Brian Welch Leaves Korn for Christ

BAKERSFIELD — Brian Welch, guitarist for the rock band Korn, walked away from the group in February 2005 and announced on a local morning radio show that he had chosen Jesus Christ as his savior, after years of drug addiction that he says clinics, books, and promises to his daughter could not break.

The announcement followed an altar call at a Bakersfield church, where Welch had been attending services alone in a black hoodie for a month, always seated in the same row and leaving before the final hymn. He told the radio show he had chosen Jesus Christ as his savior and would dedicate his music to that, and the band's website posted a short note the same afternoon saying members respected his wishes.

Old friends from the music scene called wanting to know whether the stories were true. According to people close to him, Welch answered most of them the same way: he had found something that worked where everything else had failed.

The turning point

• Welch described rolling up a bill in a closet one afternoon and stopping mid-line.
• The prayer he prayed was simple: he asked for one parent who could stay clean.
• He threw the rest of the drugs away and told the congregation the craving never returned.
• When he invited others who felt the same weight to come forward, nearly two hundred did across three services that day.

Where he is now

On March 10 of that year, Welch was baptized in the Jordan River by Pastor Vietti. He began writing songs that sounded nothing like the down-tuned Korn tracks, saying he wanted the music to help kids the way nothing had helped him. A skate park he helped fund on Brundage Lane opened on the Fourth of July, drawing seventy-three local kids to the ribbon-cutting.

The road since has been long and uneven. Welch rejoined Korn in 2013 and splits time between the band and his project Love and Death. His daughter Jennea graduated from high school in Bakersfield in 2018, and Welch co-signed her first apartment near the old church. On March 3, 2025, he appeared unannounced at the Wednesday night prayer meeting, sat in the same row he had occupied twenty years earlier, opened the same Bible he had carried to Israel, and read aloud from Psalm 40. When he left, the truck he drove had the windows down and the radio off.

The verse that now marks his story is the one he keeps returning to: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

This account was compiled from church records, public statements by Welch and Korn, tour documentation, and firsthand accounts from members of the Bakersfield congregation.