Lonnie Frisbee, the longhair Jesus looking young man and assistant pastor of Calvary Chapel in Southern California comforted the man in the big tent next to the small church that they had outgrown. Frisbee said a prayer over the man in the wheelchair and then asked the congregation to also to get close to the man and pray over him. He was afflicted with drug addiction as many of the young people in the congregation who had been addicted or experimented with drugs at one time or another in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Some of them had been a part of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in San Fransisco where the counterculture movement started and the Southern California acid rock music culture began. The new movie "Jesus Revolution" starring Kelsey Grammar as Calvary Chapel Pastor, Chuck Smith, Jonathan Roomie as Lonnie Frisbee and Joel Courtney as Greg Laurie among many others is a great movie in my opinion. It's about the true story of a national spiritual awakening in the early 70's and its origins within a community of teenage hippies of Southern California. The story and message of the movie is based on a book by one of the movements leaders called "Jesus Freaks" written by Pastor Greg Laurie. Laurie is currently serves as the senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship based in Riverside, Calif.
Even though, I did not grow up in Southern California back in those days, the movie hit home for me. I grew up down South in Memphis, Tenn., and North Mississippi. I was just a kid when the Jesus Revolution or Movement was happening. I remember when I was eight, nine or even 10 years-old watching the Vietnam newsreels on the local news, the Moon landings, the Manson murders, the Watergate trials involving President Nixon and I remember, of course, the hippie movement and the rock & roll drug scene and culture of its day. Mainly because of mainstream media such as television, newspapers and magazines, I was able to keep up with what was going on the world like most Americans did back in those when we only had three television channels, one telephone line and Saturday morning cartoons. However, I was personally affected by the Jesus Revolution when its tentacles stretched all the way to the American South in the early 1970's and early 1980's. My older brother had attended a big revival somewhere in Memphis where the Jesus movement speakers appeared and he brought home a printed t-shirt home with a hand on the back of it with a finger pointing up with letters that stated, "One Way." I used to wear it all the time while riding my bicycle on the streets of Memphis and he did not know about it. Lol.
I was not much of churchgoer while growing up in Memphis in the 1960's and early 1970's. Also, neither when I first move to North Mississippi as a teenager in the late 1970's. However, I did get a taste of the Catholic faith in 1980 when I lived with my sister and brother-in-law in Savannah, Tenn., for six months. Then I was baptized as a Baptist at my mother's church in Memphis but I did not make a full commitment to the faith. I attended some but not regularly. However, when I attended Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) in Oxford, Miss., for five years in the early 1980's, I joined Campus Crusade For Christ for a semester in the fall of 1983 which is now known as just simply "Cru." Campus Crusade For Christ had joined forces with the Jesus Movement in 1972 and organized a week-long International Student Congress on Evangelism at the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas known as Explo '72. It featured evangelism and discipleship training and contemporary music events. It was attended by more than 80,000 college and high school students and was nicknamed as the "Christian Woodstock" in the media. At the end of 1983, I attended KC 83, a Christian conference organized by Campus Crusade For Christ where 27,000 college students had gathered under one roof at a convention center in Kansas City to hear Billy Graham, Josh McDowell and Bill Bright among many others speak as well as attend contemporary christian music concerts on New Years Eve. We even went out into the City of Kansas City to knock on doors in neighborhoods to share our Christian faith with city residents. Later on, after I met my wife in 1986 while at Ole Miss, we were married civilly and later married in the Catholic faith when I converted to Catholcism. I have been a faithful Catholic and married to the same woman for the last 37 years. Sacramental marriage is an institution in the Catholic Church and I honor this with high regard with Jesus Christ being in the center of our marriage I can honestly say. "Til Death Us Do Part"-1549 Book of Common Prayer.
Needless to say, the memories from growing up down South came flooding back to my mind while watching this movie at the theater reminding me of every step of my faith journey throughout my lifetime. I highly recommend this movie regardless if you are Christian or not. It might just reignite a spark in you.
