From Rocky Past to Spiritual Renewal

As he chugs caffeine at a Westside cafe, Barry Taylor’s spiky shock of unruly red hair sprouts as though groomed by a drunken comb.

It’s nearly noon but his eyelids still have that up-all-night droop. His fingernails are painted a dullish gray. Hoops hang from his earlobes; bracelets dangle from both wrists.

“I don’t much look like a guy who runs his own church, do I?” he asks in the lilting accent of his native England.

No, he doesn’t. But with Taylor and his Santa Monica-based Sanctuary Church, pretty much all the regular rules and expectations are thrown right out the religious window.

His is a congregation of questioning outcasts and unhealed souls who have looked high and low for the right language and mind-set in which to communicate with God.

And the 42-year-old Taylor is perhaps the most imperfect soul of all, a man who searches to reconcile a debauched past with a decidedly modern approach to being Christian.

Twenty years ago, Taylor was a world-traveling roadie with the heavy metal band AC/DC--a man with a bingeing personality who did speed to stay awake around the clock and sexually exploited the young groupies he met on tour.

Those were the crazy, carefree late 1970s and early ‘80s, before the sobering onset of AIDS, when traveling with a world-known rock ‘n’ roll band meant a free ticket to sexual overdose--so many sex partners that Taylor cannot even begin to remember the faces, let alone the names.

Eventually, however, he began to question not only the lifestyle, but himself--and has ended up the spiritual center of a local religious movement in which personal respect, especially for women, is paramount.

Popular Culture Found in Messages

Taylor leads his flock as a fellow sinner who has fallen enough times to know what the hurt feels like. Quoting Dutch writer Henri Nouwen, he says it’s silly to imagine that people can be led out of the desert by someone who’s never been there before.

“I’m just as conflicted and paradoxical as the next person,” he says.

No one has a title at Taylor’s church. Meetings among church elders aren’t held regularly, just when there’s a pressing issue. On Sundays, services start about 11 a.m., or whenever people arrive.

Sanctuary members don’t have their own church and have no plans to build one. Instead, they rent the Seventh-day Adventist church at 19th Street and Arizona Avenue each Sunday.

At the church, visitors are greeted by Taylor’s six-piece band, Wonderland, which begins and ends each gathering with a musical set--not all of which has a religious bent.

During the Sunday service, formal prayers are rare, and use of the Bible isn’t heavy-handed--there’s just some plain talk about modern life and how to develop one’s spirituality amid its chaos.

Some who have visited find the church too liberal, and even some Sanctuary members say Taylor’s talks, while moving, lack a sufficient connection to Scripture and are, in effect, God-lite.

“He’s very inspirational, but you don’t hear the actual Word,” said 36-year-old Rob Chisman. “He doesn’t talk about God.”

Taylor disagrees. “I’m 100% Christian. Sanctuary isn’t any New Age blender, picking from here and there, creating our own cafeteria religion,” he says.

“I talk a lot about God, I just don’t employ the religious lingo. You’re not going to get too many ‘Praise the Lords,’ ‘Hallelujahs’ or ‘God bless you, brothers,’ from me.”

What you get is popular culture. Taylor’s 90-minute services often play like therapy sessions, such as the discussion Taylor led on a recent Sunday about keeping one’s sense of identity despite the costs. He began by asking the 80 people present about their high school in-crowd and how they had fought to become part of it. Then people broke into groups and shared their stories. Finally Taylor lectured, using modern images of nightclub bouncers and compact disc covers to illustrate his point that society breeds unhealthy conformance.

“I haven’t edited God out of the dialogue, I’ve just introduced human relationships into the dialogue about God,” he says.

It was the last job Taylor had in mind.

Growing up outside London in a nonreligious, working-class family, he got a job as a sound technician for such musical acts as the Bay City Rollers, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Black Sabbath, the Stylistics and Teddy Pendergrass.

Then came his gig with AC/DC: several years of doing 250 shows a year worldwide, remaining on the road for nine months at a time. The experience tore him from his roots, made him feel like a visitor in his own hometown.

Taylor said: “You’d come home with your tour jacket, your money and your road stories and you didn’t fit in anymore.”

Search for Higher Existence

It meant leaving behind the emotional wreckage as he hopped on the bus and rumbled off, bleary-eyed, toward his next concert. With the womanizing, Taylor admits that he was, like AC/DC’s signature song, on a “Highway to Hell.”

“You had one girl and a couple of hours later, you were out looking for another one,” he said. “It became a sport--how much could you demean someone and get away with it and not care about it?”

He began to look so unhealthily thin from the drugs and all-night benders that a friend once called him a “screaming skull.”

“I got so disgusted at people, especially the women and their willingness to be used,” he said. “Then I realized that it’s all well and good to point the finger, but what about me? I’m part of this.”

He began to look for a higher existence, but dismissed religion--especially Christianity--as “the oppressor of the working class.”

But Taylor kept searching, reading holy books such as the Koran and the Bible. “There I was on the road--dressed in black, my voice croaky--with speed up my nose and a religious book in my hand.”

Reading the Gospels, he was hooked on the stories of the selflessness of Jesus. “I was struck by the disparity between the way I treated people and the way I wanted to treat them but didn’t.”

“Other religions were more exotic, but I also didn’t see myself shaving my head, wearing an orange robe and moving to the side of a mountain any time soon. Jesus looked like a good guy to hang out with for a while.”

In the early 1980s, Taylor left AC/DC and moved to Southern California, where for 11 years he ran a church in Lake Arrowhead. After working with a Westside church called Hiding Place, he started Sanctuary three years ago.

Former Hiding Place members say Taylor was asked to leave the church. Taylor acknowledges that his life was in disarray, that he had been divorced and had engaged in an affair.

At Sanctuary, members say, people aren’t judgmental. They aren’t each other’s moral police force.

“A fully dressed hooker could come walking through those doors and she’d be accepted here,” said Barbara Ross of Cheviot Hills. “How many churches can you say that about?”

Faith in Redemption Found in Forgiveness

The congregation consists of young artists, actors and other Hollywood overachievers--many of whom, Taylor says, probably never dreamed of finding themselves inside a church on Sunday morning.

There are young women in black cocktail dresses, men in jeans and tattoos, women holding babies--nobody over the age of 50. It’s a sensitive, New Age-looking group. People hug when they meet. Strangers smile and make eye contact.

To Eddie Gibbs, a professor at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Taylor is “trying to relate the Gospel to a whole new group, the Generation Xers, the first generation in American history to begin the spiritual search outside the regular church.”

Dan Wooding, a former journalist who co-authored a biography of Taylor titled “Singing in the Dark,” added: “Barry Taylor has his finger on modern-day culture like nobody I’ve ever met in the church.”

Several Sanctuary members--including some women--said they were willing to forgive Taylor for his womanizing past.

“Open my closet,” said one, “and you’ll find worse stuff.”

That kind of reaction bolsters Taylor’s faith in redemption.

“I’m well aware of the dark side of life,” he says. “I know what it’s like to screw up really badly and not be who you want to be and feel really lousy about it.

“A lot of people feel that way. And we can all learn from our mistakes.”