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"You'll find a lot of people who don't want to be honest about their faith on their TV shows, but they're fine for you to come on and do it," says John Tesh, a man who has become something of a media whipping boy ever since he made his Christian faith public ten years ago. "Whipping boy is probably putting it mildly. Crucifixion might be a better word," he adds.

Tesh is regularly criticized for switching careers—for leaving Entertainment Tonight, the syndicated TV show that he co-hosted with Mary Hart from 1986-1996, to pursue his passion of making music (which his critics lambaste as being only slightly better than Muzak). Yet most people don't realize that John Tesh was an accomplished keyboardist long before his face became famous. In 1983, he won an Emmy for Best Musical Composition with his Pan American Games Theme. He continued to score inspirational "new age" soundtracks for sports broadcasts such as Wimbledon tennis matches, the NFL and the NBA, all while hosting the TV program. He finally decided to leave the show in 1996, turning his back on his seven-figure salary. The gamble, of course, paid off. He has since sold millions of records.

"That was a big thing for him," says Louis Lapides, Tesh's minister. "When he was going through that transition, he made it very clear that music was his passion—not being a talking head for et. I was hoping he'd take that passion and move it towards a spiritual priority, which he has."

Looking for more
John Tesh, 50, had an innocuous enough start in life. His father fought in World War II and met his wife in the Navy hospital when the young nurse took out his appendix. Tesh's parents moved to Garden City, New York, when he was a young child.

As a teenager, Tesh was exposed to music and the arts and quickly took up playing the piano and trumpet. He knew then that he one day wanted to be a professional musician.

Tesh's family went to a Methodist church where his father ran the Sunday school and mother headed up the women's auxiliary. "Our whole lives revolved around the church," he recalls. "We were there three days a week and I went to church camp every summer."

But religion was a "chore" to Tesh. "I had no relationship with Christ," he says. "I had a relationship with the idea of going to church. You read hymn number whatever, looked up Scripture, stood up, sat down, and that was it."

In the early 1970s, while pursuing a communications degree at North Carolina State University, Tesh found himself surrounded by restless college students who were asking themselves, What is religion except an excuse to explain the things you can't explain in your life? "It sort of tore my head off," he says with a sigh. "I started to lose myself. I had no real moral compass." Still, he continued to pray every evening.

'Out of the closet'
Tesh's smooth voice and leading-man looks landed him jobs in local TV news and eventually as a sportscaster for CBS. He continued to do his music on the side.

It wasn't until 1991, while on Entertainment Tonight, that John Tesh met Connie Sellecca, now 47, the popular actress from several 1980s TV series whom he would end up marrying a year later. She took him to a small Messianic congregation called Beth Ariel Fellowship in Sherman Oaks, California. He was befriended there by pastor Louis Lapides and attended a Promise Keepers conference at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Well-known preacher Tony Evans delivered a message about the need for men to "come out of the closet" as Christians.

"You good Christian men are accepting God's blessings and you're in the closet with your faith, doors shut and the lights off," said Evans. "Come out of the closet, come out of the closet! Witness to others about what God means in your life."

Tesh jumped out of his seat. "I'm out!" he cheered.

He started questioning his job, wondering what he was doing, what was his purpose. He covered the lives of celebrities and promoted the shallow culture of the entertainment business. "When you get a little older you think, 'What's going to be on my tombstone?'" he says. "I really had nothing. That's when I decided to be a little more honest about my faith."

In on the joke
Connie Sellecca and John Tesh made waves in the media when they admitted in a People magazine story that they had abstained from sex before marriage. He also expressed his desire to pursue a full-time career in music. Suddenly, the media turned on him. He was no longer the handsome face of et—he had become "John Tesh, born-again Christian."

"The media can be brutal," says Lapides. "Believers are people who have standards and values and morals and are willing to stand up for them. A lot of the media are not necessarily committed to the idea that there is such a thing as right and wrong."

Tesh's pastor believes that a person must only concern himself with being answerable to God. "The most important thing in his life is that he's being faithful with the gifts and talents God has given to him. If you look throughout the Scriptures, you'll find others who were faithful to God and got flack for it. John's in good company," says Lapides.

As sales of his instrumental music soared, Tesh continued to be a mainstay in the punchlines of comedians. "It still happens now," he says. "You're sitting in your bed, getting ready to go to sleep, and you turn on Jay Leno and all of a sudden you hear yourself getting roasted."

Instead of getting defensive every time he was ridiculed, Tesh decided to be in on the joke. He appeared on the late night TV shows and made fun of himself.

"My whole thing is to be self-deprecating," he says. "The only way to deal with this stuff when somebody's making fun of you is to enjoy the joke—especially if it's well written. Some of this stuff with Leno, Conan O'Brien, and even Dennis Miller—it's really well written."

Tesh, as it turns out, never really thought of himself as being in the entertainment business. "I always thought of myself as reporting on it," he says. A big advantage from his years at et was seeing years and years of raw interview footage with celebrities, seeing how they reacted to public scrutiny. "I've seen people like Michael Bolton and others get so upset about it and fight it, which just makes it worse," he says, adding that often the most revealing material was footage that never made it on the air.

Last year, he again "went public" with another John Tesh record named A Deeper Faith, a collection of praise tunes he uses to lead worship at Beth Ariel. He never expected the blatantly Christian record to do as well as it did.

"One of the funnier things was to be on Regis & Kelly and to have Regis go, 'That was "I Could Sing of Your Love Forever" from A Deeper Faith. This album is spiritual in nature, is it not?"' Tesh says in a Regis-like voice. He laughs now at that almost surreal moment, but he's thankful that his track record in show business has brought him the freedom to play worship music on a secular talk show.

All in the family
In 1994, Tesh and Sellecca welcomed the birth of their daughter Prima, named after Sellecca's late father Primo Sellecchia. Tesh also has a close relationship with his 21-year-old stepson, Gib.

Sellecca continues to be a strong influence in Tesh's spiritual development. "A lot of people will stand up in a meeting at Beth Ariel and say, 'We need to really grow this congregation. We really need to spread the Word,'" he notes. "Well, Connie won't go to those meetings. But this year she's brought maybe 40 people to that church. She quietly goes about being a good Christian woman."

Tesh's new record, Christmas Worship, was released in October. The album contains a bit of everything—some worship numbers, a few pop tunes, and some holiday standards performed on piano and violin. Tesh is most enthusiastic about a song called "This Is Your Gift," which he says was inspired by the idea that no matter what has happened in the last year, God gives us the opportunity for a brand-new day.

"That is my anthem for this new year coming up," he says.

This Christmas, the Tesh family will throw a party for friends that will include a birthday cake to Jesus. "It's a time of a lot of music, too," he says. "I get a chance to travel around and do some services in churches."

What he won't be doing is giving traditional gifts, other than some presents under the tree for Prima. "We started about eight years ago doing this thing where we figure out how much money we were going to spend, then we take that money and take care of a [needy] family for a year."

Tesh says it's an idea that's becoming contagious: "We send out updates of what's happening with the other families we've sponsored in previous years, and what's happened is at least three or four of our friends are doing it now for other needy families. People are taking ownership of it."

And that, Mr. Leno, is nothing to laugh at.

A Christian Reader original article. Dan Ewald is a freelance writer living in Venice, California.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
Click here for reprint information.

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