Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin Page B

alliance with the Republican Party in the late seventies— were countercultural. In the late sixties and early seventies, a growing cadre of avant-garde evangelicals found a receptive audience among thehippies, whose rejection of materialism and search for spiritual experience provided common ground. This was especially true in Pentecostal churches and charismatic Christian circles, where a lively style of worship and openness to religious ecstasy rang true for spiritual seekers of other stripes. Both the hippies and the evangelicals envisioned a world beyond the confines of ordinary time and space. Both practiced spiritual healing and were open to the wisdom of living prophets. In the end, it wasn’t a great leap from the Age of Aquarius to the Second Coming of Christ.
    Chuck Smith began to change his mind about the hippies when his daughter started dating one. His name was John. A few years back, before his Christian conversion, the young man had dropped acid and reveled in all that sin and sexuality up in San Francisco.
    â€œOne night I opened the door and there was John with a long-haired, bearded kid with bells on this feet and flowers in his hair,” Smith recalled. “An honest-to-goodness hippie!”
    â€œChuck,” John said. “I want you to meet Lonnie Frisbee.”
    Lonnie grew up in Orange County, left home as a teenager, and wound up in San Francisco for the Summer of Love. One of the first converts of the Jesus movement, Frisbee helped set up the Living Room in the Haight in late 1967, but headed home the following year. Lonnie still had the fire of a fresh convert when he showed up on Chuck Smith’s doorstep.
    â€œI put out my hand and welcomed him into the house,” Smith said. “As he began to share, I wasn’t prepared for the love that came forth from this kid. His love of Jesus Christ was infectious. The anointing of the Spirit was upon his life.” 4
    Smith helped Lonnie rent a two-bedroom house on Nineteenth Street in Costa Mesa and open the House of Miracles, one of the first crash pads for Jesus freaks. Meanwhile, on the other side of Los Angeles, David Hoyt had rented an old sanitarium in Lancaster and founded The Way Inn, another early Christian commune. Frisbee had nearly two dozen converts the first week. He built bunk beds in the garage at the House of Miracles. One kid slept in the bathtub. It was the spring of 1968, and the Jesus movement was taking off.
    But Frisbee wasn’t the only young evangelist harvesting hippies in Orange County. He and other leaders in the fledgling Jesus movement had begun hearing stories about a zealous band of young Christian evangelists in nearby Huntington Beach calling themselves “Teens for Christ.” Frisbee, who was only nineteen years old at the time, asked two street preachers with a little more savvy—Kent Philpott and David Hoyt—to help check them out.
    Berg and his family had just arrived in Huntington Beach after their flop as the Berg Family Singers. They arrived at Virginia’s cottage in early 1968 with a few followers they’d picked up along the way. Two brothers had joined the troop at the New York World’s Fair. David Berg married one of them off to Faithy in February 1967 when his youngest daughter turned sixteen years of age. Another teenage devotee married Berg’s son, Aaron, in November. Berg’s oldest daughter, Deborah, had already married a man who met the Bergs at a Florida Bible college. 5
    Lonnie Frisbee, Kent Philpott, and David Hoyt arrived late in the day for their meeting with the Teens for Christ. “Berg and his sons were sitting there with some other guys. What I remember most is that they were dressed in black suits. That was very astonishing to us. They looked like establishment-type people.
    â€œIt was not like a conversation between brothers in Christ. It was more like, ‘Who are you?’ Sort of a suspicious tone,” Philpott said.