Sunday Visitors
By Richard Buffum, Los Angeles Times, California
December 4, 1968, North America
Some are barefoot. Some wear sandals and the casual garments and hirsute adornment associated with hippies. They have been paying surprise visits to local churches on Sundays, in most instances disturbing the starched decorum of conventional congregations.
There is an elemental quality about the visitors that reproaches—even desecrates, some of the over sensitive feel—the calm, middle-class respectability of their sanctuaries.
The team, as they prefer to call themselves, is currently paying surprise visits on Sundays to conventional churches. “We are doing this,” says Mr. Berg, “to show that hippies aren’t ogres.” And to protest the “folderol, hypocrisy and emphasis on constructing new buildings that obscure the true meaning of the Gospel. Buildings have become the curse of the church.”
The Bergs’ 19-year-old son Jonathan began “preaching at 5 with a Bible in his lap,” says his mother proudly. He is the director of the teen club, a seedy store front mission on Main St. “We’re rebels. We’re already rebelling. Revolution is good, but it must have a cause,” he comments on his generation.
Highly Personal Relationship
The cause is clearly working for Jesus. The relationship is highly personal, as are those of all team members. You study and memorize Biblical passages. You scrounge for food for the team and the mission. You witness (proselyte) vigorously, handing out religious tracts daily, hours on end, down the beach and up the street. You live simply, in a segregated pad if you’re not married. You feel the sting of persecution and ridicule. Being a Christian is a seven-day week.