . . . well, you know.”

Bosworth said CBS camera crews wandered among the 300 booths where exhibitors paid between $800 and $1,000 each to rent floor space during the convention.

One exhibitor, who characterized himself as a “rock expert and drummer,” chortled over a stand-up interview he did with Morley Safer.

“It was really something,” said Rob Lamp, pastor of the Great Commission Church and chief spokesperson for the Great Commission rock band. Lamp said “60 Minutes” was apparently interested in his anti-Satan rock video, available on both VHS and Beta, for a nominal gift of $49.95, plus a 5% shipping gift. The “informative, entertaining and winsome” video is also available as a soundtrack demo cassette for $5, Lamp said. Though the video has never been seen on MTV, Lamp has shown it several times over “The PTL Club”.

Further proofs that the secular and sacred are coming together included:

--A lip-glossy, fluffy-coiffed Debby Boone, shuttled from talk show to autograph party by her own personal phalanx of recording company bodyguards who hovered around her as protectively as if she were Prince, hustling her latest record album.

--The Rev. Ellwood (Bud) Kieser, a Paulist priest from Pacific Palisades who hooked into a steady stream of media interviews as producer of an upcoming prime time Easter special starring Martin Sheen as a fictional fourth Magi who always showed up late and kept missing the itinerant Messiah from Galilee throughout his life.

Kieser’s success at landing “The Fourth Wiseman” deal with ABC has peppered his conversation with such Hollywoodisms as “the package” and “projects in development.” Whether he’ll manage another prime-time coup soon is still up to the secular whims of network production chiefs, but Kieser’s track record as producer of the syndicated inspirational TV series “Insight” during the past 20 years seems to make it fairly clear he’s not going to hear another Hollywoodism: “You’ll never work in this town again.”

--A yuk-it-up convention workshop on the beneficial use of Christian bloopers on radio.

With no apologies to bloopermasters Dick Clark or Ed McMahon, workshop moderator Warren Wiersbe counseled his fellow evangelical broadcasters to “turn bloopers into good blessings” by admitting to Christian listeners that even the Word of God can sometimes be tongue twisted into a scatological or sexual belly laugh.

The workshop audience saved its biggest laugh for a deadly serious broadcast comparison between failure to read one’s Bible regularly and failure to fill up one’s automobile with gasoline.

“You can’t rely on passed gas,” said the solemn radio minister.

--A Christian radio talk show host, taking live calls from listeners throughout the country at his special convention edition of “Talkback with Bob Larson”.

“Was it beneficial to have screams of torture played over the air?” demanded the tow-headed Larson of his secular guest.

Well, no, admitted UPI radio news executive Richard Boggs, it was in bad taste. That’s why he decided to stop playing the three second introduction to a newscast, delivering the sound of a hostage screaming as his fingers were being chopped off by a plane highjacker.

“It had a beneficial motivation on me,” said UPI newscaster Jonathan Peterson, who reported the hostage incident several months ago while the screaming aired in the background over the UPI radio network. “It disturbed me and I prayed for the hostages.”

“Oh boy, is this going to be a good show today!” chortled Larson. “We’ll go to a commercial break now.” The commercial was for a Bob Larson tape cassette on how movies like “Dune” and “2010” are “preparing youngsters for the anti-Christ.”