Part One

When someone speaks of revival, built into the terminology is a return to something right, that was wrong.  A change takes place.  True revival is not the invention of something new, not seen before in the history of true, biblical Christianity.

Hippie Movement from Haight Ashbury, San Francisco

In the 1960s, especially centered in Woodstock, New York and the Haight Ashbury District, San Francisco, a hippie movement began.  Called the flower children, they distributed flowers or floral decorations to symbolize their peace, love, universal belonging and protest the Vietnam War.  They formed their own counter culture.

Men of the culture at large still wore short hair, which conforms to biblical teaching (cf. 1 Cor 11:14).  God willed men to keep this gender distinction. Male hippies rebelled against God’s design by growing long hair — not just long, but not combed or neat either.  Today some might call what hippies wore, “casual dress.”  They spurred this informal appearance, a kind of egalitarianism communicating that no one was above anyone else.  More than that, they appeared slovenly, unkept, disordered, and ragged, some now might call “authenticity.”

Being hippy also meant sex, drugs, and rock n roll for adherents of the hippie lifestyle.  Christians at no point in history would permit those as “Christian liberty,” a manifestation of God’s grace.  Hippies practiced free sex, ignoring the conventional and biblical requirement of marriage.  They took drugs like LSD and marijuana apparently to enhance their experience.  While others sat on chairs, they went so far even to forego those for the floor or ground.  Many wouldn’t wear shoes, embracing their noble savage, uncorrupted by civilization.

Jesus Freaks

Northern California Move to Southern

With the growth of hippiedom, some went into the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco to bring the Bible to the hippies.  I’ve met some from that time period and they believed that their drugs took them out of their bodies into a greater God consciousness, an ecstatic experience that transcended themselves.  Then they tried to take this novel Christianity into some Northern California churches.  When no churches accepted, this branch of religious hippies, known as Jesus Freaks, moved to Southern California.

Lonnie Frisbee

The Jesus Freak hippies, who migrated South, were under the influence of a leader named Lonnie Frisbee.  Randall Roberts, reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote about Frisbee in an article titled, “Jesus, drugs and rock ’n’ roll: How an O.C. hippie church birthed contemporary Christian music”:

The birth of contemporary Christian rock and pop music in America can in part be traced to a vision received by a 17-year-old runaway from Costa Mesa named Lonnie Frisbee.

After stripping naked and taking LSD in 1967 near Tahquitz Falls outside of Palm Springs, the young man called to God.

As water from the falls crashed, Frisbee, who wore his hair and beard like the archetypal Jesus Christ, saw himself standing beside the Pacific Ocean, Bible in hand, staring out at the horizon. But instead of water, the sea was filled with lost souls crying out for salvation.

“God, if you’re really real, reveal yourself to me,” Frisbee, who died of AIDS in 1993, later recalled pleading. “And one afternoon, the whole atmosphere of this canyon I was in started to tingle and get light and it started to change — and I’m just going, ‘Uh oh!’”

Frisbee dressed like the popular, secular notion or stereotype of Jesus with flowing robe and long hair, using soft-spoken tones also ala the flower children.  It played well with the rebellion of the hippy subculture.  At first the hippies met on the beach and baptized in the ocean.  They used 1-2-3 pray-with-me evangelism, where someone prayed the prayer and was dunked under the waves shortly thereafter.  Their view of grace brought forgiveness and eternal life, while still being and living like a hippie.

Rejecting the Historical Church, Its Doctrine, Practice, and Worship

Chuck Smith

The Jesus Freaks found a welcoming host in a buttoned down traditional four-square Pentecostal church with Chuck Smith as its pastor.  He had 25 in his congregation in 1965.  His church sang hymns.  He wore a dark suit and tie.  That changed.

Smith’s encounter with Lonnie Frisbee offered the opportunity to take these hippies into his customary church.  Smith did not come from a historical line of Christian churches.  His trajectory came from the early 20th century heritage of the modern Charismatic or Pentecostal movement, founded on the continuation of sign gifts for today.  Smith could embrace further deviation from orthodox, historic doctrine, practice, and worship.  In 2018, John MacArthur described Smith’s predicament:

What’s he going to do? What’s the church going to do? So they had a meeting and they decided that, “We’ll lose them [speaking of his whole congregation] and they’ll [the hippies or Jesus Freaks] leave if we don’t accommodate them.” They didn’t like the music; they didn’t like the dress code; they didn’t like anything. For the first time in church history that I can find, an aberrant, small, deviant, subculture redefined the character of a church.

Acquiescing to a Youth Culture

On another occasion and I agree with him, MacArthur said, characterizing this Jesus Revolution:

That was already being discussed a lot of places, because the hippie movement caught fire across America – the movement of rebellion against authority, responsibility, duty, expectation; rebellion against right, honor; it caught fire. So the church feared, “We’re going to lose these people if we don’t acquiesce.” So for the first time when the Jesus people came to church, first time I can find in church history, the church began to redefine its own identity and worship based upon the wishes of a rebellious subculture. That definition started then and spread; started in California, spread clear across the country.

Prior to the ‘60s, nobody expected a church service to be rock concert. Nobody expected a church service to be entertainment, . . . worship to be physical stimulation, emotional feelings without engaging your mind, . . . church to be a manipulation of people’s desires to fulfill their own self-styled identity. A church was a church, and it was a place where there was thoughtful, prayerful, biblical, sober-minded hearing from the Word of God, leading to conviction and edification and elevation. It was a heavenly encounter.

Modern Generation

MacArthur continued:

But to this modern generation of young people – serious, sober, thoughtful, scriptural preaching about God, and confrontation of sin, and a call to holiness, and a call to separate from the world and from iniquity is far too absolute and far too offensive. People who want to feel good about themselves the way they are don’t want that, so the . . . church caved in and gave them what they want. And now pastors continue to accommodate those same people – irresponsible, lazy, undisciplined rebels who want what they want – and the church, instead of confronting it, conforms to it. No preaching on sanctification, no preaching on holiness can be done in those environments; they’d empty the place.

Broken People?

Professing Christian leaders now justify the Jesus revolution as ‘God using broken people.”  He used Samson and David, is the explanation.  God used Peter, but Peter was a believer, filled with the Holy Spirit, obedient to Jesus Christ, when he preached on the Day of Pentecost.  He does not use unbelievers, these “broken people,” for a flurry of conversions.

God does not use believers, who are living in sin.  They are vessels unto dishonor, who are not meet for the Master’s use.  The Jesus revolution was not a blessing to Christianity, to the church, or to the world.  This revolution started something new and wrong.  It was a bad revolution, like many other revolutions in the history of the world.

David Wilkerson and Historic Confrontation of Jesus Freaks

David Wilkerson was a mainstream evangelical in the late 1950s and through the 1970s.  He is known for the popular Christian book, The Cross and the Switchblade.  Youtube above showed a historic confrontation he had in the 1960s with the Jesus Freaks that indicates how much they clashed then with even evangelicalism.  These men present a deviant view of biblical sanctification, however, a false view that has become much more mainstream today in evangelicalism.

The Jesus Freak argument with Wilkerson represents a neo-libertine view of sanctification.  It combines with a portion of early woke or social justice warrior.  For instance, in the video above these men contradict Wilkerson by judging him by the standard Jesus imposed on the rich young ruler.  Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.  They see righteousness in their disheveled look, which someone could pose just as easily as any external or formal appearance.  Conveniently, they evince faith parallel with the lifestyle preferred by hippies.

More to Come