Christian group shows strength

A 6-foot, 300-pound man grabs a wooden Louisville Slugger in front of a packed crowd at the South Hills Evangelical Church and tucks it under his leg.

Clarence Lee curls his leg over the bat. His teeth clench. The bat snaps. Splinters fly into the crowd.

He picks up the shorter end of the bat and hoists it up perpendicularly to the longer end, forming the shape of a cross. Before chucking the split ends away, he shatters another bat over his spine.

The Mike Hagen Street Team performs these spectacles for school assemblies and community centers all over America, and a few others across the world, but the strongman act is only half the routine.

“The Strength team is a tool that God uses all over America to touch people in a powerful way,” Hagen declared on the stage, as he listed social ills the Strength Team tries to heal through evangelical Christianity.

“We got young people walking into schools with handguns and shooting each other,” Hagen said.

Hagen told the audience the only way to overcome violence, teenage suicide and drug use is through God.

“In this crazy world we live in, it’s important to stand up for God,” he said.

He also warned that God was not the source of the catastrophes of the world. Hagen said they are caused by what he calls “the enemy.”

“The Devil, he’s a roaring lion. He wants to steal, kill and destroy,” he said, enunciating each syllable with a shake of his microphone. “We’re the Strength Team, and we’re here to wage war on the Devil!”

The audience rose to their feet and roared along with Hagen, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

The act started out with a bang. One by one, all around the stage, members of the Strength Team broke towering stacks of bricks and cinderblocks with their elbows and foreheads, while thundering hard rock played in the background.

Scores of kids, mostly between the ages of 7 and 13, screamed and hollered with glee as one man blew up a hot water bottle using only air from his lungs until it exploded.

Minutes later, the whole room had their heads bowed as they listened to Lee orating the story of finding his father lying face down without a pulse just outside his home 13 years ago, before he entered the ministry.

He recalled how he and his brothers took turns trying to resuscitate him.

“Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. After he said his father had died, mournful sobs could be heard coming from parents and children who tried to hold back their tears through the moment of silence.

“Jesus wants you in your heart and he wants you to breathe,” Lee yelled, before the audience erupted with cheers as they rose to their feet.

As the show progressed, the stunts grew shorter, and the sermons grew longer. They would lead the audience in prayer, building up to a major feat, or, in one case, they distributed an enveloped to the crowd for financial offerings.

“I’m gonna thank God for that. Amen,” Hagen said as several people in the audience shouted in sync with him.

Before Strength Team volunteers accepted the “offering envelopes” in empty KFC paper buckets, Hagen thanked the Missoula SHEC community center for providing a venue, food, transportation and volunteers free of charge.

Short cheers fluttered out through the crowd in one of the final stunts of the night as a man ran through an industrial 2-by-4 and broke it apart with the brunt of his body.

After that, people were called upon to give their hearts to Jesus in a prayer service that lasted more than a half hour.

By the end, nearly half the stage was huddled to the front of the room, led by Hagen, who towered over them in prayer as they handed out church DVDs and other biblical materials.

As the ending prayer continued, and people filtered out of the community center to their cars, some gathered in line at the merchandise tables in the back.

In the middle, there was a small stack of T-shirts. It was the same T-shirt a young child no more than eight had been wearing on the stage earlier that night.

In bold letters it declared, “God’s Army.”