INTERVIEW
Inhabited’s Sara Acker: A One Girl Revolution
By Jennifer E. Jones
CBNmusic Producer
CBN.com
– Relient K. Day of Fire. Today’s Christian rock scene is mostly a boy’s club. But that doesn’t bother Sara Acker. She’s the redheaded frontwoman of Fervent Records’ Inhabited, a role she’s proudly played since their independent release in 2003. Now Sara and her four-man band are changing the way we rock.
“Back when we formed the band we weren’t sure that was what we were going to do,” she tells CBNmusic. “We enjoyed it and liked the ministry aspect. We didn’t get seriously passionate about it until three years ago.”
Before the passion came, Sara and her brother Marcus led worship for their church. When “Rescue Me”, a single off their indie Innerview, hit high on the charts, Inhabited weighed their options carefully.
“It took a while for us to make a decision because we wanted to make sure it was right,” she says.
The big step paid off. The Revolution dropped last week, and a fall tour is in the works with Todd Agnew and Starfield.
Sara has not only traveled with the band but also with Teen Mania. These missionary adventures took her to Russia, Mexico, Honduras and elsewhere. “One was to Atlanta, Georgia, where we did inner city work,” she says. “Then I went back to Russia. I went with my best friend, and we taught English in a Christian school for a couple of months.
“We went to Panama and went to a jungle. I got to stay with a tribe. There was no electricity; we were in huts; we drank out of the river. It was really cool to experience different cultures.”
The experiences impacted her deeply and gave her a greater appreciation for her home country. “In America, we’re not only blessed with money and the ability to make money but also the freedom of religion,” she says.
If teens are thinking about going on missions, they have an enthusiastic thumbs up from Sara. She’s a walking testimony of the power that missionary work has to change lives.
“A lot of times when you’re younger you go to church and learn about God but how does that apply as far as sharing it,” she says. “When you go on foreign mission trips, it puts you out of your comfort zone. I wasn’t always comfortable. It taught me how to trust God. He was always faithful even when I wasn’t sure I was saying the right thing. God would always move in spite of me.”
Sara returned to the States with a renewed passion to fulfill the Great Commission and believes that young people will feel the same.
“There’s so much to do here, and there’s no language barrier,” she says. “There’s many things we can do for outreach in our own town.”
Her ministry didn’t stop with Teen Mania. As Inhabited tours, she encounters fans every night with serious issues. “I think a lot of the kids are hurting,” she says. “Maybe they’ve fallen into sin, and they feel so isolated that they’re ashamed to confess it. Then they get under condemnation.
“There are a lot of cutters out there. That is rampant, and it’s in the churches. We get flooded with emails from kids saying, ‘I’m cutting myself. I don’t know how to quit’… They are screaming out for attention. Some of them will hide where they cut, but some of them cut so that people can see it and see how bad they’re hurting on the inside. They just want somebody to notice them. A lot of them say they just want to feel alive. I know it sounds strange but they’re just really hurting.”
Ministry is just as important as rocking out for Sara and Inhabited. Part of their show is touching the lives of troubled youth.
“I think they’re not really getting it that they have a purpose, and they have a hope and a reason to live,” she says. “We try to give them advice straight up from the Bible – verses about the mind, guarding your mind, renewing your mind. Just trying to get them to see that we really have victory in Jesus, and it’s not just a myth.”
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