Monday, October 7, 2013
The Jesus People Revolution
Chuck Smith talks about the incredible events that took place in the late sixties/early seventies that changed evangelical history
By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries
MURRIETA, CA
(ANS) – Following the news that Chuck Smith, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, California, and the father of the Jesus People Revolution, had passed away at the age of 86, in the early hours of Thursday, October 3, 2013, I thought it was the right time to re-live that great revival born out of the late 1960s/early 1970s counterculture that stands as a watershed of evangelical history.
Dan Wooding with Chuck Smith after the
Front Page Radio interview
Some time back, I sat down with Pastor Chuck during a mission’s conference at the Calvary Chapel Bible School and Conference Center in Murrieta, California, and asked him to recount the extraordinary story of what took place under his ministry that brought a generation of hippies to Christ.
In the interview for my Front Page Radio program, which will be re-broadcast this Sunday (October 13, 2013) on the KWVE Radio Network (www.kwve.com) at 5:00 PM (Pacific Time), Pastor Chuck re-lived those dramatic days which he said began with a plea from his wife, Kay.
“Actually it is true the thought I had concerning hippies at that time was, ‘Why don’t you get a bath, get a job and get a life,’” he began. “But she [Kay] was totally fascinated by them and one day she told me, ‘You know, they are so desperately in need of Jesus.’ One day, Kay told me that she’d observed this pretty young girl who was high on drugs; so high that she really didn’t know where she was or what she was doing as she attempted to cross the street in heavy traffic. Her heart just went out to this young girl. She said, ‘We’ve got to reach them. They’ve got to know a different life. They’ve got to know Jesus.’
Kay and Chuck Smith
“So she would have me drive her over to Huntington Beach and down to Laguna Beach just to observe these kids. I’d be sitting there watching them staggering down the street and be thinking, ‘What a shame’ and; ‘why don’t you get a job’ and I’d look over at my wife and she’d be weeping as she had just such a tremendous burden for them. So it was through her burden that we actually became involved in reaching out to the young people.”
Chuck Smith went on to say that a girl, who was attending the University of California, Irvine, was dating a young man she had met.
“He had a really very powerful personal witness for Jesus Christ,” said Smith. “He’d come over to pick her up and we’d be talking to him. They would then drive down to Laguna Beach and he later told us that they had seen a group of four kids who came walking by who were stoned, so he shared the Gospel with them and they all ended up kneeling there on the sidewalk and accepting the Lord.
Hippies making the One Way sign inside the tent
“He had these stories almost every day about the way God was using him. So my wife said, ‘John, we want to meet a hippie. You know, a real honest to goodness hippie.’ Kay was curious as to what made them tick and how they had got so far off base. So then John showed us his driver’s license and we were shocked because he was a normal looking young man, but there, on his on his driver’s license, he had long hair and we discovered that he had been in the hippie life himself.”
Chuck Smith said that shortly afterwards, John arrived on their doorstep with a “genuine long-haired hippie.”
He went on to say, “He had flowers in his hair and bells on his cuffs and so forth and he looked a lot like some of the pictures of Jesus with a beard and all. He told me, ‘Chuck, I want you to meet Lonnie [Frisbee] and he was so engaging and so warm. We found out that what had happened was that John was driving by Orange Coast College [in Costa Mesa] and he had a habit of always picking up hippies so he could witness to them.
“So he saw this hippie hitch hiking and so he stopped to pick him up and said to him, ‘Where are you going?’ and the kid said, ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere special. I just hitch hike in order that I can witness to the people that pick me up.’
The overlflow outside the tent
“And John said, ‘Well, that’s why I picked you up so I could witness to you.’ And he added, ‘You’ve gotta come over and meet some people.’ So he brought him over to the house and that’s where we really got acquainted with the hippie culture.”
At the time Pastor Chuck’s Calvary Chapel congregation was meeting in a Lutheran church in Newport Beach, California, and he said that soon a lot of hippies began attending the church.
“I do remember the first night they came in.” he recalled. “It was a Wednesday night and the service had already begun and about twenty of these hippies that Lonnie had brought, came in and some just sat in the aisle, while others came down towards the front of the church. I can remember the initial shocked expression of the people in the church. The interesting thing is, however, that their hearts were so filled with the love of Jesus Christ, that everybody just immediately fell in love with them, and it wasn’t really a hard thing to accept them.
“We had been teaching the people from First John saying that the real proof of the Christian life is loving. So the people did love them and embrace them and so it was an exciting experience.”
Space soon became a major problem at the church and so they went on to build a church on Sunflower Avenue, Santa Ana, to accommodate 300 people.
Pastor Chuck speaking at a huge baptism
at Pirate’s Cove
“On the first Sunday, it was so packed that the kids were sitting on the floor and I thought this was because this was the ‘grand opening’ and the following week it would be down to the 300 that the building would accommodate,” said Chuck Smith.
“But, the following Sunday there was really no room even on the floor, so we went to double services and triple services. Then we doubled the size of the auditorium and we had people sitting in the patio and, in two years, we had a phenomenal growth and that’s when we knew we had to build again, but we didn’t have time to build anything big enough. So we bought the property where we presently are but we put up a tent in order to accommodate the crowd that was coming and so we were two years in the tent while we were building our new sanctuary.”
Chuck Smith then recalled that in the early days of the Santa Ana church, not everyone in his congregation approved of the bare-foot hippies.
“I came to church on one Sunday morning and I saw a sign on the front that said, ‘No bare feet allowed.’ It was signed by the board. I was fortunate to be there early and I took the sign down and I immediately called a board meeting and I told them, ‘Do you mean to say because we have this beautiful new carpet, we’ve got to say to one kid that he can’t come in because they’ve got bare feet? Let’s rip up the carpet and have concrete floors.’
“I also said, ‘If you have to say to them that they can’t come because they have dirty clothes and we don’t want you to soil our upholstered pews, then let’s get benches and let’s never turn a kid away from the church.’”
Chuck Smith smiled when he then recalled a beach baptism service that brought out a police helicopter.
An exuberant Pastor Chuck baptizing
at Pirate’s Cove
“This was when we were in the little sanctuary on Sunflower and I had a Monday night study with the young people every Monday night,” he said. “We had this girl who was from France. She was a foreign exchange student and she was going back to France. But before she left, she accepted the Lord and expressed a desire to be baptized. So I announced that on that Monday night, after the service, we were going to go down to the Nineteenth Street beach at Newport Beach and have a baptismal service and those who would like to come along could join us. At the close of the service, there were about 50 people along with the girl from France who wanted to be baptized, and so we drove down there.
“As I was baptizing this young French girl, there were all of these hippies that were there on the beach and the neighbors didn’t know what was going on, so I guess they called the police. As I was bringing her out of the water, a police helicopter came over and turned its bright spotlight on the whole beach and, of course, to the young people it was just a sign from heaven illuminating the whole beach. It was just one of those wonderful experiences.”
First Sunday in the tent
Chuck Smith then recalled his “trepidation” about the first Sunday in the circus tent that was constructed while the present sanctuary for Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa was being built.
“Actually, we had a men’s prayer meeting every Saturday night, so we were at the little chapel on Sunflower and a group of volunteers were putting up the lights in the tent and laying out some sixteen-hundred chairs,” he said.
“After the prayer meeting, a group of us went over to see how they were coming along with the preparations because we were due to open the next morning. I was standing on the platform with one of the board members from the prayer meeting. As we looked out at this vast sea of chairs, I said, ‘Well Duane, how long do you suppose it will take the Lord to fill this tent?’ And he looked at his watch and he said, ‘I would say in about ten hours,’ and I laughed.
“We had decided that we would have double services – one at eight o’clock and the other at ten. By eight o’clock on that first morning, the tent was so crowded that there was standing room only and I had thought that this was going to be just for the first service and the second would surely be empty.
“But when the second service came around, it was the same story — the tent was packed and it standing room only. It was then that we realized that God was doing a miraculous thing here. It was just a beautiful experience.
“We had to redesign the sanctuary three times before we even got to build it but, of course, it was a lot cheaper to enlarge it on the architect’s drawing board rather than trying to build and then enlarge it. So we again saw God doing just a beautiful work.”
The birth of modern-day worship and Christian rock music
I told Chuck Smith that a lot of people maybe did not realize how, what we call modern day worship and Christian rock music, came out of those hippie days and I understood that quite a few people who have received the Lord became Christians and then they would come and ask if they could sing their songs and you would audition them before the service.
Love Song
Love Song
“That’s true,” he said. “This began at the Monday night service in the tent. There were so many talented young people that were coming in and I remember I was there in the church on a Monday and these fellows came by and introduced themselves. They said that they were musicians and they had a rock group and that they’d accepted the Lord a couple of weeks prior on a Monday night study. They told me that they said that the Lord had been giving them some Christian songs and they’d like to share them.
“And so I asked them if they would ‘play one for me.’ So they went out to their van and got their guitars and they came back and they began to play. It was the song ‘Welcome Back.’ It was so anointed that I just started weeping and I said, ‘How about sharing tonight. The kids will love it.’ That was Love Song.
“They were so good and anointed that they inspired other young people to get together and form bands and, at one time, we had over ten different bands that had formed and who were all doing their own original music. People would come and say, ‘The Lord’s given me a new chorus this afternoon when I was in school and I’d like to share it tonight.’ So we were learning the new worship choruses and it became a whole new style of music that was born there in that move of the Spirit.”
I asked him to name some of the new singers and groups that began in those days.
“There was Oden Fong, who had been with Timothy Leary down in Laguna Beach, and he of course formed a group called Mustard Seed Faith. Then we had Country Faith, Gentle Faith, the Children Of The Day, The Way, and also Isaac Airfreight, who did more of a talking type of thing. Of course, there was also Karen Lafferty [who wrote Seek Ye First, and also Debby Kerner.”
Catholic priests and nuns would attend the tent services
Besides the hippies, Chuck Smith said he had many Catholic priests and nuns who would attend the services in the tent.
“Most of the time, the priests would come in street clothes so that they wouldn’t be identified,” he chuckled. “But yes; they loved the study of the Word of God.”
It wasn’t long before the national media were turning up at the meetings and covering the Jesus People Revolution. They included Life magazine, Time, Look, Reader’s Digest and a host of national and local newspapers.
He recalled one event where he was planning to have a mass baptism of about 1,000 young people at Pirate’s Cove at Corona de Mar, California.
“I had seen in Time Magazine, an article about Black’s Beach in San Diego, and it was about how some 35 hippies down there had taken off their clothes to go swimming in the buff. So I was thinking that I really ought to call the religion editor of Time and let him know that there are hippies that are doing more than stripping nude and swimming in the ocean. There were those that were coming down and being baptized and identified with Christ.
Time cover
“As I was driving home, I was thinking about calling the religion editor so he could write a good follow-up on that article and the Lord spoke to my heart and said, ‘Who’s been your public relations agent up until now? I said, ‘Well, You have Lord.’ And He said, ‘Well, aren’t you satisfied I’ve got you in Time Magazine. I’ve got you in Look and Readers Digest. I said, ‘Oh yes Lord. Forgive me for even thinking of trying to promote what you are doing.’ And then, when I got home, there was a man in the living room who introduced himself as a writer from Time Magazine and he said, ‘We want to do an article on the Jesus People. Are you going to have a baptism or anything?’ So the Lord had been ahead of us actually and then Time ran quite an article on the Jesus Movement.”
I then asked Chuck Smith if he was astonished with all that had occurred since those hippie days with Calvary Chapels all over the world and hundreds of missionaries serving the Lord in many different lands.
“Totally,” he said. “In fact, it’s still hard to realize the reality of it all. We’re sort of like those who are just dreaming as we watch what God has done and is still is doing. It doesn’t really sink in completely. You can’t really comprehend it fully. You walk around with constant rejoicing in the Lord and in what He’s done in His goodness.”
I concluded by asking him who were some of the hippies that had found Christ in those early days and now pastor huge churches.
“Well of course there was Greg Laurie and he’s got a very large church out in Riverside, and his Harvest Crusades,” said Chuck Smith. “There are so many of the pastors like Skip Heitzig in Albuquerque, Bill Gallatin back in New York, Joe Focht in Philadelphia and Mike MacIntosh in San Diego.
Mike MacIntosh and his wife Sandy
at Pirate’s Cove
“Mike’s was really a tremendous conversion. I never thought Mike would be normal. When he first came to the church, his brain had been so fried by drugs that there wasn’t much hope for him. He thought there was a hole in the back of his head and that part of his brains were blown out and he thought you could look in and see his brains from the back. But God healed him completely and of course has used him so mightily.
“There is also Jeff Johnson, who pastors the large church in Downey. He was one of the major drug dealers in Downey. When he accepted the Lord he wanted to start teaching the Bible to the guys that he was dealing drugs to and so he started the Calvary Chapel there in Downey.
“There are just hundreds of them across the country pastoring major churches today who were once a part of that hippie movement.”
Now Pastor Chuck has left this earth and is receiving his reward in heaven. But what a legacy that he we can all look back on what we still call “The Jesus People Revolution.”
Note: I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview.
Also, if you would like to listen to this interview right now, just go to: http://www.assist-ministries.com/FrontPageRadio/FPR10.13.13ChuckSmithMono.mp3
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Dan Wooding, 72, is an award-winning journalist who who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for 50 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and he hosts the weekly “Front Page Radio” show on the KWVE Radio Network in Southern California and which is also carried throughout the United States and around the world. He is the author of some 45 books, the latest of which is a novel about the life of Jesus through the eyes of his mother called “Mary: My Story from Bethlehem to Calvary”. (Click to order)
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<!–BYLINE:By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries–>