Pacific Northwest: Revival in the ‘Underground’

Thousands of young people in the Pacific Northwest are forsaking pot to follow Christ. Spokane, Washington, is the latest big city to feel the impact of the movement, which is largely outside the churches.

Citizens have complained to the city council that the self-styled “Jesus People” are “too aggressive” and an embarrassment to the public image. The objects of their complaints: scores of young Bible-toting hip and straight types who take to the streets daily to share their faith. Often they kneel on sidewalks to pray with peers who want to receive Jesus. They show up in strength at community dances and other events to talk about him, stage “Jesus marches” and outdoor rallies, and hold forth in Bible study and outspoken witness sessions in the area’s twelve public high schools.

At the center of the Christian “underground” in Spokane is Carl Parks, 33, married, father of five young children. A nominal Christian for years, Parks grew restless over the emptiness of life and quit his job as a sales executive a year ago in a step toward “all out consecration.” He studied the Bible for one month. Then, engulfed in spiritual crisis, he locked himself in his study for three weeks to seek God. “When I came out,” he says, “I was totally committed to him.”

Parks had never heard of street Christians before, but on an Easter visit to Seattle he met hundreds of them marching in celebration of Christ’s resurrection. He visited among them for three days. “I’d searched ten years for this,” he says. “I had seen it in the Bible but not in the churches—the love of God pouring through people. God used hippies to show me.”

He returned to Spokane and promptly gathered in two dozen converts. He spent weekends witnessing with young Christian activists in Seattle streets and coffeehouses. In June he led his converts and a Seattle contingent to Spokane’s Shadle Park for a week of meetings. But first they stopped at Highbridge Park, a haven for about three hundred pot-smokers and social dropouts. (“A year ago I wasn’t even aware that we had any hippies in town,” says Parks.) The Christians jumped on benches and sang choruses and hymns, preached, then spread out to speak individually about spiritual needs. “We really freaked out the hippies,” Parks recalls with a chuckle. “About fifty of them accepted Christ that day.” Many others made decisions at Shadle Park, and by the end of the week the majority of the Highbridge group had become Christians, he said.

Also in June, members of The Wilson McKinley, one of the Northwest’s top rock bands, announced they had decided for Jesus and would be playing and singing henceforth for him. They joined the Parks group in special outreach projects. Two months ago they agreed to play at a dance for 1,000 teens in the Spokane Coliseum—on three conditions: union scale wages, freedom to do spiritual songs, and free passes for fellow Christians. The promoters concurred and billed them with three other bands. Security police did double takes when a number of youths showed up with Bibles, which were carefully checked as possible hiding places for dope. The crowd stopped dancing to listen when the McKinley went into action. Parks’s young friends mingled with the teen-agers and led some who wanted Christ into a hallway where they kneeled in prayer. One nervous officer cried: “Hey, you can’t do that here! That’s church stuff!”

“I encourage these kids to kneel out in the open,” says Parks. “It makes them stronger.”

The Jesus People opened the “I Am” coffeehouse and two communal “houses”: the House of Abraham and the House of Sarah. (As elsewhere in the spiritual explosion on the West Coast, the houses are important nurture centers for converts. “Elders” are usually in charge. A daily regimen includes group and personal prayer and Bible study, assigned chores, and witness excursions. Drugs are outlawed. Converts are expected to maintain a strict biblical morality. Resources are pooled. Many youths after a few months return to their own homes and a new life; some move on to establish “Jesus houses” elsewhere.) Spokane “missionaries” opened houses in Walla Walla, Yakima, and across the state line in Coeur d’Alene and Lewiston, Idaho. Nearly 100 young people live in them.

Parks also launched The Truth, an underground-type newspaper with a circulation of 100,000, sold on a donation basis. When police harassed the youthful vendors, they were met with smiles and straight-in-the-eyes “Jesus loves you, brother” greetings. Juvenile officer Lynn Howerton says he has received no reports of bad behavior.

As in other cities, the love and zeal displayed by the street Christians attracted young church members—some bored and on the brink of disaffection—into the Bible “raps” and outreach activities.

Pastors and older church members differ on the movement. Some dislike its charismatic flavor (many Jesus People speak in tongues), its “simplistic approach,” its apparent indifference toward the institutional church, its lack of tight discipline. But, avows Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor Richard Staub, “I don’t knock them. Some of the kids in our church have been tremendously changed by the movement.”

Miraculous physical healings reportedly occur frequently, and demon exorcism is practiced in the movement. Former heroin addicts say they experienced no withdrawal symptoms when they discarded the drug.

Jesus People circulate freely among the Jesuits at Spokane’s Gonzaga University. At least one faculty member and six ordination candidates, all charismatics, have participated in street activities.

High school principals, impressed by the changed lives they saw, asked Parks to help them cope with the serious drug problems at their schools. Student Bible-study groups sprouted up before and after school hours. When two principals balked at religion on campus, students promptly changed the meetings to “Dictionary Studies.” Quips Parks: “Those kids explore the full meaning of such words as sin, salvation, love, life.”

Christianity has prevailed so heavily in the underground that a once-popular hippie coffeehouse and newspaper were forced to shut down out of sheer disinterest.

Parks estimates that 500 hippies in the area have turned to Christ in the last six months. Earlier converts and sympathizers from the straight world have swelled the ranks to about 1,000. Logistics—food, rent, utility costs, printing bills, ongoing personal needs—are formidable and depend on donations, including income from the paper. Yet, says Parks, “the Lord has blessed our faith venture; we don’t owe one cent.” His family, he adds, is with him.

Nearly 300 miles away in Seattle, revival fires have burned brightly in the underground for two years. Numerous communes and coffeehouses have sprung up there and spawned ministries elsewhere in the Northwest and British Columbia. The largest coffeehouse is “The Catacombs,” across the street from the Space Needle. Run by Linda Meisner, a former David Wilkerson associate who worked with addicts in New York, it attracts up to 400 on weekend nights for gospel rock, Jesus “rapping,” and friendship. A heavy program of Bible studies and training classes is offered the rest of the week.

Miss Meisner seeks to coordinate all the Northwest street Christians (numbering in the thousands) into a vast underground evangelistic movement she calls “the Jesus People’s Army.” During a huge outdoor rock festival she chartered a small plane and dropped 10,000 copies of her underground paper Agape on the revelers. Meanwhile, street Christians infiltrated the crowd and had a field day of witnessing.

The New Men, a music group, has sung and testified at assemblies in a hundred drug-plagued junior-high and high schools, with spectacular results in some. In one high school, Jesus People were kept busy all day praying with students in halls and lounges; students forced teachers to shut down classes so Christians could come in and answer their questions about Jesus. At least sixty professed Christ that day.

Oregon has felt the impact of the religious awakening. Christian communes are multiplying in rural areas. Strong movements thrive in Portland at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where hundreds of young people recently jolted the campus with a peaceful “March for Christ.”

The colorful vocabulary of the movement has special meaning. To be “freaked out on Jesus” is to be totally under his influence and hence a “Jesus freak.” “Jesus People” translates as “Christians.” “Street” indicates gregariousness and nomadishness, also the sphere of active witness for “street Christians.” “Straights” are mainstream establishment types, usually with no drug experience. Straights who work with street people often, for reasons of affinity or strategy, adopt their jargon, life-style, and outward appearance.

Observers in the Northwest say the awakening shows no signs of peaking yet. Significantly, the Seattle Times listed charismatic developments as the top news story of 1970.

‘Straights’ Meet ‘Streets’

Millions of Americans were introduced to the street Christians this month by NBC television and Look magazine.

NBC’s “First Tuesday” show took viewers inside the Children of God encampment in Thurber, Texas, a communal training center for hundreds of converts from the drug, occult, and radical scenes. Black and white young people alike gave lucid, unrehearsed accounts of the changes Jesus wrought in their lives. The TV cameras caught close-ups of the Children’s communal life and fellowship (shared meals and chores, Bible study, outdoor evangelism classes), and followed the Children on witness excursions into several of the six cities where the group maintains “outposts.” In one scene the youths donned red sackcloths and held a silent Jeremiah-like vigil at the Texas-Arkansas football game. Similar vigils at other public events and in certain liberal churches are punctuated only by a call to repentance.

Producer Robert Rogers, who spent three weeks with them, on another TV show recalled what impressed him most: “These kids had no chips on their shoulders.” Love and joy prevailed, he said. And, he added, he wouldn’t prohibit his daughter from joining the group if she wanted to. Rogers, a Catholic, said about one-third of the Children are former Catholics.

NBC said the “First Tuesday” show drew only favorable audience reaction, mostly from young people who wanted to get in touch with the Children.

The clan was founded by traveling evangelist David Berg, his three children, and an associate five years ago, and came alive in 1968 with the conversion of some drug-users. It numbers more than 400 today. The Children’s Texas and Los Angeles quarters are owned by noted West Coast radio preacher Fred Jordan.

Look, in its February 9 issue out January 26, features an eight-page color-illustrated spread on America’s most unusual church: Calvary Chapel near Costa Mesa, California. Pastor Charles Smith, 43, has baptized thousands of converted hippies in the past two years. Lonnie Frisbee, a former drug-user, heads up the youth work, which has fueled much of the current West Coast spiritual explosion.

Said New York writer Brian Vachon, 29, of his experience: “It was unquestionably the most remarkable week of my life. They had the best sounding music I’ve ever heard. Everyone wanted me to accept Christ, too. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m thinking about it.”

Traveling photographers, Jack and Betty Cheetham, who took the pictures for Look, did receive Christ while on the assignment.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

Evangelical-Jewish Dialogue

A major theological dialogue between evangelical and Jewish scholars highlighted the twenty-second annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, held last month at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California. Fifteen Jewish representatives and their wives were on hand for the exchange with ETS delegates.

The dialogue was built upon two papers. One was by Rabbi Samson H. Levey, professor of rabbinics and Jewish religious thought and director of graduate studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. The other was by Dr. William W. Bass of Talbot Theological Seminary in Los Angeles.

The basic divergence of viewpoint centers in the person of Jesus Christ. Dr. Levey said that “the idea that God could demand in Jesus a human blood sacrifice is reprehensible to the Jewish mind.” He argued that God could not have demanded the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham because the Jew cannot accept the notion of offering human blood for atonement of sin. Evangelical discussants articulated their own convictions on the uniqueness of Christianity, its Jewish origins (both Old and New Testament), and the need for both Jew and Gentile to find forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.

Dr. Marc H. Tanenbaum, national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, and Dr. Robert Cooley, outgoing president of the ETS, expressed satisfaction with the dialogue that pinpointed basic differences but came out solidly in support of religious freedom, the right to propagate and worship according to the dictates of conscience, and the evangelical opposition to anti-Semitism and sympathy for persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union.

Dr. Harold Lindsell, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, was elected president of ETS, which now has nearly 1,000 members. Robert L. Saucy of Talbot Seminary was chosen vice-president.

Hope was expressed that a program committee would arrange for evangelical-Roman Catholic dialogue for the next annual meeting, to be held at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, December 27–29, 1971.

Into The Driver’S Seat Of G.M.

General Motors’ board of directors achieved a dual “first” this month by electing to the twenty-three-member board Leon H. Sullivan, pastor of Philadelphia’s Zion Baptist Church—the city’s largest Protestant congregation—and head of Opportunities Industrialization Center (a job-training enterprise he founded in 1964). Sullivan is both the first black and the first clergyman to sit on the GM board.

The company has been under fire from a group called “Campaign to Make General Motors Responsible.”

Sullivan says he will try to obtain more economic participation by blacks in GM, which lists twelve blacks among its 13,000 dealers. According to GM, about 15 per cent of its work force comes from minority groups.

Sullivan says his OIC, initiated as a self-help investment program, has trained 65,000 persons since 1964 and placed 40,000 of them in jobs. OIC is already heavily funded by federal and private funds and is now seeking $100 million from the federal government and $10 million from private sources to train and place one million unemployed persons in the 1970’s.

The cleric says he cannot devote much time to GM affairs because his church was destroyed by a fire two months ago. It was insured for $340,000, but rebuilding will cost $1.5 million he says. He hopes to break ground this summer. The origin of the blaze is still under investigation.

Deaths

GEORGE W. BABER, 72, African Methodist Episcopal bishop of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, New York, New England, and Bermuda from 1956 to 1964; in Washington, D. C.

ARTHUR A. FORD, 75, psychic medium and Christian Church (Disciples) clergyman noted for his relationship with the late James A. Pike; in Miami, Florida.

EVERETT W. PALMER, 64, bishop of the United Methodist Church for the Portland, Oregon, area; in Palm Springs, California, while vacationing, of a heart attack.

Personalia

Another clergyman is headed for Congress. The Reverend Walter Fauntroy, a Baptist, won the Democratic primary this month in the race for the new post of non-voting delegate from the District of Columbia (see January 15 issue, page 27). In view of the heavy Democratic voter registration in the nation’s capital, he is expected to win the March 23 election handily.

A Jewish rabbi was arrested on charges stemming from an encounter with police during anti-Soviet demonstrations in New York. The rabbi, Meir Kahane, is a leader of a Jewish group that is harassing Soviet diplomats in retaliation for persecution of Jews in Russia.

A military tribunal in Yaounde, Cameroon, sentenced to death the 44-year-old Roman Catholic Bishop of Nkonsamba, Monsignor Albert Ndongmo, for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government. He and five other men were ordered to be executed.

Dr. W. Joseph Hemphill was appointed executive director of the National Sunday School Association. He is a former pastor in San Gabriel, California.

Panorama

A federal grand jury indicted three Roman Catholic priests and a nun on charges of plotting to kidnap presidential adviser Henry A. Kissinger and to plant bombs in federal buildings in Washington. At least two other nuns and a former priest were named as co-conspirators but not defendants.

The Conference on Christianity and Literature chose Amos Wilder’s The New Voices: Literature, Religion, Hermeneutics (Herder and Herder) to receive its annual book award.

A Canadian government report called the country’s religious publications “visually and editorially inferior to the secular press.” The report made several exceptions, however, commending the United Church Observer, the Anglican Canadian Churchman, and two Roman Catholic papers.

A Roman Catholic priest in England won about $250,000 in a football pool this month by correctly forecasting eight tie games. He said he would pay off a small church debt and give most of the rest of the money to charitable causes.

West Indies Mission reports 4,000 professions of faith in southern Haiti during the first eight months of 1970.

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