Dc Talk is reuniting. For one song. On a solo project. Again.

Toby, Mike and Kevin appear together on "The Cross," the second track on Kevin Max's upcoming album The Blood. Though "The Cross" is a rocker, the album is being billed as one in which Max eschews his usual rock stylings as he explores music that resonated with him when he was younger.

Forefront Records finally has a new rock and roll band to add to their roster that once included the legends of Christian rock--Audio Adrenaline, dc Talk, Geoff Moore and the Distance, Bleach--and has of late been a quiet label with only tobyMac, Audio A, and Rebecca St. James making new albums.

I arrived with my wife and two of my closest friends at the Larsen Student Union on Grantham, PA’s Messiah College campus around 7:45 PM. Grantham is close to the busy lifestyle of the “big” city of Harrisburg but it’s a quiet country town where one can get away from it all.

There were already about 100 college students sitting at round tables eating their dinner, doing some studying (finals are coming in a few weeks) and in the corner there was a billiards table where a few guys were shooting pool. My wife and I have been out of school now almost three years, so we both felt slightly out of place but spent a few minutes reminiscing about our time in college.

In 1991 a blonde-haired Seattle-area misfit named Kurt Cobain changed the landscape of rock music with the opening guitar rift to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," easily the most important rock song of a decade that was only a year old and perhaps among the most essential of all time.

At around the same time, a three-man hip-hop/rock/soul group of aggressively evangelical Christian vocalists had released their sophomore album, Nu Thang. Free at Last, which came one year later, was an extremely popular effort that would eventually be hailed as a classic. But in the wake of the album's success, the crew began to plot a masterpiece that would represent a dramatic shift in their approach to songwriting—away from the poppy mainstream-style rap that made them popular in the first place, and onto the grunge bandwagon that Cobain's band Nirvana had helped build.

The move was transparently a commercial one, but it was also sublime. The anthemic title track from Jesus Freak, the resulting album, became the Christian "Teen Spirit." Enduring gems like "Colored People," "What if I Stumble" and a cover of Charlie Peacock's "In the Light" buttressed what could easily be called the best Christian rock album in history. It was our answer to Nevermind, the Nirvana album that few children of the 90's do not have in their collection, and it changed us along with the industry dc Talk had helped to create.

Last year marked the tenth anniversary of the album, so this feature is a bit late in coming. But what follows here is an ode to Jesus Freak from a generation of writers who count it among the crowning achievements in modern religious songwriting. Some of what you'll read is from staff at this website, some is from friends of ours, and a lengthy piece contains the thoughts of one of the men who made it all happen. All of this, it's safe to say, comes from people who sung along with the lyrics "I don't really care if they label me a Jesus freak/There ain't no disguisin' the truth," and meant every word.