I first heard about Jesus Freaks through Cheech and Chong: “I used to be all messed up on drugs, but then I found the Lord; now I’m all messed up on the Lord.” The idea was that people were finding, in Christ, what they had previously been seeking in drugs. The first real Jesus Freak I remember in Sonoma was a guy named Jonathan. He dressed like a hippy and talked to people about Jesus all over town. Everyone knew of him.
I was behind him once at the grocery store, and as he was leaving he noticed an older woman gawking at him and said to her, “Jesus loves you.” The woman’s response struck me as very odd; you would have thought he had slapped her or threatened her physically in some way, because she reacted with what looked like fear. This didn’t seem like an appropriate response to either his words or his manner. And a few years later I attended the church he had belonged to, Sonoma Mountain Lighthouse, and people who knew him described him as a very gentle and loving person, just as he had appeared that day at the grocery store.
I had, sometime after seeing him in the grocery store, become a Christian through an Assembly of God church in Santa Rosa. Then immediately after this I went into the Navy, and while I was in training in San Diego I and some friends spent the day with some people from a Calvary Chapel, where they were having a baptism and celebration at the beach. The one thing that stands out in my mind from that day is that these people were hungry to know more of God.
About a year later, while I was stationed in Naples, Italy, on the USS Piedmont, I stumbled across a tent ministry called Christ is the Answer, which, in their words, “grew from the grass roots of the Jesus People movement in the late 1960's and early 1970's.” They were in Naples for a number of weeks, and I hung out with them every possible moment; then, a few months later, a group of us stayed with them again in Munich while we were on leave.
The people I met in the Jesus Movement had problems, and I don’t doubt that many of them had questionable theological ideas, things that would concern me today. But they, as a group, wanted to know more of God. Hunger for God was encouraged and welcomed, as well as an openness to different sources of learning and encountering Him. They very often spurred me on by their examples and their words.
I was struck by this years later when the denomination I was part of embraced worship in ways that reminded me, in some ways, of the Jesus Movement. They wanted to be contemporary and made use of modern choruses and worship songs. But the similarity was only superficial. In the Jesus Movement, anything that gave us more of God was welcomed and celebrated. During an open time at Sonoma Mountain Lighthouse, I remember one of the women quoting words from the hymn “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” and being moved and encouraged by that. I didn’t know any hymns, and hearing these words opened new doors for me. This kind of experience was a regular occurrence, not a one-time thing.
In the church plants of my denomination, hymns were off limits, because these only belonged in “traditional services.” And, of course, they also would not include any silence, because it might interrupt the flow of the worship experience. But even more troubling, in my interactions with them and in their corporate worship there was little-to-no sense of hunger for God. The focus was on growing the church, attracting outsiders and being careful to not offend anyone; encountering God in new and unexpected ways was not at all on not the table.
Cheech and Chong, even though they were joking, were really on the right track. People don’t use drugs for no reason; they do it to find something that is lacking in their present experience. As St. Augustine says, “You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Our condition as fallen human beings is that our hearts are restless because we are out of sync with our Creator, so our hearts seek rest in other things, which for some people leads to using drugs.
The people I met in the Jesus Movement had found rest for their souls and could say, also with St. Augustine, “You were within, but I was outside, searching for You there — plunging, deformed amid all those fair forms which You had made. You were with me, but I was not with You. Things held me far from You, which, unless they were in You did not exist at all. You called and shouted, and burst my deafness. You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness.” And because of this, because God had chased away their blindness and burst their deafness, the longing of their hearts was to know more of Him.
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