Picture yourself in a cramped dorm room, a floor lamp casting shadows onto the Dave Matthews Band and Michigan hockey team posters stuck to the wall. From down the hall, the occasional eruption of yells and laughter slips out from the crack under the door to a room of boys beginning their night of partying. Now imagine five girls sitting in the dark room around a bowl of raw brownie batter, each huddled over her own copy of the Holy Bible. It is 9 p.m. on a Thursday night, and while most students are holed up in the stacks, sprawled on their couch watching TV or getting ready for a night at The Necto, these five girls, along with hundreds of others in different rooms all around Ann Arbor, will spend the next two hours sharing their stories of how Jesus has touched their lives in the past seven days. Tonight is the weekly meeting of their Life Group, which is one of the many services offered by New Life Church.

New Life: Church for the Next Generation was officially recognized as a church six years ago, when Steve Hayes became the first full-time pastor. Since then, "God has done amazing things through NLC," its website says.

In less than a decade, the Church has gone from nothing to being a staple in hundreds of lives through the use pop music, hip language and the creation of a social community founded on strict adherence to the Bible.

"Ever since I first attended, I knew it was going to be the church," said Rebekah Milian, a Kinesiology junior who joined New Life in her first week at the University. Milian grew up as a pastor's daughter, so finding a church at school was very important to her.

The Sunday church services - which start promptly at 10:01 a.m. and 12:01 p.m. - have grown from just 60 people to 500 regulars; the Life Group attendance has gone from 20 to 250 students. According to its website, "More than 40 students receive Christ each year, with another 80 people receiving Christ through NLC mission trips."

The seeds of New Life took root not in the older, more conservative population often associated with practicing Christians, but instead among students at the University. It is the younger generation's dedication to New Life that enabled it to become a part of the Ann Arbor community and to grow into what has become one of the best-attended churches in the city.

A new form of praise

New Life differs from traditional churches, a fact that is obvious from the moment a New Life member into the congregation hall - also know as Auditorium 3 of the Modern Language Building. The MLB leads a double life. By week, it's the unremarkable lecture hall that houses hundreds of LSA students and their professors. By weekend, it's transformed: It's chalk boards are hung with heavy curtains and its lecture stage is taken over by rock-band equipment - drum set, electric piano, amplifiers - and a single microphone. MLB 3 becomes the meeting place for New Life members to praise God.

For 30 minutes - half the service - the audience bobs, sways and in some cases head-bangs to catchy tunes laced with lyrics such as "Jesus, you are the savior of my soul," or "You're the only one I could live for."

The audience - which fills the large auditorium and comprises mostly college students and 20-something couples with babies - can in some cases be found during the songs with their arms outstretched above them and their eyes tightly shut. It's as if the music brings them closer to God, just as prayer does in a traditional service. Indeed the songs - whose lyrics are projected onto the same screen as a professor's Power Point presentation - are the only chance the congregation has "to praise Him for everything," said the lead singer, Karen Ostafinski, dressed in a vintage T-shirt and zip-up hoodie. She graduated from the University in 2003.

The half-hour of surprisingly well-performed music (tunes that incidentally are the type that stick in one's head) is New Life's alternative to depressing organ music and lengthy prayer, which often turns younger Christians off from conventional churches, said Sarah Keyes, a student a Eastern Michigan University who is thinking about joining New Life. The upbeat music gets people moving and involved, she said, and it helps them feel closer to God at the same time.

Milian said that the music is one of her favorite aspects of New Life, along with the sermons which are surprisi ngly accessible to students.