Jay Bakker, of Revolution Ministries, came to the Bay Area in April to speak at St. Aidan's, San Francisco, and meet with Episcopal churches here. He was interviewed by Sara Miles of St. Gregory's, San Francisco.

Jay Bakker isn't the first Christian to be wounded and hurt by the church, nor is he the first to feel the scorn and fury that the church's leadership can unleash upon the impure. The 30-year old preacher-who founded his Revolution Ministries out of the punk scene and runs his unconventional church out of a hipster bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, recently lost major evangelical supporters and his biggest donor for declaring his ministry "gay-affirming." But Bakker, a slight man whose arms are covered in tattoos, is not particularly surprised. "The church is living in a bubble," he says, quietly. "Whenever you go back to the message of Christ, people get threatened."

Bakker takes the hypocrisy of the church personally. His televangelist parents, Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker, helped start the Trinity Broadcasting Network and the 700 Club in the 1970's, and later they founded the PTL (Praise The Lord) Club. At the height of their popularity, they pastored the largest church in the country, building a theme park, raising over million dollars a week, and living an extravagant, over-the-top lifestyle. From infancy, Jay appeared with his parents on television and entertained the faithful. "Everyone wanted to sit on our sofa and have their picture taken," he said. "Everyone wanted a piece of my parents." Then scandal hit. Amid rumors that he'd hidden an affair with a former church secretary, Jimmy Bakker was indicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years in prison (he served only five). Fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scar and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history."

The experience was searing for Jay Bakker. Just thirteen when his father was sent to prison, he began drinking heavily to deal with his sudden disillusionment about the meaning of Christian charity. "All of a sudden, our church and all our friends disappeared," he said. "Nobody visited my dad in prison; nobody wanted to be near us."

It took Jay years of despair to hear what he calls "the real story" about God, that "God loves us unconditionally. It's not about how we look or whether we act right." He began working in a coffeehouse in Phoenix with punks and street kids, "the lost people-the people we're not supposed to bother with," and started Revolution. Its goal: "to show all people the unconditional love and grace of Jesus without any reservations due to their lifestyle or religious background, past or future." And "all" meant all: unlike many evangelical churches, Bakker was clear that he could not compromise by excluding gay people or any other group.

Today, Revolution has gatherings in Williamsburg, Atlanta, and Charlotte. "Church, but not buildings," Jay is quick to say. "We work out of bars and tip the bartenders. We don't want to be a new denomination, or a franchise." Jay's deep distrust of religion - "Religion Kills" is the slogan on the home page of his popular Website, http://www.revolutionnyc.com/idea.htm - hasn't stopped him from working full time as a preacher, speaker, and evangelist, organizing young people from all backgrounds into informal communities. And it hasn't stopped him from his own kind of televanglism; his new series, "One Punk Under God" http://www.revolutionnyc.com/onepunkad.htm is featured on the Sundance Channel. "The church needs another Reformation," he says. "What's happening now [in the American church] is what happened when Luther read Galatians, and everything broke loose."

Jay's interest in reformation would make him seem a natural part of what gets billed as the "emerging church," a movement away from old forms that crosses evangelical and mainstream denominations. The emerging church, though, lives in tension between its grass roots and the marketing machine of traditional Christianity, which, from fundamentalists to Episcopalians, is constantly searching for ways to package old wine in a trendy new wineskin "the kids" will buy.

Jay, who grew up surrounded by teen crusades, has a refreshing skepticism about the attempts of established churches to claim relevance by decorating their message with cool graphics. "Emergent church is real," he says, "but it can also be just a prettier version of the same thing. It's like Mr. Potato Head-you can put a lot of s--t on it, stick a hat and hair on, say look, we're postmodern now: but it's still a potato."

The challenge, says Jay, is "thought and heart change," and a willingness to follow Jesus in unconditional love, whatever the cost. "The more I see of grace," he says, "the more willing I am to stand up for persecuted people and outsiders. And the more I realize I don't want to be about Christianity, but about Christ."