movie review: jesus revolution

Coming to Christ at the tail end of the so-called “Jesus Movement”, I think I put more faith in the Holy Spirit’s ability to work in and around me than in any dogma or religious authority.  This was the gift of that era, as portrayed in the film Jesus Revolution.

But one of the instigators of the revival at California’s Newport Beach Calvary Chapel in 1969 was a flawed man named Lonnie Frisbee.  As the movie shows, he was subject to ego and anger, just as many human beings are.  What the movie doesn’t show is that he died of AIDS.  If he was not a homosexual, he was admittedly sexually experimental.  Despite him not fitting into a neat Christian “morality”, God used him in a mighty way—he changed Pastor Chuck Smith’s life, threw open the doors of Christendom to drugged-out hippies and misfits and orphans in a movement that ushered in a wave of renewal in the church and a new kind of contemporary (in its time) Christian music.  

Watching the movie took me back to what attracted me to Christianity in the first place:  JESUS.  Just purely and simply, the love of Jesus.  God was present in such a bold and vibrant way.  God was using the unlikeliest of people, without seminary credentials, and these people were doing adventurous things. Faith in Christ had not been moralized or monetized.  When Dave and I felt called to leave his teaching position and head out on the road in a VW camper with our Family Bible Jamboree!, we were actually encouraged not to charge for our performances, because if God was a part of it, he would provide.  And he did…including the VW camper!  (Thank you, Bonnie and Klint!)

These days I wonder who might we be alienating from the church because they do not fit neatly into the moral box that makes us comfortable.  Could it be someone who could usher in the next Christian revival?  Jesus was always about reaching those that the religious authorities condemned.  “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.”  (Matthew 16:6) and “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”  (Mark 2:17)  Or as Lonnie Frisbee put it in Jesus Revolution, “There is an entire generation right now searching for God.  I know we must seem a little strange. But if you look a little deeper, if you look with love, you'll see a bunch of kids that are searching for all the right things, just in all the wrong places.”

If you haven’t yet, try to watch this film, and see what it stirs up in you.  Is there a longing to see the kingdom expand and include more people by extending Christ’s love?  At the very least, maybe it will give you a window into what that time was like and how it changed the lives of people like me. 

Love, Liz 

“[In] culture wars no one can claim victory.  We have all been further dehumanized, fragmented and exiled from genuine conversation…culture is not a territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care.  Culture is a garden to be cultivated.”  Makoto Fujimura