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"I was so bitter and angry inside," Cameron remembers, "I pressed my car horn and held it until the light changed."

Weeks later, after he committed his life to Christ on one especially lonely night, Cameron felt an urge to find the people on the bus he had blasted with his horn. Something about the togetherness he glimpsed at the stoplight intrigued him. Besides, with hair halfway down to his waist he had had trouble "connecting" with people in more traditional churches.

The busload of young people turned out to be the Jesus People Traveling Team, USA, a group of countercultural communal Christians traveling the country by bus, doing street witnessing, holding concerts at churches with their Jesus rock group, Resurrection Band, and passing out copies of Cornerstone, a hip evangelistic tabloid. Now located in Chicago, Jesus People USA (JPUSA) still includes Tom Cameron plus 500 others. This year it is celebrating two decades of growth and ministry.

Cameron was not the only child of the seventies seeking an authentic community to belong to. Back then, Jesus communes, or "Christian houses," as members called them, seemed to multiply like loaves and fishes, with one 1971 estimate putting them at 600. All but a handful, however, came and went.

If community was a buzz word that failed to outlast the seventies, it may be making a comeback in the nineties. Americans in general, and Christians in particular, seem disillusioned with "rugged individualism" and do-it-yourself, a la carte faith. After the so-called "me" decade, a recent Time cover story noted, the nineties is turning into the "we" decade as Americans make room in their hectic lives for relationships. A new Gallup poll reveals that three out of ten Americans say they are involved in small groups that offer support, and another 10 percent say they wish they were.

Amid this shared hungering for community, the Jesus People offer a provocative case study for how Christian groups—from neighborhood Bible studies to sprawling megachurches—can experience true community. While few churches can or should replicate JPUSA's expressly communal life, 20 years have given them lessons about community that are worth pondering by the wider church.

Open to change
To stay vital, a Christian community must make friends with change.

The group Cameron stumbled upon developed a knack early on for responding creatively to new situations—whether on the order of interpersonal dynamics or cultural shifts.

For example, Cameron's new "home" in 1972 (the group had no permanent address the first six months he traveled with them) began as a spin-off from Jesus People of Milwaukee, a group a 1972 CT news report called a former "doper commune." But the Milwaukee group disintegrated, leaving the team traveling in Florida without a base. Cameron's new-found friends were not fazed, however. They kept alive their vision for street witnessing, parking-lot concerts, and church youth rallies.

Even the decision to settle in Chicago was not so much a part of a master plan as it was a concession to circumstances. Many on the "Jesus bus" had relatives in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, Cameron recalls, so they drove north to visit over Christmas 1972, expecting to return to their work in Gainesville after the holidays. Then word of mouth brought them a string of opportunities to put on concerts and church rallies. "We would sleep in church basements, and the ladies would cook potlucks for us," Cameron remembers. "We went into many small towns that had had no contemporary evangelism for ages."

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45