Creation Festival: The Tour is a full night of music, said Dan Haseltine, lead singer for Jars of Clay, the headlining act.

"There's very few spots when something isn't cranking out of the speakers," Haseltine said by phone, during one of the stops on the contemporary Christian music tour. "It's a lot of fun, and people get their money's worth."

The concert, featuring six rock, pop and punk-pop bands, will be in Billings on Sunday, the second-to-the-last stop for the tour that began in mid-September. This is the second year of the multistate tour, which gathers its acts from the wildly popular Creation Festival, held every summer in Washington state.

The concert is a fundraiser for Ethiopia Hope, a ministry of Harvest Church that's working with orphanages in Ethiopia, as well as helping local church families to adopt Ethiopian orphans.

Along with Jars of Clay, the evening will feature Thousand Foot Krutch, Audio Adrenaline, B. Reith, This Beautiful Republic and FM Static. The night will include a time of worship and ministry.

Three-time Grammy Award winners Jars of Clay, who last performed in Billings in 2006, have sold more than 6 million albums since the band formed nearly 16 years ago. The band's music has evolved in that time, said Haseltine, who is based in Nashville.

"When we first started, a lot of what we were doing had an acoustic drive to it, more folk-music oriented," he said. "I think we're always pushing ourselves to widen our palette of musical textures."

For instance, "Good Monsters," the group's previous album was pure rock, while its most recent release, "The Long Fall Back to Earth," is billed as more state-of-the-art pop.

That's partly due to the themes of the two releases, Haseltine said.

" 'Good Monsters' was about making a grand declaration about social justice and why we should be in community," Haseltine said. "With this record, it's a much more intimate look at relationships around us."

Life often provides the grist for songs and Haseltine said that's definitely true of "Long Fall Back to Earth." He and the other three members of Jars have walked through a season of life with friends who have gone through crumbling relationships.

"And finding in the midst of those struggles a great glimpse of a person's real courage and strength," Haseltine said. "It just didn't seem we could go full-on rock 'n' roll with those topics."

But a folk sound would have created a more melodramatic sound he said. Instead, the band blended pop textures and musical influences from the '80s.

And that sound blends well with the other groups that are on the bill for Sunday night's concert.

"It's fun for us to be out with a lot of rock and roll bands," he said. "Because we can be acoustic or rock 'n' roll, on this tour, we're leaning more on rock 'n' roll."

Jars of Clay also is in sync with the fundraising effort that is bringing the concert to Billings. Harvest Church's Ethiopia Hope has its emphasis on the poor in Africa.

Jars of Clay has focused on Africa with its nonprofit faith-based ministry, the Blood: Water Mission. The water side of the nonprofit has nearly completed its 1,000 wells project, providing clean water and sanitation to thousands of communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Now it's focusing more on the AIDS side, funding projects as diverse as a soccer program to engage kids in a positive activity, to a medical clinic that serves 4,000 people a week.

"We're making heroes out of Africans in their own communities and helping pull them out of poverty," Haseltine said.