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The last two years of the sixties saw flower power wilt with a vengeance. Vietnam burned on. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan was thriving. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in the space of two months. Charles Manson’s murderous crew offered up their victims to nihilism. Mick Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil” as an Altamont rock concert fan was killed by Hell’s Angels.

At the same time, along came the Jesus People—earnest, alive, “freaks” with smiles instead of frowns or vacant stares. The long hair was confusing to many Christians, but the message sounded first century: “Get ready! Repent because Jesus is coming back soon!”

Some Christians criticized it, saying it had a “simplistic mentality,” with “an excessive emphasis on experience and feeling.” Others called the Jesus Movement counterfeit Christianity. In 1971, the mass media noticed, and Look, Time, Life, and Newsweek gave the movement mostly positive, though somewhat superficial, reviews.

That was about 25 years ago. Looking back, who were these “Jesus People”? And what has happened to them today?

The Jesus Movement, like the time that spawned it, was psychedelic in the variety of its participants. A 1974 study suggested that at its apex, the movement comprised 30,000 to 3 million people, depending on how one defined a “Jesus Person.” But one common factor was a testimony of a personal, revolutionary encounter with living Truth:

“When I was in the peace movement,” said one young convert, “I was always looking for peace and joy and love, and there never seemed to be any. I’d come home at night and it just didn’t seem real, it just didn’t last. You know, it says in the Bible that if you build a house on sand that, when the wind and water come, it will blow away. But if you build a house on rock, when the wind and the water come, it will stand firm.

“When I heard about Jesus, it just blew my mind that something came before and then just went on into eternity. It blew my mind that I could be grounded into that rock … I had always believed that there was a truth, a rock, that you could grab hold of and that wouldn’t change, but I was never able to find it until I found Jesus.”

Ted Wise, who some credit with starting the movement in the spring of 1967 (he denies it), was a Sausalito, California, sailmaker whose wife had rediscovered her lost childhood faith. Tired of the drugs and esoteric Eastern religions he’d found in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, Wise began reading the Bible for himself and made a decision for Christ. Wise then started a Christian commune, The House of Acts.

“We all moved in together—eight adults and seven children in a two-bedroom house,” House told Look magazine. “It was a situation where prayer and faith in God’s will was an absolute necessity.” Through the late sixties, such Christian communes spread across the west coast.

Another early convert who influenced the movement was Lonnie Frisbee, an extroverted longhair. After he was introduced to Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, Frisbee moved into Smith’s house. Lonnie brought home so many converts, a new home had to be found in May 1968. Within two weeks, 35 young men had accepted the Lord and had moved into the house. “We had built bunks out into the garage,” recalls Smith, “and they were sleeping wall to wall through the house. One kid was even sleeping in the bathtub.”

The commune was called “House of Miracles” and would ultimately spin off into a number of related communes of Jesus People known as the Shiloh communities. At their high point, Shiloh claimed 187 communities across the country. (In 1987, after leadership struggles and an encounter with the IRS, Shiloh’s last community closed its doors.)

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