I’ve spoken and written my testimony many times
– how I came to know Christ through a Billy Graham movie, and then a book
called The Cross and the Switchblade
, and finally through an on-fire youth group called Children of God (COG). But I never knew that what we were
experiencing in Ohio was somehow linked to a Hippie movement in California, a
Hippie named Lonnie, and a Pastor named Chuck Smith. That part is the story that Jesus Revolution tells. If the
leaders in my community had known of that connection, the message never was
widely spread. All I knew was that I was touched and changed by the Holy
Spirit, and kids from all over Springfield from different churches were
gathering at Grace Lutheran Church on Wednesday nights to sit in a circle and
sing along to Mike Nace’s guitar.
So now I will tell the part of my story that
reflects the color of the local Jesus Movement.
We were called “Jesus Freaks” and we didn’t
mind. In fact, it was kind of a badge of
honor. If the “world” didn’t understand,
that made our experience of what God was doing all the sweeter. With my more mature years, I realize the
fallacy of that attitude as exclusionary, but that’s what we had and what we
seemed to need at the time. We were
teenagers who weren’t understood by our parents. We needed a place to belong, and the only
place we were understood in our newfound passion was with others similarly “touched.” We were a bit anti-establishment, as the
Hippies were, but without the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll of that worldly culture. So where could
we fit in? Only with those of our own
kind.
The music we sang was pop culture, but it was
also corny. After all, it sprang up
almost overnight against a backdrop of centuries-old hymns. Yes, while the secular culture was singing
anti-establishment Bob Dylan and other “thoughtful” and reactionary protest
songs, those touched by the Holy Spirit in the Jesus Movement were neither at
home with those nor with the hymns.
Every revolution needs its anthems, so we had “They’ll Know We Are
Christians By Our Love,” “It Only Takes a Spark to Get a Fire Going,” “Jesus,
Jesus, I Love You So,” and the edgy “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” They were a
spiritual version of sitting around the campfire and singing “Kum Bah Yah.” But
many of these simple songs were also able to help us express our heartfelt
gratitude to the God whom we were intimately experiencing. So, any “outsider” who judged them either on
musicality or on theology would have been rejected, and rightly so.
It was a time of “us against the world” on so
many fronts. As teens we were not doing
many of the activities of our peers. As
students, we felt the need to challenge worldly attitudes in our high school
classrooms, and to compare literature we were studying, for example, to what we
were reading in the Bible. This made us
stand out even if we didn’t want to. At
church, we were groaning to experience real heartfelt worship, but the three organ-accompanied
hymns were over before we had a chance even to get started! We wanted to shout “Hallelujah!”
and “Praise the Lord,” when everyone else was sitting quietly with heads bowed.
We wanted to greet people at the door with a hug and sincere “Jesus loves you!”
but that was just too radical for church culture. At home, our parents thought we were in a
cult.
On a personal note about my home life, after I
got filled with the Holy Spirit and received my prayer language, the Lord began
to coach me in intercession. I had a
six-foot wooden cross installed in my bedroom.
I pushed aside clothes and shoes and dedicated my walk-in closet to long
prayer times. My mother would come in
and find me reading the Bible in my free time.
And although I dated, belonged to school clubs, took piano lessons, and
kept a high gpa, I also attended Wednesday night COG, Sunday morning church
service, and Friday night ministry or connection times with other youth groups.
Most of the time my mother did not forbid me to do these things, although she did
look askance at me and feared I was in a cult.
She did put her foot down one time when I told her I was fasting. Being a Christian in my home was an uphill battle.
Mom definitely did not understand me, and
although my father attended church he also thought “God helps those who help
themselves” was in the Bible. I felt
alone, and sometimes persecuted.
There was one on-fire group in our town that was sponsored by a mainstream church,
and that was called The One Way House which was connected with First Christian
Church. This was an actual property
outside of town complete with a farmhouse, a barn, and a creek. The leadership was young – late teens, early
twenties – and the rest of those who came were even younger. Kids came, they sang and worshiped, they
listened to teachings from the Bible, they prayed together, they “fellowshipped”
(our word for socializing among Christians), they got saved, and they got
baptized in the creek. It was an amazing time.
I suppose we took it for granted that this kind
of thing had always been going on and always would be. Because we were so young we didn’t have any
perspective about revivals and movements of God. Not until I moved away to college in Texas
did I come to realize that this was a time and a season in the sovereignty of
God.
And yet, the Holy Spirit was just as much with
me as I studied at my Catholic university in Dallas as he had been back in my
Lutheran youth group. As a matter of
fact, he beat me there! For when I
arrived, I was immediately swept into an ecumenical Spirit-filled Catholic-Protestant
prayer group on campus. I also began to
attend an auditorium-filled Sunday evening gathering led by Catholic priests,
nuns, and lay leaders called “The Christian Community of God’s Delight.” The
thousand-fold worshipers began by lifting praise to God in newly-written
canticles and Spirit-songs (music which ebbs and flows and harmonizes, led by an
unseen Conductor). Then one-by-one
individuals led by the Holy Spirit would step up to the microphone to give a
prophetic word, an encouragement, or a Scripture. We ended with one of the leaders recapping
those individual messages, and we could always see that, somehow, just as with
the music, a Divine Message had been given to us all.
After this service, we were dismissed to go to
individual classrooms where we learned how to be filled with the Holy Spirit,
what the Bible says about tongues, prophesy and spiritual gifts, and how to
operate in those gifts. It was amazingly
organized, biblical, and beneficial.
Again, I took for granted this ecumenical move of the Holy Spirit. My Catholic friends and I, seeking to
understand our common ground, concluded with assurance that it was “JESUS.” This was my first cross-cultural experience –
sponsored by the Holy Spirit.
This testimony has been an attempt to reflect
just a bit of what was going on in Springfield, Ohio and Dallas, Texas in
approximately 1971 – 1974. I have since learned that this microcosm is merely a
drop in the ocean of what God was doing from California to Florida in that
season – the season we called the Jesus Movement, and that Time Magazine dubbed the “Jesus
Revolution.”
Jesus, revive us again! The Spirit and
the Bride say, “Come!”
The early music of Love Song, the band from the movie: https://youtu.be/66DlLkh6o4Q
