There are Christians who look at the 24-7 missionaries and say what they are doing is ungodly, even dangerous. "Dressing up sexy and going out dancing -- what kind of example are you setting?" they say. "You look just like the rest of the sinners." In the 24-7 prayer room, Ward met an older man one afternoon who thought she should be wearing a hair shirt. "Can you imagine?" she says. She considers it for a minute. "Actually, it might be a scream."

Yet image consciousness is a question that 24-7 missionaries themselves have wrestled with. Twenty-five-year-old Lora Thomson, a long-term team member from Edinburgh, Scotland, who looks like she could be fronting an indie rock band, with her stubby pigtails and silver nose ring, used to believe that being a good Christian meant renouncing her trendy look and her passion for clubbing. "I thought I would have to be single forever and live in Africa and wear unflattering tops. I was totally not up for it." To prove her devotion, however, she decided to succumb. First she stopped buying music. Then she vowed to stop clubbing. But the biggest challenge was taking out her piercings. In the middle of a Christian students meeting, she heard God command her to take out first her nose ring, then her navel ring. When he told her to take out her five earrings, though, she put up a fight. "I said, 'This is getting ridiculous, God. Everybody has pierced ears.'" But God wasn't letting her off the hook. "Take them out," she heard him say. "Your identity is in me, not in what you wear." When it was over, she looked at the jewelry in her hand and burst into tears. "I couldn't believe I had been deriving all of my self-confidence from this little pile of metal."

Four years later, her nose ring safely back in place, Thomson no longer feels as if she's compromising her faith by looking trendy. "If you're willing to sacrifice something, God will always give it back to you," she says. Thanks to 24-7, she now sees that clubbing and Christianity are compatible, even complementary. "When I go clubbing, I know God is there, and I try to work with him, to keep him company," she says. "I can sense the pain of the people dancing around me, and I pray for them." Occasionally, however, she'll be in a club, and she won't feel God in the atmosphere at all. That worries her. "If God isn't there," she says, "it means his opposite is. The devil."

That's what the prayer team sensed one night when they went dancing at El Divino, a sprawling club on the Ibiza harbor, where VIP clients cruise up to the door in their yachts.

The music felt dark, oppressive. Women were gyrating and thrusting and running their hands over their bodies, and men were lapping it up. To combat that, Ward split up the prayer team into two groups, and they all prayed for God to make his presence felt. Joslin waved her hand over the crowd. Ward closed her eyes and opened her palms to the sky. Most of the prayer team members just seemed to be dancing, though. To the naked eye, they looked like any other clubber in the room, lost in the music and the darkness and the confusion of flickering lights.

Twenty minutes into their prayer session, the tenor of the music began to shift. The missionaries thought it sounded lighter, more joyous. OK, they conceded, it might have had something to do with the change of DJ. But what about that line she sampled from the Hallelujah Chorus, "King of kings, and Lord of lords," looping it over and over? If that wasn't a sign that God was in the house, they didn't know what was.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The evening of the short-term team's final prayer walk, the prayer room is on fire. Exultant worship music plays on the boombox. Joslin lies on the floor, pounding it with her fists. In the corner, Gardiner-Crehan is having a fervent one-on-one with God. The walls are covered in prophetic paintings that the team has made over the week, depicting what they believe God wants for Ibiza. One is an oceanic swirl of blue and green. Another portrays revelers in the West End leaping joyously from cages.

The missionaries have a goal tonight: They want to tell everyone they've been praying for that they're not just a bunch of nice people who give out fruit. They want to tell them that they came to Ibiza because of Jesus. It's their last night. They have nothing to lose.

That said, giving out fruit is a great way to start a conversation, and they still have loads of it left over from the other night, when they were banned from the Bull Bar. They stroll through the West End like Earth-bound flight attendants, plastic trays poised on their hands, asking, again and again, "Free fruit? You like some fruit?" Some people look at them suspiciously. But most grab at it, taking three, four pieces, shoving them ravenously into their mouths. "There isn't any vodka in it," they mumble to one another, disappointed.

Gardiner-Crehan is standing near the corner where he last saw Gary, scanning the street anxiously. "I really hope to see Gary tonight," he says. "I want to tell him that I'm here because Jesus died for our sins. That's why I gave him the ice cream." He flashes a smile at one of the touts from the Bull Bar, offering her a candy heart that says, "You're Fab," but his trademark enthusiasm seems to be flagging. Gary is nowhere in sight. Neither is Simba, the guy who offered to clean the beaches two nights ago.

Silvester is out, though, loping around in front of Ground Zero in a Marilyn Manson T-shirt, occasionally shouting out, "Rock and full, mother fuckers!" to passersby. Godec strolls down the hill to say goodbye and tell him that the prayer team is leaving the next day. "That's too bad," Silvester says. "Yeah," Godec says. They're both quiet for a minute. Then, before he can think about it too much, Godec takes the plunge. He tells Silvester that God loves him.

"I know it sounds kind of cheesy," Godec says, when he recalls the conversation later, at a place called the Beaver Bar, where two fellow missionaries are sharing a farewell shot of Sprite with their favorite bartender. "But it was really important to me that he hear that before I left." I ask him how Silvester reacted. "Well, he didn't scowl. But he didn't give his life to Jesus or anything."

For the rest of the missionaries, however, the final prayer walk is a bit of a letdown. There are no prophetic words from God that night, no moving prayer requests. There is nothing to do but change out of their 24-7 T-shirts and into their rave gear and go clubbing.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A couple of days after the short-term team leaves, I visit Silvester in the sock-strewn apartment he shares with two roommates over Ground Zero. It's 7 p.m. He has just woken up and pulled on a pair of jeans, but his shirt is off and he has a bar code tattooed on his back, with the word "Rejected" underneath. On either side of it, riding the swell of his deltoids, are two black angel wings.

As it turns out, Silvester knows a thing or two about Christianity. He was raised a Jehovah's Witness. It was a miserable experience. Forbidden from hanging out with outsiders, he found himself virtually friendless. At 17, he finally wrote his parents a letter telling them he was leaving the faith, and their house. Needless to say, he's not very big on religion.

"But I really liked the prayer guys," he says. "They were always sober, and they seemed to care about other people. They were like an oasis of sanity on the craziest street in the world."

I ask him how he felt when Godec told him that God loved him, and he laughs, a low-pitched ha-ha-ha, each syllable distinct. "I don't know," he says. "It's a nice thought, but I don't really believe in God." Over his head is a poster of flames shooting up from the earth, the word "Lucifer" floating above them; across from that, a drawing of a winking skull reads, "Freedom From Slavery." So it doesn't bother him that they want to convert him? He laughs again, and takes a drag of his hand-rolled cigarette. "Not at all," he says. "I don't think it will work. But I won't hold it against them."

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Recent Stories