Big House is the biggest hit by Audio Adrenaline, one of the biggest Christian bands of the last 15 years. The song opens Adios: The Greatest Hits, which was released in August. But underneath the song’s catchy, upbeat surface is a deeper story about how the members of an increasingly popular band decided to devote significant portions of their time, money and celebrity to the cause of impoverished orphans in Haiti. Here, they tell a part of that story.
It’s the summer of 2005; and even though the members of Audio Adrenaline have been on the road for months, they decide to take another journey — to the poor Haitian town of Cyvadier, where their foundation is building an orphanage for Haitian children.
Before there was Audio Adrenaline, band member Mark Stuart’s parents served as missionaries in Haiti. Mark’s time in Haiti had a profound impact on him.
“I’ve always had a love for Haiti,” Mark says. “It was something that has been a part of me, way before Audio Adrenaline. This is like home for me. When I come here, I just melt into who I am supposed to be — if that makes any sense.
“God gave me a heart for the country of Haiti and for its beautiful people, especially the children. Soon afterward, I embarked on my crazy career with Audio Adrenaline. God has so blessed us over the years, and one of our responses to those blessings has been to start The Hands and Feet Project in Cyvadier, Haiti.”
From a Song to a Mission
Haiti has shaped the band members’ lives as well as their music.
“The lyrics for the song ‘Big House’ were actually lyrics to a song that the kids taught us to sing here,” says Stuart. “I was in junior high or high school on the north shore of Haiti working with my parents, and these kids would be singing this song. We wrote ‘Big House’ using those lyrics. It’s just a song about the hope of heaven.
“If you’re a kid living here, you most likely live in a hut with a mud floor and a tin roof. You’ve got 10 family members sleeping with you. You might even have to sleep in a chair or something. One day, you look down the street and see a house. You think, I wonder if that’s what heaven is like — a big house with everything we need: a room, a bed and all the food we need. Someday, I’ll go there, to my Father’s house. So that song means a lot to the kids here.”
The band purchased a parcel of land in August 2004; and today the Hands and Feet Project is helping orphans like Thamara, whose mother died about a year after she was born.
From a Mission to a Crusade
Meanwhile, members of Audio Adrenaline have served as public champions for an understanding of Christian living that balances faith and action. Here’s how they express that understanding:
In James 1:27, the writer made this astounding statement: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after the widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (NIV).
What’s also fascinating is what the verse doesn’t say. The verse doesn’t say that the religion God accepts as pure and faultless is one in which we are involved in one more Bible study or one more church activity. Yet isn’t that what we’re told so often? “If you want to live the kind of life that God sees as pure and faultless, then you’ve got to try real hard not to ________________ [you fill in the blank] and be involved in as many church activities as possible.” It’s like we equate busyness for God as intimacy with God.
All this begs an obvious question: How are we as a church, the incarnation of Jesus in this world, doing at living this teaching? Wouldn’t it be amazing to see the church known more for what or who it stands for than for what or who it stands against? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see the church known more for how it loves because of what it believes than by what it merely says it believes?
Christianity, at its core, is not about sitting, waiting and hoping for some future event to happen. It is about taking action in the here and now because we believe that something has already happened and is happening — something beautiful that makes all the difference in this world.
As we sing in the song “Hands and Feet”:
I saw the pain and I turned my back
Why can’t I do the things I want to?
I’m willing yet I’m so afraid
You give me strength
When I say …
I want to be Your hands
I want to be Your feet
I’ll go where You send me
I’ll go where You send me
Or as a wise man said once, “You must be the change you want to see in the world” [Mahatma Gandhi]. We believe that to do anything less would be, well, anti-Jesus.
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Haiti at a glance
The country of Haiti has a population of just over 8 million people. The unemployment rate is a staggering 80 percent. The majority of the Haitian population lives on less than $1 a day, with the median income being only about $60 a year. Only 25 percent of the population has access to safe drinking water, and less than 30 percent of the population has access to adequate sanitation. Just under half of the population is literate. In addition, the average life expectancy for Haitians is less than 50 years.
All of this makes Haiti the most impoverished country in the Western hemisphere, and children are hit especially hard by the widespread poverty:
• Of the just over 8.2 million people who live in Haiti, children under the age of 18 make up almost half of the population.
• There are 1.2 million children under the age of 5. Over half of these children suffer from malnutrition.
• Only 25 percent of Haitian children have the vaccines they need to survive, making Haiti the country with the lowest vaccination rate in the world.
• The country of Haiti spends $21 per child for public and private health care, compared to $38 per child in sub-Saharan Africa and $202 per child in Latin America.
• The infant mortality rate in Haiti is 76 of every 1,000 live births, more than twice that of any other country in the Western Hemisphere.
• Only 53 percent of Haitian children ages 6 to 12 are enrolled in school.
• Only 14 percent of Haitian children ages 13 to 18 are enrolled in school.
• Only 43 percent of students entering first grade ever reach the fifth grade, and only 29 percent ever make it to sixth grade.
• Only 38 out of 1,000 children who enter the first year of primary school finish secondary school.
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This article was excerpted with permission from the book, ‘The Hands and Feet Project‘ by Audio Adrenaline with Mike DeVries (Regal Books/Gospel Light www.regalbooks.com.) For information on the band’s work in Haiti, contact: Hands and Feet Project, P.O. Box 682105, Franklin, TN 37068-2105, (615) 300-7497, handsandfeetproject.org
