Howard Stern once told Liz Curtis Higgs to get her act together. That's how wild she was.

From the day she turned 16 in 1970 until the day she found Jesus in 1982, Higgs tried it all. She ingested every kind of drug she could find, from cocaine to LSD. She drank lots of booze. She picked fights in bars. She went home with the wrong men, men who were married, men who were abusive.

And she survived relatively unscathed. She didn't get arrested. She didn't get AIDS. She didn't get pregnant. (If she would have, she would have had an abortion, she says.) She didn't die.

Now the former bad girl is a minister. She takes her message to women's groups all over the country. It is part Ya-Ya sisterhood and part "girlfriend" theology.

She will be in Spokane for a two-day women's conference starting tonight at Pines Baptist Church in the Spokane Valley. Tickets are $45 for both days and are available at the door.

"In essence I am still a bad girl," she says. Her books and her Web site capitalize on that

image. "Bad Girls of the Bible, "Really Bad Girls of the Bible" and "Mad Mary" are all selling well."

Her speaking schedule is booked through 2003.

Higgs has ridden -- and maybe even helped to create -- a wave of high-energy events targeted at Evangelical Christian women, like the Women of Faith conference.

She encourages women to take responsibility for their spiritual lives. It is a message that resounds loudly at Evangelical churches, where women are quickly reaching critical mass in the ranks of leadership.

Her goal is to give other bad girls the information they need to start changing their lives.

But she never suggests they have to change before they come to church.

"You don't have to clean up your act and then come to God," she says. "Just come on down (to church), even if you are still hung over from the night before."

Higgs' bad girl persona is part deliberate and part unavoidable, she says.

"I still think unkind thoughts, I still covet," she says. "If you stand up there and say I've got it all together, what message does that give to the girl who doesn't have it all together?"

To that end, Higgs' talks are a combination comedy club, tent revival and self-help group. She promises to have people laughing until they cry, while she is sneaking in some heavy women's theology in between the wisecracks.

She doesn't believe the Bible admonishes women to be quiet, demure or inferior to their husbands.

"God made me like this, how can I apologize?" she says. "And there are tons of other women out there who need to have women like me jump up and shout, `Hey girls!"'

As for the men of the church, Higgs says they are mostly supportive of her work. Many of them are really bad boys or they are married bad girls in order to save them.

"I help them understand those girls, and appreciate them for who they are," she says.

Higgs believes that at least some bad girls are born, not made. That was her case. She says she

was raised in a solid, Christian home by loving, dedicated parents. But as she came of age she discarded those values. Early into her adult life she became a successful radio DJ. The job gave her the cash to live her wild lifestyle.

After working with Stern in Detroit, she moved to Louisville to work at an oldies station. There, a Christian couple "adopted" her. They invited her to church and told her that God loved her unconditionally.

Over a seven-week period, Higgs says, she was converted.

Higgs' husband, a man with a doctoral degree from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, manages her career and her speaking schedule. He is an example of a good Christian man who has learned to appreciate a bad girl rather than make her change, she says.

"He is perfectly happy letting me be the star," she said. It is a message she wants both men and women of the church to hear.

"Just because you surrender to Him doesn't mean you become a doormat," she says.