(Another) Jesus Revolution
I urge you to view the movie, Jesus Revolution; you will not be disappointed. It certainly gives pause for, do it again Lord. Jesus Revolution captures the essence of the 60’s – both in what happened and to whom and through whom it happened - with no glitz nor glamour.
The hippie movement, originating in the San Francisco Bay area, asked a lot of serious and overdue questions; questions about the efficacy of wars, how much is enough, and the poverty of formal institutions when it came to providing satisfying answers. The hippies were interested in truth and were prepared to try whatever avenue (for better or for worse) to seek the truth. The high priest of psychedelic drugs Timothy Leary preached the use of LSD, as a means of the quest for truth, insisting it was a consciousness expander. What he/they failed to divine was LSD became a gateway to other more destructive drugs, so, while some people insisted, they saw heaven, others were experiencing hell.
In the middle of this questioning, experimentation and chaos arose a different form of truth-seeking. It came to be known as the Jesus movement, and its adherents, Jesus freaks. These young people dressed like, looked like, and spoke like hippies, but they were on a vastly different path. But you would have to carefully listen to them and see their life transformation up close to recognise what was happening, which is why many traditional Christians rejected them. It took a brave person to see beyond all they considered a Christian should look and live like. Such a man was Chuck Smith.
He was initially challenged and resistant, but he couldn’t deny something compelling, and Jesus-like in what he saw. His journey was not replicated by some of his elders. In one of the saddest scenes, a few elders walked out of the church in protest to the influx of hippies. Hearteningly one of them that stood to leave, ostensibly, went and sat in the middle of the young hippie believers.
We may have forgotten that the Jesus Revolution was birthed in the hippie camp – which was radically anti-establishment, and there were elements in the Jesus freaks that did mirror that of the hippie revolution – turn on, tune in and drop out. It isn’t always easy to separate form and function. We, of course, would not repeat this mistake by rejecting something God’s Spirit was doing, would we?
What or who today would closely approximate the hippie movement, in the sense of an alternate truth-finding journey, even if the answers proffered failed to live up to expectations? What community, in the youth, what subset of dissatisfied seekers of, albeit subjective and personalised, truth alongside a quest for identity would fit the bill? I think the answer is staring at us.
How many Christian people are so enculturated in their brand of faith they would miss what God’s Spirit was doing outside their comfort; something outside their entrenched and therefore right way of living for Jesus? The hippies were an offence to middle-class Christians in so many ways, yet it was amongst these truth seekers that God poured out his Spirit in a remarkable way. We quickly forget John the Baptist and Jesus were rejected by the very people who upheld truth.
What if a Jesus revolution started among the LGBTQ and trans communities? How many comfortable believers would walk out of church, were these people to, en masse, turn up in church, draped in rainbow flags, confused genders on display? Would we be like Chuck Smith’s elder, cross the aisle and put our arms around them, among people who were beginning a radical, even if messy, journey with Jesus?
Would we celebrate a new Jesus Revolution?