Jay Bakker is the son of Tammy Fae and Jim Bakker, the former TV preachers whose empire went up in smoke in the 1980s.

This NYT Magazine article profiles Jay, who runs a church-less church that tends to souls as that feel as lost, broken and outcast as he once did.

An excerpt:

In an Atlanta coffeehouse one night last summer, Jay Bakker squinted through patchy stage lights and asked for prayer requests. It was the regular Wednesday-night Bible study for Revolution Ministries, and about 30 people, most of them in their 20's, sat at scattered tables and listened. Bakker wore green Vans, jeans, a Johnny Cash belt buckle and a black Social Distortion T-shirt, revealing arms tattooed to the wrists. A silver ring protruded through his lower lip, and black discs stretched both ear lobes.

''My friend Mitch got shot in the face and is in critical condition,'' one waifish young man with choppy brown hair said. ''I found out he pushed someone, and the guy shot him.''

Bakker, whose full name is Jamie Charles Bakker, acknowledged the prayer request and added one of his own, for his mother, whose cancer had spread from her colon to her lungs and throat. At 29, he still faintly recalls the cherubic kid who appeared almost from birth with his parents, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, on their syndicated television show, ''The PTL Club,'' then disappeared during the family's sexual and legal scandals in the 1980's. ''We're just trying to love people with no agenda,'' he told the group. ''That's hard, to be a Christian and have no agenda, and it's hard for people to think of a Christian with no agenda.''

This was an important night for the ministry, he announced. The Masquerade, a multistory rock club, had invited them to hold their weekly services there, with cocktail waitresses and a full bar. Though the club is secular, its three levels are called Heaven, Purgatory and Hell. Bakker said that Revolution's service would start on the middle level, Purgatory, but that if they drew enough people, they could move downstairs to Hell. He spoke without rhetorical flourish, moving the lesson informally from an Alanis Morissette lyric to the Old Testament story of Abraham, apologizing when he felt he was getting too preachy. A booth in the back sold T-shirts and buttons with the ministry's slogan, ''Religion Kills.''

''Maybe this is what the postmodern church is supposed to look like,'' he said. ''For the first time I feel we're having some peace in this, we're starting a church where there is no church. We're not the first to do this, but for Revolution, it's a big step.''

It was a big step for Bakker as well. He was 2 when his parents started Heritage USA, a 2,000-plus-acre Christian theme park, and 11 when the family's empire crumbled amid revelations that his father had had sex with a staff member named Jessica Hahn. In the years since, Jay Bakker has been a teenage alcoholic, a skate punk, a Christian pariah, a high-school dropout, a Gap employee and, for a while, a singer in a Social Distortion cover band. He wears this journey on his sleeves, literally: the tattoo on one wrist reads ''Broken''; on the other, ''Outcast.''