Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.
C. S. Lewis
If we have got the true love of God shed abroad in our hearts, we will show it in our lives. We will not have to go up and down the earth proclaiming it. We will show it in everything we say or do.
Dwight L. Moody
In that convulsive year of 1968, Kay Smith was about forty years old. She had been a pastor’s wife for almost half her life. She was a witty, intelligent, fun woman who was curious about everything and missed very little. She was a deep student of the Bible. She had shoulder-length black hair, bright blue eyes, and long, tapered fingers with oval fingernails. While Chuck Smith was a winsome, warm personality in the pulpit, he was quieter in a private setting. For her part, Kay was inquisitive, verbal, and ebullient. She loved to talk with people and hear their stories.
In early 1968, though, Kay was moved by the stories of people she hadn’t yet met.
Newspapers in Southern California were highlighting the influx of restless teenagers into the area. Many of them were runaways who’d rejected their parents’ rules and materialistic values in favor of freedom and the open road. They’d come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, but now it was cold in Northern California, so they’d made their way south to warmer cities. Young men and women were homeless and hitchhiking, easy prey for just about anyone. They’d go through trashcans looking for food, but somehow seemed to always have access to marijuana and harder drugs.
Kay made her husband drive over to Huntington Beach with her. It was a surfing beach about twenty minutes from their home. It was also home to the Golden Bear, a club that featured musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Huntington was a hippie magnet, with teenagers, peace signs, flowers, beads, and drugs everywhere. Kids wore buttons with the mantras of the day: “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” “Save water, shower with a friend,” and the seemingly omnipresent, “Make love, not war.”
Chuck and Kay would watch kids staggering down the street or zoned out on the beach. Chuck would think practical, manly thoughts like, Why don’t you get a job and cut your hair and take a bath?
Then he’d look over at his wife and she would have tears in her blue eyes. “They’re so lost,” Kay would say. “We’ve got to reach out to them! They’ve got to know a different life! They’ve got to know Jesus!”
Soon Chuck followed his wife’s leading. Kay realized that if they waited for their paths to cross with one of these needy teenagers, it just wasn’t going to happen. Lost hippies weren’t going to spontaneously show up at their nice, conservative church one Sunday morning. They needed to do something.
Their college-age daughter was dating a guy who’d come to know Christ out of the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco. So Kay asked the boyfriend if he could bring a real live hippie over to the Smiths’ house. “We just want to understand their world,” she said. “We want to know how they think, what they believe, and how we can help.”
Soon after that, the Smiths’ doorbell rang. Their daughter’s boyfriend was standing on the porch along with a slender young man with long, brown hair, a mustache and beard, and a linen tunic. He had flowers in his hair and tiny, tinkling bells on his cuffs. He had a huge smile on his face.
“Come in!” said Kay.
“This is Lonnie,” the boyfriend said. “Lonnie Frisbee. I was driving the other day, and I always try to pick up hippies who’re hitchhiking so I can tell them about Jesus. So I picked up this guy here, and next thing I know, he’s telling me that he hitchhikes around the area so he can tell the people who give him rides all about Jesus. He’s our brother in Christ.”
It was like when John Lennon met Paul McCartney, or Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak. Or when nitro met glycerin. Explosive. Lonnie Frisbee and Chuck Smith were the same species; aside from that, they had nothing in common in terms of personality, life experience, background, or appearance. But they both knew Jesus, and when Lonnie crossed Chuck and Kay Smith’s threshold, something big and volatile was about to happen that only God could orchestrate.
As they talked that evening, Chuck realized that Lonnie might be the very person God could use to help his church reach out to hippies, beach bums, and druggies. “You speak their language,” he said to Lonnie. “You know better than any of us how, what, and why they think and feel the way they do. You could stay with us for a couple of weeks and help me understand what makes them tick.”1
Lonnie was excited about the idea. “I could do that,” he said. But, he added, he’d just gotten married to a girl who’d been caught up in the drug scene, like he had, but had left it all behind to follow Jesus. They were living in San Francisco.
“No problem,” said Chuck. “Bring your wife. She can stay here too.”
Soon Lonnie and his wife were living in the Smiths’ home. But they had this irrepressible habit of reproducing . . . not physically but spiritually. They’d go out to the streets or the beach with fellow believers and talk to kids about Jesus Christ. Hippies would confess their sins, receive Jesus, and become sons and daughters of God. They’d leave their old lives behind. And some would move right in to the Smiths’ home as well and be baptized in the backyard pool.
Chuck and Kay were called to many bold moves, but running a commune in their home was not one of them. Chuck rented out a house in Costa Mesa. The group moved in. They worked, shared meals and resources, and studied the Bible. They shared about Christ with other hippies. Within a few weeks there were thirty-five people living there. Chuck rented another house. The same thing happened. Eventually there were a half dozen new communities of young believers getting excited about Jesus and the Word of God.
Great as it is, the story of hippies coming to faith in Christ might have been just a blip on the religious radar if they had kept to themselves in their communes. What was of key importance, and what made the conversions of hippies in Costa Mesa not just a passing phenomenon but an enduring movement of the Holy Spirit, was the fact that many of these kids came right into the local church.
Chuck Smith’s church, to be exact.
Chuck’s church was not perfect. It was full of imperfect people, just like the first-century church in the book of Acts. Back then the church was called the ekklesia in the Greek, the visible gathering of believers. The word is used 114 times in the New Testament, and at least ninety of those times it refers to specific, local groups of Christ followers. The book of Acts shows God’s people coming together in local churches that are devoted to God’s Word, to fellowship with one another, to worship, and to prayer.2
The local church—humble as it is, filled with flawed but redeemed human beings—is God’s ordained instrument for spreading His good news to people of every tribe and nation. Whether today or fifty years ago, the strength or weakness of any movements, parachurch ministries, or people depends largely on their connection to the local church. The stronger the connection, the greater and longer the impact of that movement in its lasting influence on the culture. The weaker the connection, the weaker the impact.
What gave legs to the Jesus Movement as it happened in Southern California—specifically in Orange County, and later in Riverside, Downey, West Covina, San Diego, and elsewhere—was its connection to local churches.
It was a Wednesday evening service in Chuck Smith’s little ekklesia in Costa Mesa, circa 1968. Chuck had just prayed the customary opening prayer, and his congregation of businessmen, moms, dads, and other upstanding citizens looked up, waiting for his sermon.
Then, in the silence, came the small but distinct sound of bells. Little bells tinkling on the ankles of about fifteen hippies who were wearing granny dresses, jeans, cutoffs, tie-dye shirts, headbands, and flowers in their long hair. They walked down the aisle. Most had never set their bare feet inside a church before. They looked at the pews but chose to move all the way to the front, where they sat down cross-legged on the floor right in front of the pulpit, waiting expectantly to hear whatever it was that Pastor Chuck Smith had to say.
There was a collective gasp from the pews, then silence in Calvary Chapel. Chuck looked at his congregation. His congregation looked at the hippies. The hippies smiled back, holding their new Bibles in their laps.
“Well,” said Chuck heartily. “Tonight we’re continuing our series in the letters of the apostle John. So let’s all open our Bibles to the book of 1 John!” Chuck read:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.3
So it was not a campaign or an outreach or a program or a human plan that kicked off the Jesus Revolution in Costa Mesa in 1968. It was, like all awakenings or revivals, initiated by the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit opened Kay Smith’s heart to people who were on the margins of society, people who weren’t like her. The Spirit—who clearly has a sense of humor—linked two such unlikely brothers as Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee. And the Spirit drew hippies and conservative church people together into an unlikely new community, one built not by human plans or preferences but by the revolutionary love of God.