Jesus People’ Preaching Their Gospel Everywhere
By George W. Cornell, Associated Press Religion Writer, Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado
June 5, 1971, North America
Soft-spoken, cheerful, Bibles in hand, they extend profuse blessing to anyone they meet and then, as if imparting a choice secret, they say: “Jesus loves you.”
These are the street Christians, the “Jesus Freaks,” who in recent months have proliferated exuberantly across the country, to the surprise and sometimes uneasiness or ordinary church folk.
“Have you met the Lord?” they ask. “It’s beautiful to walk with Him.”
Their movement started out in California and for about two years was largely concentrated in that area. But now extensions of it are cropping up from coast to coast, and from Minneapolis to Miami.
“It’s sweeping the country,” says Evangelist Billy Graham.
“It doesn’t bother me that it might be a fad. At least it is a positive fad. I’m for anything that promotes the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
ALTHOUGH MANY well-groomed “straight kids” are involved in it, in affluent suburbs and on campuses, much of it is in the youth subculture, spurning traditional institutions, including the church.
“The church has sophisticated the gospel and added this and that and complicated it so you can’t come to know Jesus personally,” said Bill Squires, a youth in headband and paisley tunic, passing out leaflets in Rochester, N.Y.
“Jesus is our bag. He can fill the void in your life.”
The movement is totally loose and unstructured, impossible to measure statistically, breaking out spontaneously in many places, with young people gathering to groove on the Bible, prayer and gospel rock.
“JESUS IS WHERE it’s at, man,” they say. “He’s really heavy.” They meet in parks, storefronts, church basements, homes, schoolyards to sway in circle, arm around each other’s shoulders
“Hal-le-lu-ja, hal-le-lu-ja! Praise the Lord!”
They roam the streets, from New York to Honolulu, “rapping” to passersby about Jesus. They point fingers skywards, and exult, “One way! One way!”
Various expressions of the movement have sprung up almost unexplainably in scores of cities and communal bands. They range from the “Children of God” in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Thurber, Tex., to “The Way” groups in Rye, N.Y., and Wichita, Kan.; from the “New Community” in Buffalo, N.Y., to the “Christian Liberation Front” in San Francisco; from a “Jesus Parade” in Seattle to a “Jesus Festival” in Evansville, Ind.
THE MOVEMENT is reflected in record teen-age crowds at evangelism rallies in Greensboro, N.C.; Nortonville, Ky.; Niceville, Fla.; Hamilton, Ohio; San Antonio, Tex.; and in Nashville, Tenn.; where the dignified First Baptist Church reverberated with the young people’s “Jesus yell;”
“Give me a ‘J’; Give me a ‘E.’” and so on through J-E-S-U-S.
Kindred groups have been reported in Detroit, Cleveland, Denver, Worcester Mass.; Milwaukee, Kansas City, Spokane, Wash., and elsewhere.
Participants usually call each other “brother” and “sister.” Many affect hippie appearance—long hair, fringed vest, faded jeans. “The Bible doesn’t tell you to cut your hair or what kind of clothes to wear,” says the Hollywood Free Paper, one of a score of underground papers that have sprung up to boost the movement.
MANY INVOLVED have been social dropouts, wandering through the drug scene, and they say Jesus set them free.
“My days were in drugs, sex and lies,” writes a girl, Karen, in the Buffalo Jesus newspaper, Together. “Then I met a brother who seemed to have his head together…He invited me to a Bible rap…I asked Jesus to come into my life, and He did and it’s beautiful.”
Rock music, particularly the new religiously oriented rock, is generally part of their style, as exhibited in faith rock festivals this spring in the Hollywood Bowl and at Myntle Beach, S.C.
Bible study, “Jesus teaching” and frequent mass baptisms, especially off Pacific beaches, are regular parts of the movement. It discounts church social action and stresses the Bible and a personal relationship to Jesus.
“WE SING YOU a new song—total liberation, the redeeming of life to life, spiritual rebirth, reconciliation to your God,” proclaims the Berkeley, Calif., Jesus paper, “Right On.”
The Rev. Gabriel Fackre of Andover Newton Theological School, says the movement’s “vocabulary resembles that of a very conservative kind of Christianity,” but it doesn’t seem directed toward restoring the institutional church.
Its counterculture garb and life style, he writes in the Christian Century, suggests that Jesus people still are in revolt against the society of their elders through a “new pietism” that ignores economical and social problems.
Apparently to them, “turning on with Jesus means dropping out of the social struggle,” he says.
The Rev. Dr. Hudson T. Amerding, president of Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois, has voiced fears the movement may be superficial, but he also adds: “The Lord might be going outside the churches to accomplish some of His ends.”