I love speaking to and hanging out with young people. As a college professor I made it a point to sit around the student center a couple hours a week just to enjoy time with excited, vivacious students. I also love teenagers; in fact, I just returned from a wonderful weekend in Florida where I got to hang out with my family, a great group of college students from FSU, and a wonderful pile of youth. Not too many middle aged seminary professor-types get to do that often, so I am grateful.
I am not so good with elementary students. They are a bit loud for me, a bit unruly for my advancing years. But we can learn a lot from children. In his fascinating book Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Gordon Mackenzie made an observation of elementary school children. An artist who for years sketched designs for Hallmark cards, MacKenzie spoke to elementary school classes about art. Over time he recognized a consistent pattern when he asked students in a certain grade if those who considered themselves an artist would raise their hand:
First grade: All the children jumped from their chairs, arms waving wildly.
Second grade: About half the kids raised their hands no higher than their shoulders.
Third grade: No more than one-third ever raised their hands, and those who did were cautious and self-conscious about it.
“The higher the grade,” he observed, “the fewer children raised their hands.” He called the pattern “the suppression of creative genius.”
That has been more pronounced in the church. We have created a culture which celebrates the duty-driven church goer and raises eyebrows at the passionate witness on the streets. Certainly as we grow older, maturity calls for wisdom, restraint, and even silence at appropriate times. But have we so anesthetized the church that outbreaks of creativity, even those consistent with Scripture, are considered scandalous?
I thank God that as a child about eleven years old, at the time caution takes over enthusiasm, I saw young adults radiantly and unashamedly passionate about their faith. I was a typical, good little church kid who knew the right answers in Sunday school and had ribbons for attendance at Vacation Bible School. But I did not know Jesus. Suddenly our church was invaded by the Jesus Movement. In 1970 I witnessed many hippie-looking youth become passionate for Jesus. Their passion became mine, for their testimonies helped to lead me to Christ.
In the early seventies God moved through a lot of young people, many who looked a little strange. In fact, many young adults who had dropped out of society in the 1960s met the Lord during a spiritual movement called the Jesus Movement. The change was so radical that many were called “Jesus Freaks.”
At the same time, God was stirring less strange young people. Asbury College in Kentucky experienced a powerful revival in 1970. In churches across America, youth choirs swelled in numbers as youth musicals gave teenagers a way to spread the gospel in a medium they loved.
God was up to something! It was called the Jesus Movement because it simply focused on Jesus – on His power to save, and on His return. The big saying then among teenagers was “One Way!” Often this was yelled while an index finger was pointed into the sky, indicating the uniqueness of Jesus as the only true Savior. I recall so many youth hungry to worship God, eager to study Scripture, unashamed to share Christ.
A Christian Youth Counterculture
The Jesus Movement demonstrates the zeal of youth in spiritual movements. The movement went against the flow – against the flow of so many youth who reacted to society by dropping out or experimenting with drugs or sex on the one hand, and against the staleness of so many churches that had lost their passion for God on the other. Thousands of people came to Christ from lifestyles of drug addiction. Also, even more youth got a fresh dose of excitement in their churches. I have lost count of the numbers of people in ministry today over 40 years of age (you know, over the hill) who look back to what God was doing in the early seventies as being the most important time in their lives spiritually.
Let’s Get Excited!
In many cities across America, churches called Calvary Chapel dot the landscape. All the churches came from the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, where pastor Chuck Smith began baptizing hundreds of new believers around 1970. The church became a nerve center of the growing masses of young adults who found a focus for their excitement in the grace of God.
Jesus cheers, mass ocean baptisms, coffeehouse ministries, Christian rock and roll music, and unashamed personal witnessing characterized the early 1970s in the lives of many young people. In the midst of the controversy in American society in the late 1960s and early 1970s over civil rights, nuclear weapons, and the war in Vietnam, God moved. The Jesus Movement is best known for the hippies, runaways, druggies and others who were radically changed by the love of Christ. Go back to 1970 to 1972 and you will find the Jesus Movement on the cover of major news magazines from Time to Newsweek to Life. These young adults recaptured the first-century notion that evangelism means sharing good news.
The Jesus Movement included more than the “Jesus Freaks.” Young people in churches of all denominations were affected. The most common way the movement affected churches was in the massive youth choirs and youth musicals (Good News, Celebrate Life, Tell It Like It Is, etc.) that exploded across the country. In the early seventies, most of the time the youth choir was the youth group. I came to Christ in 1970 in a church which saw many hippie-types get radically saved. I was a skinny, insecure, pathetic kid with ears like Mickey Mouse, the body of a pipe cleaner, and the crooked teeth of an alligator. But when I saw Jesus change those hippies, I believed He could change me too – and He did. We even started a coffeehouse, calling it the “One Way Christian Night Club.” Later, I was in a church as a teen which averaged just over 200 in attendance, but had a youth choir of 70 teens. Also, in our small church, we had youth retreats every winter and summer, and had to cut off the attendance sometimes at 100, and even had to turn away some kids. I have never gotten over those days.
Imagine if you had a camp or retreat when the number of teens that went equaled half the number of your weekly attendance. How many students would that be?
I have had pastors ask me, how did your church get so many youth to attend the retreats? My answer – we didn’t, God did. In the book of Acts the early believers did not try to draw a crowd. They either went to the crowds with great excitement to share Christ, or people came to them to get in on the excitement! People want to be part of a movement.
The Jesus Movement presented a unique, youth-driven awakening. This reality affected it negatively in that it tended to be driven by emotion and was at times superficial. And, although the music the Jesus Movement was birthed out of a desire to relate Christianity to the everyday world, its long term impact has been to help create a Christian subculture…. Still, while not a “great” awakening, it is hard to imagine the contemporary church at the start of the third millennium without its effects. And, it is hard for me not to become excited at the possibility for a movement of God among students today.
(Note: this is excerpted from my forthcoming book Join the Movement: God is Calling You to Change the World, available March 07 from Kregel)
