Former alt-rock frontwoman tells how she found Christianity

Rock ’n’ roll types typically don’t show up in church until they have to. Lacey Sturm, the former frontwoman of the alternative rock band Flyleaf, said she was no exception.

“We all have a story of how we got here this morning,” she told the congregation Sunday at La Croix Church in Cape Girardeau.

She joined them for worship services and shared how she first came to church: punishment.

But while Johnny Cash’s redemptive arc stretched over the course of a long career, Sturm found her way from depression and atheism to Christianity before she was out of her teens.

She said her mother already had one child when she became pregnant with Sturm at 16 years old. The pregnancy, doctors told her, would not be easy. Some encouraged her to seek an abortion.

Lacey Sturm performs as her husband, Josh, plays guitar Sunday at La Croix Church in Cape Girardeau.Fred Lynch

“It was very dangerous for her to have me, and we both almost died [during the delivery],” Sturm said. “But we survived.”

It was a struggle, Sturm said. They were poor.

“But [my mother] always tells me to say this: ‘God provided,’” she said.

About age 10, Sturm saw her mother’s sister marry an abusive man who eventually beat her 3-year-old cousin to death.

“I stopped believing in God,” Sturm said. “I also felt this obligation to stay sad for him ... a loyalty, in a way.”

Lacey Sturm presents her Christian testimony Sunday at La Croix Church in Cape Girardeau.Fred Lynch

Her sadness, she said, became self-sustaining.

“The Bible says to meditate on things that are good and lovely and pure,” she said. “I did the opposite. ... Meditating on sad things to stay sad.”

After a while, she said, her rejection of God and good things bled into personal relationships. She isolated herself from upbeat people.

“If you were happy, I didn’t trust you,” she said. “I only hung out with people who were like me.”

By this time, she was 16, partying and utterly depressed. She recalled the types of relationships into which her lifestyle led her.

“I would cling onto [other people] like they were God,” she said. “But only God is God enough to be God to you.”

She had strayed too far to bring herself back even if she wanted to, she recalled, and she didn’t want to.

“I hated church, hated Christians,” she said. “I felt judged there.

“I always looked for a reason to end my life,” she said.

She said she wished she hadn’t forgotten the world around her and that other people in it wanted love just as much as she did.

“It’s not all about your pain,” she said. “It’s all between us and God.”

She told the La Croix congregants she decided to kill herself when she was 16. She said goodbye to a select few at school and ditched class early but found her grandmother at home instead of an empty house. Her grandmother forced her to go to church with her.

“I sat in the back of the room and hated everybody there,” she said, even when the pastor said he felt a “suicidal spirit in the room.”

He asked those struggling to come up for prayer. Sturm didn’t. Instead she headed for the door. An elderly man stopped her, though, and told her he’d pray for her. He told her God would be a better father to her than the father she didn’t have at home.

“He just guessed right, I thought,” Sturm said, admitting her purple hair, buzzed underneath, and Pantera T-shirt suggested daddy issues.

But when the man hugged her, she said, she was astonished — and terrified — to realize she suddenly believed God to be real and loving. At first, she said, accepting love was hard.

“But in the presence of God, you want justice for yourself, almost,” she said.

From there, she became a Christian and started Flyleaf with other Christians. Their eponymous debut album went platinum.

“And that’s why I’m still alive,” she said.

Sturm sang with Flyleaf for 10 years until departing in 2012.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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