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Saturday, January 13, 2007
The Underground Christian Press
Recollections of the Jesus People
By Donald L. Hughes
Editor, JesusJournal.com
HEMET, CA (ANS) -- I can remember the first time I saw a "hippy Christian." He
was a young person my own age, had a scraggly beard, was dressed in a flowing
white robe and was carrying a 2 x 4 cross over his shoulder. He was trudging up
Cave Creek Road in Phoenix, Arizona, and I pulled over to talk to him. It was
1967 and people were less afraid to talk to apparitions in the desert back
then.
The young man identified himself as Brother John in a pleasant southern drawl.
He had been in Phoenix for just a few weeks, and he was part of a Jesus house,
a place where believers lived and worshiped together, that was located near
Encanto Park.
Brother John inquired into the state of my soul, and when I told him it had
been saved by the precious blood of Jesus, it pleased him. He invited me to
come to their house and worship the Lord with them, and I asked him what time I
should show up. "Show up anytime," he said.
Brother John declined my offer of a ride, even though his cross would have fit
through the sunroof of my Volkswagen Bug. I watched him take up his cross again
in my rear-view mirror, and then he was out of sight.
A few days later I dropped by the Jesus house, and it was filled with young
people sitting on the floor listening to a young guy teach from the Bible. I
took a place on the floor with them, listened a while, and deemed that this was
no cult, that the teaching was the same gospel preached in my own home church.
There were many differences between this house church and the church I
attended, however. The main one was the spiritual electricity that permeated
the house, that thing we usually define as the presence of the Holy Spirit. The
young guy sharing from the Word did not seem to have any special oratorical
gifts, yet the kids were all hanging on his every word, and were audibly
praising God for every Bible truth revealed. I felt as if I had gone through
the looking glass and landed in the Book of Acts.
Arthur Blessitt carrying the cross in China
A year later I moved back to California to complete my degree at Azusa Pacific
College (as it was known then) and found myself meeting an array of amazing
characters over the next few years. They included people like Lonnie Frisbee
from Calvary Chapel, another cross-carrying southerner, Arthur Blessitt, who
had a coffee house on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Hal Lindsey who held forth
near UCLA at a place called the JC Light and Power Company, and other lesser
luminaries.
Larry Norman asked an important question: "Why did the devil have all the
good music?" Album cover from 1969.
Back then there was a fresh wind blowing, one that moved us outside the walls
of the traditional church and out into the street. For me, it was a movement
filled with an excitement that was fueled by a love for Jesus, a compulsion to
share the gospel without inhibition, and the Christian music of long-haired
radical named Larry Norman, who sang it like it was.
The Jesus People movement wasn't the Great Awakening that touched America in
the 1730s, but it provided a new vision for what the church could be. It was a
time of genuine spiritual renewal, one that I would like to see repeated today.
It was during this time that I became aware of people handing out Christian
newspapers on the street. They were the smaller tabloid size, and were filled
with testimonies of people who had been saved, ads for Christian coffeehouses
and announcements of upcoming Christian concerts. They stuck in my mind as
being a very effective means of communication.
In the fall of 1970 I was at Wheaton Graduate School working on an M.A. degree
with classmates like Myra Grant and Philip Yancey. I wasn't sure what topic I
wanted to do my thesis on, but James L. Johnson, head of Evangelical Literature
Overseas (ELO), the spark behind the Communications degree at Wheaton, and an
author himself, asked what I found most exciting. He laughed when I told him
that everything about Christian media excited me.
Johnson was a mentor to me both on personal and professional levels. While I
was working on my degree I was simultaneously working as an editor at Christian
Life Publications, and ELO had office space in the building. Jim and I would
sit in the mostly dark office late at night and discuss all the big issues of
life. It was during one of those discussions that we talked about the Jesus
People newspapers, and the influence newspapers in that format had in American
history.
So, I ended up doing my M.A. thesis on, "The Christian Tabloid Newspaper in
20th Century American Religious Thought," and a bound copy is still on the
library shelves at Wheaton for those who wish to read it. It covers Christian
tabloid newspapers from their genesis as reading material for rural people to
fundamentalists' newspapers like John R. Rice's Sword of the Lord,
religious-political tabloids like Dr. Carl McIntire's Christian Beacon and
evangelistic tabloids like Billy Graham's Decision, before it changed to a
magazine format. Christian tabloid newspapers have a long and significant
history in American religious journalism.
Jim Johnson was on my thesis committee, along with Lois LeBar, a renowned
Christian educator and Larry Richards, who was generating his own
ecclesiastical revival that year with the release of a landmark book called, A
New Face for the Church.
A member of the Jesus Liberation Front distributes copies of Right On on
the Cal Berkeley campus in 1969.
Bob Walker, Christian Life magazine publisher, heard about my thesis project
around the office and commissioned me to write a story about Christian
newspapers for a Jesus People cover story in April, 1971. It was entitled,
"Christian Newspapers Go Underground."
In the story (and my thesis) I researched and reported on "tabs" I was very
familiar with, like the Hollywood Free Paper founded and edited by Duane
Pederson. In my story I noted it began in 1969 with a distribution of 10,000
copies. The special 1971 New Year's edition for distribution at the Rose Parade
totaled 200,000 copies. Usually the distribution was about 125,000 copies
bi-weekly.
In the article I wrote, "The Free Paper features large cartoons drawn boldly
with felt pens, usually showing man's plight in a materialistic world, in the
style of Mad magazine. Editorial material includes announcements and
advertisements concerning Bible raps, special events for Jesus People,
"Hot-line" phone numbers for people needing help, montages depicting Jesus
People "happenings", and reprints straight from columns of major establishment
newspapers. Published testimonies reveal the typewritten evangelistic
exhortations printed in the Free Paper were the instruments that led the
writers to acknowledge Jesus as their Savior and Lord."
Right On, published by the Christian Liberation Front in Berkeley, California,
was another popular underground Christian newspaper. It was edited by Jack
Sparks and carried more intellectual material aimed at the University of
California students, its target audience. Sparks told me at the time that the
expressed purpose of Right On was evangelism, saying "We don't write for
Christians." I asked him how he measured the effectiveness of the tab and he
said, "The volume of mail and changed campus atmosphere indicate that the
papers are serving its purpose."
Time magazine cover,
June 21, 1971
Time magazine reported that there were probably about 50 such Christian
underground newspapers in existence at the peak of the Jesus People revolution.
My guess was that it was 3-4 times that number. Here is my analysis of the
Christian underground newspaper scene at the time.
"The underground Christian newspapers appear to emerge from the youth
subculture to meet the spiritual needs of their own peer group. Many papers
have become the basis of communication for a larger organization. Typical of
this type of evolution is Peace, formerly published as Rated X in the Los
Angeles community of La Puente.
"Rated X was edited by a 19 year-old ex-drug user named Ferni Casner. Casner,
aided by Judy Durham, another drug drop-out who became a Christian, traveled
hundreds of miles weekly throughout southern California dropping off bundles of
Rated X at more than 25 colleges, coffee houses and communal Jesus houses in 31
local communities.
"While virtually a two-person operation, Rated X grew from 5,000 copies to
20,000 copies in a matter of a few months. Casner wrote most of the stories
regarding what was happening around the Jesus scene in California, including
interviews with leaders of the Jesus Movement. After gathering stories Casner
and Durham returned to La Puente to hammer out the stories on a decrepit
typewriter.
"A close advisor of Casner's, Tony Salerno, a southern California Christian
youth leader, supplied spiritual support and often cash in the early days of
the publication of Rated X. Salerno, who operates two Christian coffee houses
called Agape Inn in La Puente and Agape Inn #2 in nearby Highland Park. When
Casner left Rated X to go to college, Judy Durham became the editor, the paper
became the official publication of a group called Agape Force headed by
Salerno, and the name of the newspaper was changed from Rated X to Peace."
So, the underground Christian newspapers were very fluid. They often changed
names, editors and had varying sponsorship. They were published on nothing more
than a word from the Lord, and faded soon after they served their purpose.
Today, I like to think that the spirit of the Christian underground press lives
on, if not in online ezines like www.JesusJournal.com, which I edit, at least
in the thousands of Christian blogs out there. We are all trying to do the same
thing, and that is to bring new spiritual energy to the Body of Christ. Many of
us think we need, and are overdue, for an outpouring of God's Spirit like we
saw in the Jesus People days.
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Donald L. Hughes is the editor of JesusJournal.com an online magazine
that deals with faith and culture. He has academic degrees from Azusa Pacific
University, Wheaton Graduate School and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has
been in Christian media ministry for over 30 years. He recently produced The
Bird Flu Plague: A Survival Strategy for Families & Churches, a documentary
released by Theatron Films. Copyright 2007 by www.JesusJournal.com, and used by
permission.
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