Pastor Preaches Metallica

(gibson.com) A pastor in Calgary, Alberta, Canada has been preaching the good word of… Metallica? Yes, and 49-year-old pastor John Van Sloten recently wrote about the experience in his new book, The Day Metallica Came to Church: Searching for the Everywhere God in Everything. Blabbermouth.net reports that The Miracle Channel’s Ufonic recently conducted an interview with the "pop culture pastor," during which he told the story of how he began using Metallica lyrics in his sermons.

"Some kid asked me at church to preach Metallica. I sort of said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and told him I’d pray about it, which is how we slough people off, and then the next day someone from our church called me with Metallica tickets," Van Sloten said. "So my wife and I went to Metallica and had an experience there, in a very deep communal sense that these people are all sharing a lament and a feeling of injustice about how screwed up the world is. That got my heart into it so I went back and read all the lyrics and as I was reading their lyrics I would have a biblical truth or a scriptural passage come at the same time."

Van Sloten was inspired to begin employing Metallica songs, including "Creeping Death," in his work as a pastor at the Christian Reformed New Hope Chuch.

"Metallica wrote [‘Creeping Death’] based on the 10 plagues and the Exodus," he said. "Basically you are quoting the same episode. I saw these connections between biblical truth and Metallica as heavy metal truth. When you put them side by side, it convinced me that Metallica had to be preached."

Once word got out, the members of Metallica sent a camera crew to film one of Van Sloten’s sermons and see what he was up to.

"It was huge that Metallica would be intrigued and actually want to film the service so that they could see a church preach about them," he said. "Not just in the way they thought people would preach about them but seeing them as Old Testament prophets in terms of some of the things they get angry about."