Preacher in the Mud: Rapping for Christ

One boy was dead. He ran screaming into the path of a truck while on a bad “trip” with LSD. Two dozen teen-agers were in the hospital suffering from overdoses of “acid.” Another 118 were arrested either for selling or possessing narcotics or for illegal use of alcohol.

Those statistics were part of the aftermath of a West Palm Beach, Florida, Thanksgiving weekend rock festival so bitterly opposed in the community that arson is suspected in the burning of festival promoter Dave Rupp’s hot-rod shop.

The festival was plagued by a first-day rain that turned the grounds of Rupp’s auto racetrack into a quagmire, cold nights, strikes by the helicopter pilots ferrying performers to the site, and financial problems. It also had a few instances of nudity, a number of couples copulating, and the usual obscenities from performers like Janis Joplin.

But there was an unusual note to the three-day festival that attracted 40,000 young people ostensibly to hear such rock groups as the Rolling Stones, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. Another attraction was the Reverend Arthur O. Blessitt, a tall, long-haired minister wearing a mod vest and muddy boots.

It was the first rock festival to put a preacher on its program; Blessitt was free to speak whenever he wanted to. He did so three times the first day, and on Sunday morning he held a worship service from the “liberated” stage. Here he told the dirty, bearded, oddly dressed youths sitting and lying in the mud, “You may look more like those who heard the Sermon on the Mount than any group of people since that day.” Then, using the hip language of his audience, he preached on the Beatitudes.

For four hours after Blessitt spoke, teen-agers crowded into the “gospel tent” set up by the Reverend Fenton Moorehead, “minister to the generation gap” at West Palm Beach’s First Baptist Church. “They poured their hearts out,” he reported.

Typical was the case of a weeping girl who told him; “Last night I made some mistakes. Because of the service this morning, I know it. I’m here to make it right with God.”

Moorehead estimated at least 300 teen-agers made decisions for Christ through the work of about 200 college students of all denominations from all over the country. They attended an orientation class, and used the gospel tent as headquarters for witnessing, passing out tracts, and distributing 10,000 “psychedelic” New Testaments.

They gave away fifty dozen hardboiled eggs and more than 3,000 sandwiches (each with a tract inside the wrapper) when kids were begging for food. This not only helped attract the young people but “showed that this is a ministering of caring, and not just of the open mouth,” observed Moorehead.

“Thank God we fought for the right to come here,” declared Jess Moody, pastor of the First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach (he arranged for Blessitt to be on the program). “I don’t blame the people who don’t like the festival. I don’t like it either. I don’t like the drugs or the anti-police attitude. But Christ would be here.”

Blessitt was introduced to the crowd, which police called “remarkably peaceful,” by Glenn Schwartz, lead guitarist with the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. On the first night Schwartz “rapped” with the real and “plastic” hippies. He told them how he once had a hang-up on drugs. “It seemed all right to me for awhile,” confessed the 29-year-old native of Cleveland, “until I no longer was in control. Then I was afraid.”

Schwartz told the crowd, which included thousands of 13-to-16-year-olds, about “the revolution that took place in me when I was saved through Jesus Christ. I accepted Jesus through a real need.”

That “revolution” took place a year and a half ago in “His Place,” a Christian coffeehouse on Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California, run by Southern Baptist Blessitt.

Among those who made “commitments to Christ” was the manager of the Chambers Brothers, who made his decision on stage as Blessitt talked with him.

One girl already bedded down in her tent heard Blessitt talking over the loudspeaker at three o’clock Saturday morning. She went to the gospel tent, waited for an hour and a half to talk to him, and then turned over her botched-up life to Christ. By noon she had joined the college kids witnessing and handing out New Testaments.

One of the most active workers was Sharon Alsup, a pretty, dark-haired freshman at Palm Beach Atlantic College. “I’ve been witnessing since I was 14,” she said, “but I never experienced anything like this.”

She had been singing at a revival meeting when she heard about the rock festival. She began praying about it, and the church took up a collection. It came to exactly $20, the festival admission price.

Sharon found “some pretty far out kids here,” and she was “slapped down” by some who “were really harsh with me.” But she described some rewarding experiences, like one with a Negro boy who was “really mixed up and pretty suicidal.” She recounted how “we rapped and prayed for two hours, and he left here with Jesus in his heart.”

The man at the concession stand next to the gospel tent was unhappy that Sharon and the others had come. “I dislike it very strongly,” said Jess Goldstone, who was selling leather goods and head shop items like scented candles, cigarette papers, and water pipes. (The papers and pipes are used for smoking marijuana and other drugs.)

“The credo of this generation is for everyone to do his own thing,” Goldstone huffed. “Then this group comes along and foists its proselytizing on them to force them into a mold. I didn’t come here to get converted.”

ADON TAFT

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