Description: Thoughts on the Gospel, Life Groups and Discipleship
It was the middle of July 1967, the “long hot summer” in more ways than one. Protests against the Vietnam war were common, especially on college campuses. Three years earlier Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Peace Prize for leading the Civil Rights Movement, yet there was still ongoing racial unrest. Race riots were happening across the nation: Harlem, Philadelphia, and Watts, CA. The hippie movement had already been born on both coasts, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and New York’s Greenwic
In the midst of this upheaval, just two years earlier, in the small California beach town of Costa Mesa, Calvary Chapel had its beginning. Hippies, disenchanted with the both the drug and free-love culture, found their way to Chuck Smith’s church. With their long hair and dressed in bell-bottoms, they were fascinated with the counter-cultural teachings of Jesus on love, peace, and joy. Calvary Chapel is a large part of what Look magazine called The Jesus Movement . Other publications called them “The Groo
I was a young boy in the summer of 1967 (9 years old) but I have distinct memories of watching the violence and social breakdown in our country, not unlike what we are experiencing today in a pandemic. In the midst of our own national/world chaos and the fear and anxiety that creates, how can we glean wisdom from the Jesus Movement to infuse us with courage to lean on God? What if he’s doing something profound in our lives and in the church in the present moment? We are the recipients of what the Jesus Move