23
Tea or Revolution?

Everywhere the apostle Paul went, there was either a riot or a revival. Everywhere I go, they serve tea.

An Anglican bishop

Like the New Testament itself, the Jesus Movement had a wide cast of characters. They were wonderful, weird, damaged, powerful, prophetic, and everything in between. The Holy Spirit works in all kinds of strange and surprising ways. His effects can’t be graphed. His movements can’t be dissected; they are alive. Jesus saved souls, rescued people from drug addiction, planted lonely people in families, revived churches, and changed human lives. Some people walked with Him for a while and then fell back into old ways. And over the years, perhaps some of His former firebrands were more likely to be found at home sipping tea, so to speak, than preaching Jesus on the streets.

One person who probably never stayed home sipping tea was Lonnie Frisbee. Abundantly gifted and deeply wounded, Lonnie was a restless soul. His journey took him from the Southern California Jesus scene in the early ’70s when he got involved with a pyramid style of leadership and cell group “accountability” called the Shepherding Movement. Like any human endeavor, it was subject to excess and abuse; Lonnie later said that “the heavy-handed ‘shepherding’ experience almost did me in. It did do me in . . . and it was also a disaster.”1

He surfaced again in Southern California in 1980. Chuck Smith had invited him back to Calvary Chapel, but to Greg Laurie, it seemed like Lonnie was trying to recapture the former glories of his early Jesus Revolution days. A paid newspaper advertisement featured a photo of him as the man who started the Jesus Movement. It seemed odd for Lonnie to take credit for something Jesus had done. And when Lonnie would speak, chaos would sometimes ensue. One Calvary Chapel staff member was surprised when Lonnie addressed a youth group meeting in May 1980 and kids started falling on the floor like trees in a forest, crashing into chairs, some speaking in tongues, some crying and confused because of the chaos.

Other times when Lonnie would appear at churches or other gatherings, he wasn’t as winsome as he once had been. His humor seemed angry and brittle. Some said that he felt cut out of the history of the Calvary Chapel movement, or that he hadn’t been compensated fairly for his service while there. He and his wife had divorced in 1973; she said it was because of an extramarital affair on her part.2 Lonnie later called it a “dirty, disgusting, gutter relationship of adultery,” though he said he later baptized the man and that God bonded them in the love of Jesus.3

Back in their early days, Greg had felt that as long as Lonnie was around Chuck and his systematic teaching of Scripture, he seemed to do well. But while Chuck’s church services focused on love as the key manifestation of the Holy Spirit in modern times, Lonnie was more interested in intense signs, wonders, healings, and current-day Pentecostal miracles. Because of his “Jesus” look in the booming days of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, many newspapers and magazines had heralded him. He was a favorite on the popular television program of Kathryn Kuhlman, a vivacious personality who held charismatic healing services.

After leaving Calvary Chapel a second time, Lonnie traveled the world, preaching with John Wimber. John was a gifted Calvary Chapel pastor who had eventually shifted much of his emphasis from evangelism and discipleship to dramatic and demonstrative manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit, and founded the Vineyard Movement. Lonnie and John would conduct “healing clinics.” Lonnie once described a series of gatherings in South Africa where “in every single one of the meetings the warts were dropping off people’s hands . . . instantaneously gone. Big warts . . . to them it’s nothing, because they have witch doctors, wart witch doctors in Africa and you could go to that witch doctor and he does a little thing and throws smoke in the air, gives you something and the warts are supposed to fall off and sometimes they do.”4

In other meetings, both in the US and abroad, there was often chaos as people fainted or shrieked in unknown languages, heralding Lonnie as a miracle worker. To Greg, Lonnie’s preoccupation with physical manifestations and experiences seemed a long way from preaching the gospel and giving glory to Jesus.

Meanwhile, Lonnie had slid into an undercover homosexual lifestyle, and he eventually contracted AIDS. This was early in the disease’s development and treatment in the US, and there were no lifesaving options available. Sadly, by early 1993 he was terminal.

Greg and his old friend Mike MacIntosh went to visit Lonnie in early March of ’93. He was in hospice care in Newport Beach.

They were met by a caretaker who guided them up some stairs to a wide room. Lonnie was on a couch, in obvious pain. He was like a skeleton with skin, but that made his smile all the bigger as he welcomed his old friends. He reminisced about old times, but also told them how he knew he would be miraculously healed and would continue his preaching ministry to big crowds around the world.

At the same time, though, he told them he was sad about the course his life had taken. He said he regretted some of the choices he’d made.

The sun set, and Lonnie’s caregiver lit a fire in the fireplace. Lonnie kept talking, his face lit by the warm flames. The sight took Greg back to the old days at the retreats in the mountains more than twenty years earlier. They had all been so young then. They’d build a big fire, and Lonnie would preach to all the Jesus People while the flames danced and the logs crackled. Greg and Cathe, and so many others, had been so proud and thankful that he was their preacher.

But now it all felt so different to Greg.

The fire was so small, and Lonnie seemed smaller too, like a young boy. His life was flickering out. Mike and Greg hugged him carefully so as not to hurt him, told him they loved him and they’d see him in Heaven, and then they all prayed together.

Lonnie Frisbee died a few days later, on March 12, 1993. He was forty-three years old.

Throughout the ’90s and into the new millennium, Greg pressed on with Harvest Christian Fellowship, its evangelistic crusades, a daily radio program, television opportunities, and a growing internet presence as social media exploded and technology allowed for powerful new ways to spread the gospel. He served on Billy Graham’s board of directors and grew in his friendship with the revered preacher. Dr. Graham would send him sermons, and Greg would give him ideas for current illustrations to support his points. During crusades, Greg would be in the arena, listening to Billy Graham preach. He never lost the thrill when he’d hear his hero use his material. And he loved that when they’d have dinner or just talk, Billy Graham didn’t drop names about all the world leaders and celebrities he knew. He didn’t hold forth with his own stories as much as ask his companions about their stories. Greg respected his integrity, his humility, and his lifelong commitment to evangelism, to the glory of God. He was, like Jesus, as gracious to the person he met on the street or in a restaurant as he was to a president or a celebrity. Billy Graham wasn’t perfect, but he was a great role model.

As time went by, it was clear that Greg’s hair and his youth might be gone, but he still had that absolute passion for souls that God had created in him from his beginning “sermon” at Pirate’s Cove in 1970.

Like most of us, though, it turned out that the toughest people for Greg to evangelize were his own family. He had what was basically a full-time ministry trying to share the gospel with his mother’s flock of ex-husbands. He did enjoy a sweet, miraculous relationship with Oscar Laurie, Charlene’s husband who had adopted Greg as a child and given him his name. Later, Greg had the surreal opportunity to meet his birth father. It was an absolutely underwhelming experience. And at the end of her long, restless life, Greg’s mom, Charlene, came to know Jesus before she died.

Members of every generation need to find Jesus on their own, and sometimes kids react against those who have come before. Greg’s grandparents had been Christians, set in their legalistic ways. Greg’s mother rebelled against them and ran away from faith. Greg saw the futility of his mom’s alcohol-muddled existence and eventually ran the other way, toward Jesus. Then, for a time, his own kids chose the habits of this world and a double lifestyle.

It’s not uncommon for pastors’ kids to feel the fishbowl pressure of other people’s expectations. Many revolt for a while against the boundaries and behaviors that have been part of their world for as long as they can remember.

It killed Greg and made him half-crazy with fear to see his older son Christopher wander into drug use as a teenager and young adult. On the one hand he was still the charming, handsome, beloved son, and on the other hand he was a full-blown prodigal, far from God.

Sometimes he wouldn’t show up for a commitment, and Greg would drive over to his apartment and pull him out of bed.

Chris would bat the air and head back to the covers.

“Just leave me alone, Dad!”

Greg’s heart would break. “I will not leave you alone!” he’d tell his son. “I love you. I would do anything to save you. You cannot live like this!”

One morning Greg couldn’t find Christopher. His then-girlfriend didn’t know where he was. Neither did any of his other friends. He wasn’t picking up his phone calls. All Greg could envision was his son dead in a ditch somewhere. He called a friend who was a police officer and asked him to check everywhere that he could.

Greg paced, his stomach in a knot. The phone rang.

“Are you sitting down?” his cop friend asked. “He’s in the Santa Ana Jail. He got pulled over last night and was arrested for drugs. Possession of Ecstasy.”

Greg exhaled. At least Christopher wasn’t dead. At least he hadn’t killed someone in a car wreck.

But then his heart fell. He thought back to his own bad trips as a teenager on LSD. And now here was his son doing the hallucinogenic thing. Why?

Christopher probably couldn’t have really answered that question at the time. And maybe the question wasn’t so much why he was running away from Jesus but when he would turn back to Him. Like all of us, he had to come to that turning point on his own. Only the Holy Spirit could break through to his wandering heart.

It happened one day in the shower. As Christopher told his mother later, he was standing under the stream of water, feeling it flood over his face, and was crying out to God about the mess he was making of his life.

“Help me!” he cried. “Show me what to do!”

By the end of the shower, two things had happened. Christopher had decided to marry his girlfriend, Brittany. And, in the words of the old Jesus People song, he had decided to follow Jesus. No turning back.

They were married in 2006. Christopher had been working at a local design firm as a graphic artist, but as he became more involved with church life again, he switched over to working at Harvest in Riverside. He loved using his artistic gifts for the glory of God. He and Brittany had a baby daughter, Stella. They were building a little family, a new life, and had just opened their home to a weekly Bible study. Life was sweet.

Jonathan Laurie, ten years younger than his charismatic older brother, had a totally different personality from Christopher. He didn’t gravitate to the spotlight. He wasn’t the life of the party. He was more of an observer. He’d graduated high school and worked a series of jobs. Greg, feeling like Jonathan needed to settle down and get a work ethic going—just as Greg had years earlier under Chuck Smith—helped his son get a job as a metal finisher at a friend’s aerospace firm. Jonathan was working hard, coating aircraft parts and sweating all day long. He was living at home to save money. But like his brother before him, he was juggling a double life. Dope on Saturdays—well, dope every day—and church on Sundays. Sipping coffee and chatting at the sunny breakfast bar with Mom and Dad, with pornography and alcohol and drugs stashed in dark corners in his room upstairs. He was miserable, but he hid it all pretty well. His parents didn’t even know what he was doing.

By 2008, Greg and Cathe sensed that Jonathan was drifting, but beyond that they were hopeful that he, like Christopher, would soon come to the point of being totally sold out to Jesus.

Otherwise things were going well. Harvest Christian Fellowship was humming along like a well-oiled machine, with great people in place, exciting programs, and ongoing growth. Greg was speaking to hundreds of thousands of people at a time at stadium events that had their origins in the old Billy Graham crusades of the past generation, but tooled for current ears. Same gospel, new hearers.

Once Greg and Cathe had adjusted to the strange reality that they just weren’t twentysomethings anymore, they had gone crazy about being grandparents. Two-year-old Stella called them Papa and Nama. It was magical. And Christopher and Brittany were expecting a second baby daughter in the fall.

Greg’s memoir from that year, Lost Boy, traced his dysfunctional past to God’s incredible blessings on his life. It ended with joyful family photos, and looked like all it needed was the tagline “and they lived happily ever after.”

It was a season of peaceful maintenance, of continuing to cultivate fields that had been plowed long ago. Greg felt overwhelmed with gratitude. Given his lonely childhood and fractured teen years, now he felt rich in the things he’d once thought he’d never know: a real relationship with God. An intact, lifelong marriage. A loving family. Solid work in a community of faith, a broader family of Christian brothers and sisters. When he was young he had felt like he was drifting in a vast wasteland, and now it was all a miracle, like God had made his life into a beautiful, blooming garden.

What Greg didn’t know was that his garden was about to get plowed under, and God was about to upend his life in a stark, new, very personal Jesus Revolution.