A group of 50 brightly dressed hippies gathered by the shore at Newport Beach in Southern California on a summer evening in 1968. Clad in tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottoms and love beads, these disillusioned children of the acid generation waded into the Pacific Ocean toward a 41-year-old minister, who welcomed them with a smile and an accepting embrace.

The man in the water was Chuck Smith, who would later be called “the Pied Piper of the Jesus Generation” by news reporters. After he dunked his long-haired converts one by one in the swirling surf, the flower children confessed their newfound faith in Jesus Christ and claimed a new identity. From now on they would be known as Jesus freaks, and their rebellion against the Establishment would be called the Jesus movement.

Smith was a relatively unsuccessful pastor when he founded Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, in 1965. He had recently left the Foursquare denomination, and most of his colleagues considered him an unlikely candidate to pioneer the most significant Christian revival movement in modern American history.

Only 25 people came to the first Sunday service at Calvary Chapel, but the church was the epicenter of a spiritual earthquake that shook America in the early 1970s and still reverberates around the world. Beach-side baptisms, which took place after Smith’s Monday night Bible studies, became a regular event until there were too many new converts to be baptized on the 19th Street beach. So Smith moved to nearby Pirates Cove, where Errol Flynn shot many of his swashbuckling movies.

“About 10,000 were baptized in the first year alone,” Smith recalls. “The largest-ever baptism we had was about 1,200 people.” During a two-year period in the mid-1970s, Calvary Chapel staff members performed more than 8,000 baptisms and registered some 20,000 conversions, the pastor said.

But Smith doesn’t take any credit for starting the Jesus movement. In fact, he says he really didn’t like hippies. “I resented their dirty clothes, their dirty vans and the way they bummed off people and lived off society instead of contributing to it,” he admits. “It was my wife, Kay, who saw them as poor little kids just searching for answers.”

Smith says it actually was a slightly built, long-haired Jesus freak named Lonnie Frisbie who brought the first ragtag group of seekers to a Bible study. “The back door opened and all these kids with long hair and bells on their jeans came in and sat down,” Smith says. “I can remember the shocked expressions on the faces of the other people.” He calls Frisbie the first evangelist of the Jesus movement.

It wasn’t long before Smith’s church was so packed with hippies that a large circus tent was pitched on a 10-acre plot of land where Calvary Chapel’s present facility is located on Fairview and Sunflower streets in Costa Mesa.

So many hippies were coming to Christ, in fact, that Smith began organizing communal homes for them. The communes, with names like House of Miracles, Mansion Messiah and The Lord’s House, began to spread throughout California as enthusiastic young converts led their friends to Christ.

Each commune had its own “elder,” Smith says, and the young people shared housecleaning duties, paid rent and formed their own businesses. “It was probably the first time they’d ever taken any sort of responsibility for themselves,” he notes.

Totally Radical
What made the Jesus movement so significant was the fact that young people experienced such dramatic, overnight conversions. They went from darkness to light, from free sex to chastity, from using LSD to reading the Bible and preaching in the streets. The case of Mike MacIntosh, Smith says, best illustrates how God turned a whole subculture around.

Mike’s mind had been so damaged by drugs that he once turned himself over to police in Laguna Beach, telling them that he was the “fifth Beatle” and that he had lost part of his brain. He ended up in the psychiatric ward at Orange County Medical Center.

“Mike had delusions that the back of his head had been blown out and that his brain was exposed,” Smith explains. Then one night in 1970, MacIntosh attended a service at Calvary Chapel. Love Song, a music group led by Chuck Girard, performed, and Frisbie preached a sermon aimed at the flower power generation. When Frisbie gave an altar call, MacIntosh surrendered his life to Christ.

His wife, Sandy, had divorced him because of his erratic behavior, and he knew that before he could win back her love he needed God’s healing. So at a Saturday evening men’s prayer meeting, he asked for prayer. Afterward, he said he felt like his brain had been washed clean.

MacIntosh moved into Mansion Messiah and continued trying to win his ex-wife to the Lord. He finally persuaded her to attend an open-air gathering at Corona Del Mar Beach where a mass baptism was planned. Sandy sensed a need to be baptized, so she made her way toward the ocean. There, Frisbie asked if she was born again.

“I don’t think so,” she said, as hundreds watched along the rock bluff. “Well, then, let’s pray,” said the young evangelist.

As they held hands, Sandy asked the Lord into her heart. Then she was baptized by the man whose message had led her former husband to Christ.

On April 3, 1971, Mike and Sandy were remarried by Chuck Smith. Love Song provided the music, and Chuck Girard broke down in tears as he sang “Feel the Love”. The couple’s 3-year-old daughter carried a bouquet of daisies down the aisle.

As his wife stood at his side, Mike wept openly. He had regained his wife and daughter.

God had done the ultimate miracle in his life. At the end of the ceremony, the congregation broke into spontaneous applause and cheers.

Smith says what happened to MacIntosh “was just the visible, tangible evidence of how Jesus Christ can take a life that is totally devastated and messed up and put it back together.” But Mike MacIntosh’s story didn’t end there. He now pastors Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego, which began as a home Bible study of 12 people and has grown to a congregation of 6,500—one of California’s largest churches. Horizon has planted more than 30 additional congregations.

Good Vibrations
Mike MacIntosh’s story was repeated hundreds of times during that era, and people who were touched by the Jesus Movement moved to other parts of the country, triggering similar results. It started in some places simultaneously. In other areas, it coincided with the charismatic renewal movement that swept through mainline churches in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But in every place it touched, young people found Christ.

• Some of the earliest tremors of the Jesus movement were felt in 1967 in San Francisco, where hundreds of dropouts became followers of Jesus as a result of a coffeehouse ministry called The Living Room. Lonnie Frisbie began his ministry in the Bay area and later moved to Southern California, where he began working with Chuck Smith.
• At Calvary Chapel, contemporary folk groups like Love Song, Children of the Day, Mustard Seed Faith and Bethlehem created what we know today as contemporary Christian music. The church also launched Maranatha! Music, which has helped popularize charismatic praise choruses and has made them standard fare in churches all over the world today.
• Greg Laurie, an early Calvary Chapel convert, now stages some of the most impressive evangelistic crusades in the United States, sometimes attracting crowds of 50,000. A Bible study he started in Riverside, California, in 1972 has grown to be a 12,000-member church.
• Ken Gulliksen, a soft-spoken pastor in Southern California, led a Friday night Bible study at the height of the Jesus Movement that brought thousands of young people to the Lord. One of them was Bob Dylan, the Jewish-born pop-prophet whose songs had become anthems of the anti-war movement. Gulliksen later became a key leader among John Wimber’s Vineyard churches.
• Moishe Rosen’s Jews for Jesus organization grew out of the Jesus Movement, as did Operation Mobilization. Young converts from the early 1970s helped fuel the success of Youth With A Mission and added new vitality and manpower to Campus Crusade for Christ.
• In Chicago, the Jesus Movement triggered the formation of Jesus People U.S.A., a group that went on to spawn Cornerstone magazine and helped make outdoor Jesus festivals popular.
• A blond Christian rock musician named Larry Norman started evangelizing in the streets of Hollywood, Calif., in 1969. Among those he led to Christ was a bearded kid named Keith Green, who went on to become a legendary Christian musician and evangelical activist.

“God was raising up people all over America, but we were unbeknownst to each other,” Norman says. “So I was shocked when I found out that Life and Time magazines were doing stories about a Jesus movement. I was excited to realize that I wasn’t alone. There were other crazy people doing what I was doing.”

It was actually Look magazine that published the first full report on the Jesus Movement in February 1971, and its photos of young people being baptized in the Pacific Ocean caught the attention of the international media. Time and Life followed with cover stories in June 1971 and June 1972 respectively, and foreign reporters flocked to Southern California to catch a glimpse of the unusual phenomenon.

Jack Cheetham, the photographer who captured the first images of the revival for Look, told Charisma that he went hunting for the Jesus Movement in 1970. “The media was telling people that God was dead,” says Cheetham, who at that time was a nominal Methodist who rarely attended church.

But Cheetham had heard rumors of a Jesus Movement in California, and he set out with his wife, Betty, to find it. Shortly after they arrived in Los Angeles, they attended a service at Melodyland Christian Center where they heard young people giving testimonies about being “saved,” delivered from drug addiction and finding “a personal relationship with Jesus.” As he snapped photos of the meeting, Cheetham’s wife whispered, “I think you found your Jesus movement.”

Cheetham’s images of hippies praising God captured a defining moment in American history. They were also a fulfillment of a prophecy, according to Cheetham. “Chuck Smith told me that a woman prophesied at Calvary Chapel that someone would come and discover what God was doing there and make it known around the world.”

That’s exactly what Cheetham did when his photographs appeared in Look. “Soon, magazines and newspapers, TV and radio from around the world reported the good news,” says Cheetham. “Suddenly, all over the world, thousands of Christians announced that God was not dead.” Cheetham adds that he became a born-again Christian as a result of his encounter with the Jesus people.

Dan Wooding wrote this article in a 1993 September edition of Charisma.