It is a bit uncomfortable to write about a historic time that I have lived through. The Jesus People Movement might one day be called the Fourth Great Awakening. I still remember the day I was at my uncle's house and saw the cover of Time Magazine. It said "Is God is dead?" It was April of 1966, and the scientific method was moving the United States into an ever increasing secular society and the bible was becoming demythologized. Many people took offense at that cover. It was the first time a magazine cover included only text with no images. I was 11 years old at the time and attending Catholic school in the 6th grade. I gazed at the magazine and tried to understand what that cover was trying to say. Surely God was not dead. I still went to church every Sunday, and was an altar boy. The priests and nuns were all still there. What do they mean, "Is God Dead"? Seminaries at the time were exploring the demythologization of the Bible. Rudolph Boltman introduced a process to interpret the Bible by separating cosmological and historical claims from ethical and theological teachings. Boltman's famous quote was, "We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament." His beliefs, rooted in the philosophies of Spinoza and Kant, depend on human reason to interpret the Bible. The scientific method, which is a process and not an outcome, was influencing the postmodern world. Later Francis Schaeffer would argue that if human reason is flawed, then the foundations of this argument is incorrect. C.S. Lewis would agree that the scientific process was only leading us into a deeper mythology. The Jesus Movement was a backlash to this myth by demonstrating that modern day miracles still occur. Lewis would also argue that believing that Jesus Christ is God is the most rational conclusion when faced with the other alternatives.
People were growing their hair long and were being baptized in the ocean. My personal experience can be added to this account. Yes, I became a Jesus Freak. In 1971 I grew my hair long, and I used to jump rope to the 39 lashes in "Jesus Christ Superstar." In high school and college, I performed in God-spell productions at nursing homes. I still remember questioning the Catholicism of my youth. One day I was waiting to give my confession to the priest, and I looked up at the crucifix. The thought came into my mind that Jesus died so that I did not have to feel guilty anymore. I walked out of church that day without going to confession, and I knew I was forgiven. This freedom from guilt was my conversion experience. I stayed in the Catholic church for a couple of years and even led worship in folk masses at Saint Valentines Church in Bethel Park. My best friend at the time, Sam Pagano, invited me to attend a different kind of church service. It was called prayer and praise, and it happened at night so it would not interfere with morning mass. At the end of the service, the pastor asked if anyone wanted more of Jesus Christ to come up front. I came forward, but noticed that many older women were falling down as the pastor would lay his hands on them. I sized up the pastor, realized that I was much bigger than him, and decided that he was not going to knock me over. He tried his best, he spoke in tongues and forcefully placed his hand on my forehead. He gave up after a short time when I did not fall. Meantime his short, timid assistant pastor came behind me and gently placed his hands on my back. I began shaking as I was still seeking God's presence. The shaking turned into an ecstatic experience. I began speaking in an unknown tongue. I felt the love of God in waves of lucid affection that was a life-changing experience and irrefutably God. I had a reasonable Christian conversion experience at the confessional, but now I had an emotional experience that sealed my conversion. Later I learned that this experience was called the Baptism of the Spirit.
The service turned out to be a Neo-Pentecostal evangelical service. The service was held at the Bethel Park Women's Club building on Brightwood Road. The location was typical for many of the new inter-denominational services at the time. Many of these new churches rented school buildings, or church buildings at off peak hours. All of the Great Awakening movement churches felt that they were special. We all felt that the end times were near, and a new kind of message would unite the protestant denominations into a new testament church like the second chapter of Acts. The community of the first century church happened in the context of the first Pentecost. The Pentecostal churches of the Third Great Awakening had introduced a resurgence of spiritual gifts listed in I Corinthians 12. Spiritual gifts like prophesy, healing, miracles and casting out demons were manifested regularly in neo-pentecostal churches as well. These new churches were one group that was driving the Jesus People movement. They all had a distinguishing characteristic of intense participatory worship at the center of their services.
The charismatic renewal hit the Catholic church at Duquesne University in 1967. I attended the 1973 Charismatic Conference. While I was there, I spoke in tongues in one of the meetings. After the meeting, a Malaysian women, who was visiting, came up to me and told me that I was worshiping God in her native language. This was an obscure language that very few people knew. She was surprised that I could speak it. I told her that I did not know her language. I was speaking in a spiritual tongue that I could not understand but she could. This is a personal testimony of a supernatural experience that happened to me in the context of worship. The charismatic renewal was changing the Catholic church's sacramental theology, and bringing renewal to it with authentic experiences. The Jesus Movement occurred between 1961 - 1980’s and spurred the development of Neo-Pentecostal and spirit filled catholic churches. The charismatic renewal in the Catholic church led to ecumenical developments like the fight against abortion and the incorporation of lay ministers into services. The religious right formed a strong voting block influencing politics at the time. Contemporary Christian music and house churches infiltrated the culture.
Billy Graham continued in the tradition of revivals from the Third Great Awakening. If the revivals of Billy Sunday were successful because of his charismatic appeal, then Billy Graham was at the right place at the right time for the Jesus People Movement. His first crusade happened in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1947. Scheduled in arenas and stadiums, his Los Angeles crusade was scheduled for 3 weeks but was extended to eight weeks. Between 1947 and 2005, Billy Graham conducted 417 crusades in 185 countries and territories on six continents. He is believed to have reached over 200 million people in his lifetime, doubling the number that Billy Sunday had reached. The Jesus movement started in the 1960's, but Graham's ministry transcends that time period by starting nearly 20 years earlier. Billy Graham met with and prayed with twelve presidents. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was accepted by many protestant denominations who sponsored his crusades. This emphasis on revival and spiritual regeneration united and divided different protestant groups, like Finney did in the Second Great Awakening. This period saw the beginnings of mega and para church organizations. Some of the groups from the Fourth Great Awakening became institutionalized and larger than any local church. This was similar to the development of the YMCA, Salvation Army, National Catholic Community Services, and hundreds of mission organizations founded in the Third Great Awakening. Groups like The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Pat Robertson's 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority became politically active. This led to the further weakening of mainline protestant churches, and the rise of the evangelical caucus of the Republican Party.
In his book, "Mere Christianity" C.S. Lewis puts forward the rationale for believing that Jesus Christ is God. It is called the Trilemma. In it, he states, "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." From this account we can see that the Jesus People movement was more than just Neo Pentecostal emotionalism. Teachers in the movement attempted to reconcile faith with reason similar to what happened in the First Great Awakening. Most of us probably know C.S. Lewis for his children's books, "The Chronicles of Narnia," however, some people may not know that his teaching books transcended his life, making him the most influential teacher in the Fourth Great Awakening.
Alexander Tocqueville described a quite accurate depiction of the early American Republic from a French perspective. Francis Schaeffer was an American Presbyterian minister who left the United States to form a community in L'Abri, Switzerland. Much like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Schaeffer's was able to bring reason into the revival movement by looking at American Christianity from outside the country. He argued daily against the presuppositions that robbed secular arguments of their validity. He then argued for a world view that placed the Christian religion at the heart of world history. The Jesus Movement like the other Great Awakenings was a marriage of faith, reason, and experience. Schaeffer's contribution offered an alternative explanation for postmodern thought by offering a distinctively Christian worldview. No longer did lay Christians see themselves as just members of a church. They saw themselves as Christians first, and then asked how they might use their craft, skills or vocation to enhance the Kingdom of God (an invisible spiritual and eternal kingdom that transcended time space and national identity). This priesthood of all believers became a distinguishing characteristic of the Fourth Great Awakening. The Jesus People Movement combined reason, experience, and faith into organizations that were validated by the supernatural experiences found in charismatic and pentecostal worship services that spread all over the world.
When will the next Great Awakening happen? Soon I pray.
Pat
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