GEORGE, Wash. – The hair and beard may have turned to gray and there are a few more wrinkles in the face now than there were 25 years ago, but the Rev. Harry Thomas still feels like a kid when it’s time for another Creation Festival.

The co-founder of the first Creation concert with Timothy Landis back in 1979 at Muddy Run Park near Quarryville, Penn., Thomas doesn’t believe he’ll ever tire of the event.

“It’s still very exciting,” he said. “I didn’t even have any idea that we would last 25 years. We felt called to do it, but we didn’t know if that calling was for one year, five years, 10 years and here we are 25 years later.”

Thomas and Creation stayed strictly in Pennsylvania until 1998 when they held the first Creation West at the Gorge Amphitheater. It was the demise of another Christian festival in the Northwest that led Thomas to the region.

“There was another festival that I never got to attend, called Jesus Northwest, and when we heard they were no longer going to be doing their festival any longer we began to get calls from people in the northwest saying, ‘can you bring Creation out here?'” Thomas said. “We said we would have to pray about it and the Lord would have to provide the proper venue. Here we are at the Gorge and we love it out here. It’s like a second home to me now.”

The main purpose of the event isn’t to enjoy the music, although nobody will deny the artists are a major attraction, but rather to get close to God if somebody already knows him or to get introduced to God if they do not.

Thomas said he really has no idea how many lives the Creation concerts have impacted.

“We know it’s very high, but God keeps those records,” he said. “We see thousands of people come to the Lord between the two events. One thing that happens though quite often is that you are in a mall shopping and somebody comes up and says ‘I’ve been to Creation and I accepted the Lord there or my kids accepted the Lord there.’ Those are the things that give you goosebumps.”

Other Christian music festivals, such as Spirit West Coast or the Cornerstone Festival, may be slowly catching up in the sheer number of people that attend, but neither has the prestige associated with Creation. With that prestige also comes a lot of notoriety, both from the Christian media and the mainstream media.

“We’ve gotten some marvelous coverage from the secular media,” Thomas said. “CBS came last year and did a special on us. We appreciate the coverage and it is newsworthy. There are a lot of things that are in the news that aren’t newsworthy. And this is newsworthy.”