Topher Jones had already spent more than a decade building a career in electronic music before anyone knew him as Rave Jesus.
Performing under the names King Arthur and later King Topher, the Florida native played some of the biggest festivals in the world, including Tomorrowland’s main stage. His records found a global audience, and his career kept growing. Yet the moments that stayed with him had little to do with the crowds.
“My favorite part of all of it was having these conversations backstage at these festivals, getting to love on people and talking about Jesus and pray for them and see God move kind of behind the scenes in the dance music space,” Jones told RELEVANT. “It stirred me up to really think, ‘God is hungry to meet people in this space.’”
Jones began wondering what it would look like to pursue those conversations as intentionally as he pursued music.
In 2018, he invited a couple of friends from the dance music industry to a weekly prayer call. The group met to pray for artists, producers and others working in EDM. Without giving it much thought, he called it the “Rave Jesus” prayer call.
For the next five and a half years, Rave Jesus wasn’t an artist. It was simply a group of people praying for God to move in dance music. During the pandemic, the call opened to the public and quickly grew as industry professionals from around the world joined each week. Jones says people were meeting Jesus through those gatherings long before he ever released a song under the name.
When he felt God asking him to make Rave Jesus his music project, his first response was no.
“I didn’t want to do any of this,” he said. “People are like, ‘It’s such a great idea.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I said no to God so many times.’”
His hesitation came from a practical concern. Jones had spent years earning respect in mainstream dance music, and he assumed openly branding the project as Christian would close doors.
Instead, many of the people he expected to lose became some of his biggest supporters.
“All my friends in the dance music industry are just like, ‘Yeah, well, we know you. This isn’t anything weird. This is just you being you,’” he said. “They’re some of the biggest champions of it, even if they’re not Christians.”
The criticism, he says, has largely come from inside the church.
Many Christians hear “rave” and immediately associate it with drug culture or nightlife. Jones understands where that reaction comes from, but he believes it misses the point.
“The initial Christian response to anything new is apprehension and a bit fearful,” he said. “They’re like, ‘I don’t know, so this must be evil.’ That’s just not actually discernment. That’s maybe your preference or your lack of understanding of what’s actually going on here.”
Jones doesn’t see electronic music as spiritually different from any other genre. For him, it’s simply another way to tell stories and point people toward Jesus.
That philosophy influences where Rave Jesus performs. Rather than taking headline shows into churches, he books clubs and independent music venues.
“I want this to be a place where people that wouldn’t go to church might feel more comfortable showing up to a music concert than they would going to church,” he said.
Those spaces have produced some of the stories he remembers most.
After one show, the general manager of the venue pulled Jones aside. During the concert, a stranger had approached her and shared what he believed God wanted her to hear. He spoke about recurring nightmares connected to an abusive former relationship, something Jones says nobody at the venue could have known.
“She was like, ‘I have to rethink how I think about all of this stuff because that was not my impression of Christians or who God is,’” Jones recalled. “People are having legit encounters, knowing that there’s a God in heaven that loves them.”
He says those conversations happen backstage, too. Artists he once knew only as peers have started asking questions about faith.
“There are a lot of very, very well-known big people in dance music that are asking a lot of questions right now,” he said. “They have everything. They’re rich, they’re famous… and they’re not happy. They’re asking, ‘Explain this to me. I’m trying to understand.’”
Jones believes the timing has helped. Social media has made it easier for artists working outside the traditional Christian music industry to find an audience, and listeners have become more willing to explore genres that once sat outside the church’s comfort zone. Christian EDM, while still relatively small, has grown noticeably over the last couple of years.
Jones is happy to be part of that growth, but he doesn’t talk much about building a genre. He talks about reaching people who already love dance music.
“I’ve done this at the elite level of the industry,” he said. “People that like dance music go, ‘This is just amazing dance music.’ Then they dig in and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, this is about Jesus.’”
For Jones, that’s the assignment. The music draws people into the room. What happens after that is what keeps him coming back.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source relevantmagazine.com ’
