"WELCOME," SAYS THE PREACHER, "to the kegger for Christ!"

Peter Illyn passes a cold one to Drew Grow, guitarist for the Portland folk-rock band Five O'Clock People, and breathes in the glory around him. On the floor of an ancient volcanic crater hidden deep within Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest, blue lupines and yellow mountain daisies poke through an open meadow padded with beargrass and moss. Illyn is taking a break from Tomfest to lead Grow and Five O'Clock People bassist Kris Doty, drummer Andy Uppendahl, and Doug Van Pelt, editor of the Christian rock magazine HM, on a day hike to experience God's good work in the almighty flesh. And here it is! God's rocks, God's moss, God's trees, God's (slap!) mosquitoes. "This," Illyn tells the gathered musicians, "is what I like to call one of my quiet places."

It was in a spot like this that Illyn experienced the epiphany that led him to become God's padre of wild places. "I was a Foursquare pastor for nine years," he says, launching into his stump speech. "And then about ten years ago I took a sabbatical. I got two llamas, Frank and Jesse, and we went on a hike up the Pacific Crest Trail. We walked for four months, a thousand miles from the California state line to the Canadian border. I read my Bible and prayed every night. I was looking for guidance. I was the associate pastor at a church in Portland, but the work just didn't seem to fit me.

"And then one night I stopped in a place called Big Crow Basin. It's up in the Norse Peak Wilderness in central Washington. Incredible place, thousands of crows flying up at us, squawking—it's called Big Crow Basin for a reason, you know?—and this fog, knee-high, just creeping over the valley, all white in the moonlight. A little after midnight, a herd of elk came into camp. I unzipped my tent and stood there, shaking because it was so cold, looking at all these elk around me. And then this one big old bull, had a full rack of horns, he lifted his head and just bellowed at the sky. At that moment, I fell in love with the wild.

"I spent the rest of my hike reading scripture, trying to figure out how God thought about the wild. What I discovered is that the wild is part of God's household. In the story of Noah, God made a covenant with mankind and every living thing—all the domestic animals, the wild animals, the birds in the air. The earth is not just for us. John 3:16 says, 'God so loved the world that he gave his only Son'—God so loved the world, all of creation.

"I went in as a preacher on a sabbatical," he says. "I came out a Christian environmentalist."

And so began Illyn's peripatetic crusade. He resigned his associate pastorship in 1989 and, with the help of an inheritance and some investments, earned an MBA in marketing at Portland State University. He kept his wife, son, and daughter fed by running llama-packing trips into the mountains and crafted his eco-evangelist message by speaking to any church group that would have him. In 1996 he merged Christians for Environmental Stewardship with the international environmental organization Green Cross and became Green Cross's West Coast director. When Green Cross folded in 1998, Illyn approached Target Earth, a 10,000-member Christian nonprofit organization based in Pleasanton, California, that combats poverty and environmental destruction, about taking on his mission. For the past two and a half years he's served as Target Earth's regional director in the Pacific Northwest. His job is fluid. One week he's barnstorming through evangelical prayer breakfasts in Montana; the next he's preaching to a student group at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma or holding a phone session with the leader of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Illyn hopes some of that wilderness magic will rub off on the band members chilling in the afternoon sun. "I came up here one time with a friend of mine who was fighting leukemia," he tells them, opening his arms to the splendor around him. "We spent the afternoon just being quiet. Listening." The rockers nod behind their sunglasses. Dude.

If he can move these musicians, Illyn is convinced he can green up the future of the entire evangelical movement. "This generation is struggling to choose its values right now," says Illyn. "And bands are becoming their opinion leaders.... Where we're making progress isn't with the 65-year-olds—it's the 25- and 30-year-olds. In ten years they're going to be the agents of change. It's easy to ignore an outside voice, but it's more difficult to resist the call for environmental stewardship when it's coming from within."

Illyn believes that evangelical Christians will accept environmentalism as they've come to accept racial equality. "Thirty years ago people were openly justifying their bigotry," he says. "Fifteen years ago there was silent bigotry. Now, these younger Christians find tremendous value in racial diversity. Ten years from now we'll look back on the issue of environmental stewardship and go, 'Why was there even a question?'"