Mark and I just got back from watching Jesus Revolution at the theater. Talk about a flashback! I’ve been talking with a young neighbor of ours about what it was like in the “Old Days”…

The movie contends that the Jesus revolution was started by the hippies, but there was something that I believe pre-dated that. The second Vatican Council (1962-1965) gave permission for Catholic churches to use the common language of the people along with Latin, but the churches quickly dropped Latin entirely. My first introduction to the Jesus movement came when a young Catholic band came and sang at my Baptist church while I was in junior high.

In between junior high and high school, my parents were falling apart, so we switched to a charismatic Baptist church. It didn’t save the marriage, but it was great for me. I joined a youth Bible study at Doc Davis’s house. There were high schoolers all over his living room floor. We sang the modern classics: “We are one in the Spirit”, “I’ll Fly Away”, “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man Who Stilled the Water”, “Pass It On”, and many more. Then Doc would talk to us about Jesus. His living room became so crowded that he had to knock out the living room wall. One Tuesday night, several of us, including me, got baptized in his backyard pool.

It was a great time to be in high school. It was cool to be a Jesus Freak, and I was probably one of the freakiest of them all. I would tell my classmates about my church and the youth Bible study and they’d want to come and check it out themselves.

There’s a curse or a blessing that says, “May you live in interesting times.” The late ’60s through the early ’70s were about as interesting a time to be a teenager as any before or since. For my high school’s 40th reunion, they opened up my alma mater and we were allowed to bring our children (or grandchildren) in and show them around. I took my son and tried to explain to him what it was like growing up in those times. Young people were having demonstrations and sit-ins and changes were being made. Big corporations finally had to change their polluting ways. It seemed like there wasn’t anything my generation couldn’t do.

There were attempts to integrate schools. I remember the first year some black students were bussed to my lily-white school. There were tensions, yes, but there were also some interesting lessons on both sides. My social studies teacher, Mrs. Betty Golding, lead some of the most interesting discussions about current events. My art teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Borden from Germany, made both boys and girls learn how to spin wool. She let us listen to our kind of music during class. She called us “Sveet children” and “darlinks”. I loved those two teachers.

During my youth (some of it before high school), President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Viet Nam war ended. Richard Nixon resigned after Watergate broke out. I had a sense, even back then, that I was living through history.

But I digress. Suffice it to say that the hippies who started the Jesus Revolution made it much easier to be a Christian in high school. I was blessed to be growing up in such times. This movie brought it all back to me. We need another revival to sweep the country. If movies like this can open the discussion to people who would rather enter a theater than a church, maybe we could see it happen again.