They came rocking and rolling into the end of the sixties and changed the personality of Church and nation – as Great Awakenings do. They had encounters as intimate as they were dynamic with the Living Jesus in places like the beaches of California – and Oregon. They met Him in the deserts and in the state and national parks. They praised Him in high schools and lakeshores around Bakersfield, and in the coffee houses of Hollywood and San Diego – and Boston and Chicago.
They launched the short-term missions movement and the faith-based recovery movement. They broke the gifts of the Holy Spirit out of the church basement and contemporary worship movement into the sanctuary and top-40 Radio. They planted the Messianic Movement in Israel – and around the world – along with the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard denominations and a mainstream Christian music and media industry. The artistic types among them include bestselling authors, producers and screenwriters like Bodie Thoene, James Scott Bell, Michael Phillips, and David McFadzean – names that may or may not be familiar to readers but who shaped much of our current book and film culture – the parts of which we can be proud – because they created high quality family friendly television – like the Home Improvement series – and a slew of books from legal thrillers that pray to historical fiction that honors Israel to a re-discovery of old masters like George McDonald. They sparked every revival of the past half century from Toronto, Ontario; to Redding, California. And they remain the most hidden and ignored phenomenon of the past three hundred years. They are the Jesus People.
Like the people of Great Awakenings before them they did not fit into the church box. God took leaders like Lonnie Frisbee and Richard Twiss where he found them – the former high on LSD in the desert and the latter on heroin on a beach in Maui – He brought them down and introduced Himself to them the way He approached Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road. He did not make them conventional Christians after that; He made them explosive servants of His Kingdom, filling them with His Holy Spirit and the gifts that so often accompany the Spirit – healings, prophecies, miracles and such.
God also took more conventional leaders like Chuck Smith, James Dobson and Jack Hayford – and leaders somewhere in between – like John Wimber and Todd Hunter – and used them to structure and pastor the movement past its beginnings in an upper room the size of the US western coastal states. These leaders struggled with each other and with the tension that always exists when God does a brand new thing on the one hand and declares His word that the new creation has a shape consistent with what He has done before. They redeemed the vision of the peaceable Kingdom the hippies thought came from the Age of Aquarius and the Jesus People discovered came from the authentic God. They waited in the wings when the anarchical good intentions of the hippies collapsed with the deaths – from overdose and exposure at Woodstock and from violence at the Altamont Speedway in late 1969. They proclaimed and acted as though the Word of God were indeed living and true – in the midst of our rioting and unraveling world – if we would have Him.
The impact of the Jesus People is still felt in our culture – from the arts to the amazing numbers of young people who engage in service projects both domestically and abroad. But it is just as true – as Ed Underwood points out in his excellent book, Reborn to Be Wild, that we of the movement all too often allowed ourselves to be housebroken. Add to that the unremitting drumbeat that the Boomers were nothing but a bunch of self-indulgent yuppies who abandoned their children and their social responsibilities and it is easy to see why the Awakening God gave us Boomers is so largely forgotten and ignored.
Reality is God never repeats His movements into the world anymore than He repeats the design of a snowflake. Yet every snowflake looks enough like every other snowflake to be recognizable as what it is. The Boomers have a calling – to pass the baton to the next generation while we are paving the straight highway in the desert for our God – see Mark 1:1-4 in the Bible – so they can walk it while we are still building it. But if we would recognize and appreciate the Great Awakening that is coming in our time we – all of us – must recognize and appreciate the one that came to the Jesus People.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at
