(Photo Credit: Mike Segar)
A music festival with heavy metal, punk, hip-hop and pop music might seem like an unusual place to get baptized, but Creation is a festival with strict rules: no alcohol, no drugs and no sex before marriage.
"It's like the Christian version of Woodstock, basically, except it's neat and clean," said Victor Gibson, 37, from Manheim, Pennsylvania, who brought his wife and five children aged from five to 14 to the four-day festival.
"Take a look back at the crowd," he said, as thousands of fans held their arms in the air, pounding out the beat of a song by Christian band Kutless, whose sound Gibson likened to Metallica. "No rioting, no fighting, nobody getting beat up."
Lily Ellerson, a 12-year-old from Maryland, was one of nearly 200 people who were baptized in a pond on the final day of Creation, which drew around 70,000 people in late June.
Ellerson said she decided to be baptized after hearing a speaker at one of the side-events at the festival.
"I felt God was there," Ellerson said. "I could just see him, I could feel him all around me, and I thought I wanted to give my full heart to him."
Ellerson came with a church youth group of 47 people, including her cousin Emily White, who volunteers at the church.
"You really do feel like, wow, we are in the Kingdom right now and right here," White said. "You're living in a community of 70,000 people, without the benefit of electricity or water, yet everybody loves each other, you don't hear about things being stolen or fights.
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