March 9, 2023 Show with Gary George on “The Jesus Revolution Movie”

The Jesus Movement, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Search for the True Church

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this ninth day of March, 2023.

I am thrilled to have back an old friend of mine going back to the early 1990s, a brother who I met at the John Bunyan Conference all those years ago in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and then later in New Ringgold, Pennsylvania, which is where the conference later moved to every year.

And his name is Gary George. He is a conference speaker, and he's the pastor of Sovereign Grace Chapel of Southbridge, Massachusetts. We're going to be addressing the movie, The Jesus Revolution, its pros and cons, and we're also going to be hearing Gary's testimony of a pastor saved during that revolution.

And we'll also be promoting the 2023 John Bunyan Conference in Franklin, Tennessee. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Gary George. Gary, did you unmute yourself?

Hello, Gary.

Okay, here I am, Chris, good to be with you. Thank you for that introduction. Looking forward to it.

Yes, I am looking forward to it as well. And before we go into your testimony and a review of the movie, The Jesus Revolution, tell our listeners about Sovereign Grace Chapel of Southbridge, Massachusetts.

Yes, Sovereign Grace Chapel started off in 1991, approximately, and it was first named Grace Reform Baptist Church. In 2000, the name changed to Sovereign Grace Chapel. I started pastoring it in the middle of 1992, so we have been functioning for over 30 years now.

And we're in Southbridge, Massachusetts. We have a plurality of eldership, numbers of deacons, and we carry on with congregational church government. And the Lord has been blessing us, and we're excited to spread the gospel and teach the truth as we know it from the Word of God and love the Lord.

Amen. If anybody wants to know more about Sovereign Grace Chapel in Southbridge, Massachusetts, go to SovereignGraceMA, the abbreviation for Massachusetts, dot org. SovereignGraceMA .org. Now, although you have given your testimony of salvation on the program before, it is very relevant to you being a qualified candidate to do a critical review of the movie, The Jesus Revolution, because a part of your testimony is the very era in which our Lord saved you, which was during that period of time in the late 60s, early 70s, that was known as The Jesus Revolution.

I believe it was the New York Times that perhaps, not the New York Times, Time Magazine, I believe, gave it that nickname. I think that was the cover story in the early 70s with that title. But, so let's start with your salvation testimony and include in that any kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised and the providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you.

Well, first of all, if anyone was saved in that era, they obviously have to be an older person. As you said, The Jesus Revolution or The Jesus Movement came on the scene in the late 60s. For myself, prior to that, I had been born and grew up in an Albanian Orthodox church.

My parents were immigrants. I attended Sunday school with my older brother who brought me when I was about the age of seven or eight years old. My mother wanted us to go to church. And so that's all I knew of was orthodoxy.

And I guess you could say I was somewhat of a regular church attender. And if any of your guests, I mean, your listeners don't know much about orthodoxy, it would be very similar, outwardly at least, to Catholicism in many ways, with the liturgy being a very fixed order of service that's conducted weekly.

It's about a two-hour-plus service that the priest conducts. Very boring for the most part. And because it was in Albanian when I was little, I didn't comprehend all the words that were said, but it changed over the course of time.

And of course, there are more serious theological differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, but one of the outward things that some people might immediately recognize is that Eastern Orthodox forbid three-dimensional images like statues and all of their icons that they venerate.

They're still guilty of the sin of idolatry, but they venerate images that are not three-dimensional.

Yeah, it's kind of ironic in a way, because their icons are so diligently done. I didn't know this until I learned it in my late teens about iconography and how it was done, but those that do the drawings or the artistic work for drawing icons are almost monkish.

There's a very serious ascetic posture that they take in their artistic drawings of saints, because they're going to portray a saint of some sort, or an angel, Michael the Archangel, angel for instance, is one of the icons that is on what is known as the icon screen, which separates where the priest functions in the back prior to his coming out to the congregation.

And I being an altar boy, I had that privilege of being on the other side of the icon screen, which no woman was allowed to go in there. Even laypersons weren't recommended to go in the back. Just the priest, altar boys, bishop, etc., could be in those sacred areas.

So yeah, those icons that they draw, they put a lot, a lot of emphasis on the sacredness of them. And as you say, they are venerated objects and supposedly the tool and the means by which a person is able to draw near to the divine through the, you could say, the medium of an icon.

In fact, if any of our listeners want to find out more about the differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and the differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Reformation, and that is a nickname for the Bible, the differences they have from the Holy Scriptures, what Bible-believing Christians believe and teach, you could go to the Iron Sharpens Iron radio website.

I conducted a fascinating interview in 2018 with Dr. Jack Kinnear, who was on the faculty at the time of Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And he received his doctorate at an Eastern Orthodox seminary, not because he himself was Eastern Orthodox or was ecumenical with them, but he wanted to find out more deeply about that religion.

And so his opinion or his understanding has a lot of relevance. But if you type in the search engine at ironsharpensironradio .com, K-I-N-N, that's N as in Nancy, N as in Nancy, E-E-R, K-I-N-N-E-E-R, that is the only interview I conducted with Dr. Kinnear, and that will come up.

Dr. Jack Kinnear on Eastern Orthodoxy, what separates it from Rome and the Reformation from April 16th, 2018. But anyway, so pick up where you left off there as far as your conversion story.

Let me just throw something in there that you and I think your audience of listeners might find interesting. About a dozen years ago, I had a colloquium set up where I invited an Orthodox priest, a Catholic theologian, and an evangelist, Rob Zins.

Now, did this take place in a bar? I'm only kidding. It sounds like this set up for a joke. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I know you're a joker. But anyway, the point of it was, the title that I gave to the colloquium was, Where is the True Church? So each of those representatives, the Orthodox priest, the Catholic theologian, and Rob Zins, who was representing historic, you know, Protestant Reformation or evangelicalism, you could say in a general way, they each gave 55-minute presentations on why they believe where the true church was.

It was a very interesting colloquium. I wish I had tapes and recordings and so on that I could provide to your listening audience. They would find it super interesting. But anyway, getting back to my story.

So I grew up Orthodox, just like I suppose you, Chris, who grew up in Catholicism. I never heard the word, and maybe you did, but I never heard the word born again or being saved. Those were foreign vocabulary words to me.

I did not either until my brother became a born-again believer when I was a teenager.

So what caught my interest, and this is what I want to lead into in regards to the Jesus movement or the Jesus revolution, I went to a prep school, and a history teacher that I was in the class of required us students to have to order either Time magazine or Newsweek magazine.

So I believe it was Newsweek that I had ordered because he wanted to keep us up on current events. And there was a brief article in the back of the magazine about these Jesus freaks in California who were going to parking lots of shoppers at supermarkets and telling them about Jesus.

And I was really scratching my head, and I said, what is that all about, talking about Jesus? Well, anyway, that sort of piqued my interest, and then I was in line to go to a Jesuit-run college on a college sports scholarship, football and baseball.

It was Holy Cross College. And during that summer, I caught in the newspaper that the head of the psychology department was going to be speaking at a charismatic camp, and he was going to be talking about.

Jesus.

And there was some mention about a coffeehouse. It was called the Charisma Coffeehouse, which was a charismatic group. And I had no idea what that was all about. So I happened to meet a girl who told me that she goes to it, and I said, would you mind inviting me to go?

I'd like to go and see what that's all about. So I went, and this was my first exposure, I guess you could say, to born-again Christianity. And it was a very upbeat coffeehouse with the music playing, prayer, raising of hands, Jesus, Jesus, praise the Lord, praise the Lord.

My first reaction was, these people are nuts. What am I doing here? They're off their rocker. I mean, what is this Jesus thing all about? But as time went on in the course of that evening, I started to say, hey, there's got to be something about this that's real.

These people are talking about Jesus like they know Him or He knows them, and they have this sort of personal relationship with each other that really impressed me. And then I did go to that camp meeting that the professor who was a chaplain, an assistant chaplain at the college that I was going to go to at Holy Cross College, I introduced myself to him and found out that he was involved with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that took place in Notre Dame roughly in 1967.

So he had a leaning towards, you know, the Jesus movement in that sense. So this was my first exposure, and Chris, I think you can appreciate it because you came out of what we would call a dead church, a non-gospel preaching, quote, church where we never heard words about new birth, conversion, conviction of sin, hell, judgment, the blood of Christ, atonement, that kind of language would have been very strange to us.

But once we got exposed to it, all of a sudden, it's like, wow, what is this all about? I never heard this stuff before.

But like, I can say, though, that the older nuns who were my schoolteachers in parochial school did mention hell.

Oh, yeah, right.

The younger nuns and priests, because I was I was just on the heels of the ending of Vatican II or the completion, I should say. It didn't end. It completed. And so there was a whole new modern Catholicism that made up the dominant way I was raised and the experience I had in church with folk masses and them actually using Beatles music in the church with a different meaning in their minds, like, let it be.

And in those times of darkness, Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom. Let it be. They actually sang that in the mass. But anyway, this is not my story.

It's yours. Yeah, so that summer, which is what have been the summer of 71 now, which was going to be my freshman year of going to college. This is when I got introduced to this charismatic brand of Christianity that at least they talked about Jesus and and people's lives were being changed.

And a lot of these people in the coffee house had long hair. They were definitely in the hippie mode and era, and they definitely displayed it the way they look, the way they talk, the way they acted.

And some of them had been converted in California, came to the Eastern part. By the way, I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is the second most populated city in New England. So anyway, going to the college that summer, I had gone on a retreat with the Orthodox Church as a teenager, and we went to a monastery in New Canaan, Connecticut.

And at this retreat, the teenagers had an opportunity to meet with the monks and ask the question, ask questions that we wanted to to the monks. Well, I had question after question after question. I was so irritating to the other teenagers that one of the teenagers gave me an elbow in the ribs and said just so that I could hear he said, hey, Gary, why don't you just go get a Bible?

All the answers are in it. And he said it sarcastically, like, come on, that's enough. Go get a Bible. You'll get the answers there. Well, little did he know that that was a life changing saying. He created such an interest or God used that to create such an interest that I couldn't wait to get off the bus back in Worcester.

I went immediately downtown. I went into a religious bookstore that I believe was Catholic, and I said, hi, I would like to buy a Bible. I don't know anything about Bibles, but could you just set me up with a Bible?

Well, they ended up giving me a leatherback revised version. The revised standard version didn't come out till like 1991. They gave me a revised version. So here I am with my Bible for the first time.

And now what do I do with it? I had no one guiding me or instructing me. And I was totally in the Lord's hands. And I believe God was working in me because it was the spiritual interest that I didn't have before, but it was being created in me.

Like it says in Philippians 1, 6, he that has begun a good work in you. And I want to say that the work had begun and was working in me. So here I am with my Bible. And I decided, I guess, just flipping through pages to start at the Gospel of Matthew.

As you know, most Bibles begin with this is the testament of the Lord Jesus Christ. So I started there in Matthew. I'm reading along until I came to chapter 6, verse 19, lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven for where your treasure is and so on.

Well, that verse right there stopped me in my tracks and made me think about the afterlife, something that I had not given much thought to at all. And I thought, wow, Jesus is saying to have treasures in heaven.

I never thought of heaven or even hell for that matter, basically. And I have to say that from that day on, I could not get Jesus out of my mind. I would wake up thinking about Jesus. And I said to myself, where did this come from?

Why am I thinking about Jesus all the time? Where did this come from? I wasn't able to pinpoint it, but I found myself constantly desiring spiritual things. I kept reading the Bible. It took me three years, but I read through the whole Bible, didn't understand a lot of it.

Some I did, some I didn't. You could say I had like, remember when Jesus in Mark chapter 8, he touches the blind man and he says, what do you see? He says, I see men like trees. Well, that's what my life was like during the Jesus revolution period, Jesus movement.

I was seeing men as trees. I felt some inspiration, some divine experience in my life of the divine. And I started buying, for instance, the one way Jesus signs. I put it on my Volkswagen window. I bought a bumper sticker and put it on my bumper that said, things go better with Jesus, which was taken from the old commercial that Coca-Cola had that used to say things go better with Coca-Cola.

I put that on the back of my Volkswagen Beetle on the bumper. I wore a cross around my neck. Jesus Christ Superstar came out around that time. And again, I don't have any theological grounding. So anything about Jesus was exciting.

Godspell, I went to that in Boston. I went to see the Jesus Christ Superstar movie. Billy Graham, the Crusades were at a hype at that point. They were peaking out in the early 70s and through the 70s.

And boy, when Billy Graham was coming on, I was interested to listen to that. And I started taking on some of the rhetoric of born again Christianity. And I claimed myself to have been born again. And I was using that language.

And remember the late great planet Earth came out, I believe, around 71, somewhere in that time period of Hal Lindsey's. I heard about it. I got a hold of that. I got infatuated with this rapture theory and the second coming and Hal Lindsey pushing that we're in the end time.

So that was also stimulating me. The terminology, the Jesus freaks, the Jesus people, of course, we were just coming out of Vietnam, the charismatic renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. And then you had new converts like Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton.

You had Paul Stuckey from the Peter, Paul and Mary group.

Eric, Eric Clampton made it a profession of faith in Christ.

Yeah, it's in writing. You can see it. Um, um, Pat Boone, of course, was claiming to be born again. As a matter of fact, I believe it was in 72 or 71. Uh, I read that he had baptized, uh, 200 people, uh, in his private swimming pool of his house, uh, in, in just six months or something like that.

Wow.

You have the, we had the cross and the switch blades with David Wilkerson and that whole thing. I mean, a lot of things were going on. Teen challenge, intervarsity, you know, uh, Christian fellowship, coffee houses were springing up everywhere.

That is Christian coffee houses. Um, you had now what comes from that, this movement of the Jesus revolution was a lot of independency. A lot of independent churches started to spring up. Um, music became a big medium of the Jesus movement.

A lot of people, especially young people were taken up with a lot of the music that had very weak theology, but catchy tunes, uh, uh, you know, I know you can remember some of those Maranatha songs and some of those simple songs like in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk and you're going through all of these antics.

You're jumping and leaping and praising God. And those kinds of things were, were very impressive and, uh, affected a lot of people and the, and the Jesus movement was spreading across the country. I think we can say safely that, that, um, in San Francisco, hey, Ashbery was probably one of the early centers of where the hippie Jesus revolution movement began, and I think we'll talk about the movie a little bit later, but the movie does portray rightly so that California was, uh, was the area where, and that's where a lot of hippies, of course, migrated to because it was near the ocean and it was just a hip place to go in America at that time.

In fact, in fact, pick up, pick up right where you left off when we come back from our first break. And if anybody would like to send in a question to Gary George, not only about his, uh, conversion testimony, his salvation testimony, but also about the movie, the Jesus revolution.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence.

Don't go away.

We'll be right back with Gary George, right after these messages from our.

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Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Gary George, who is a conference speaker and pastor of Sovereign Grace Chapel of Southbridge, Massachusetts. We are discussing the Jesus Revolution movie, its pros and cons.

And right now we are in the middle of a testimony of Pastor Gary George, who was saved during that Jesus revolution. If you have a question for Pastor Gary, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence and your country of residence. Pastor Gary, when you were saved during this era, were many of your Christian brothers and sisters with whom you shared fellowship hippies?

In the movie, there seems to be nothing but a sharp contrast between those that were Christian hippies and those that were more rigid fundamentalist type Christians. There didn't seem to be anybody in between represented in that movie, other than, of course, the fact that the hippie movement was sharply divided itself.

It had those that were drug addicts and who idolized Timothy Leary and other gurus, where drug abuse was a main sacrament, if you will, of those hippies. And of course, you have the hippies that were brought to Christ, who came out of that wing of the hippies, if you will.

So what was your experience in regard to the actual hippies? Were you a hippie? Were your friends hippies and that kind of a thing?

Well, because I was a jock, jocks weren't into the hippie movement. Our coaches would not allow us to have been hippies with a long hair, etc. Being a jock, an athlete, drugs weren't appealing to us. It was looked at as something frowned on and not that some didn't use it, but I myself never got into the drug scene.

Very, very little. I was more on the alcohol side. And this is what was so difficult during the My Jesus Movement period from 71 to 75, which was the climax of, you could say, this Romans 7, in a way, where the things that I wanted to do, I couldn't do, and I was doing the things I didn't want to do and so on.

And I didn't get into Romans 8, if I can use that portion that way, until 75. But I want to say something that I think God used in a very powerful way and how he used the scriptures during this era. I found myself going more frequently to this charismatic coffeehouse.

Again, I began to take on the cloak of being a Christian. I was reading the Bible. I was going to these charismatic meetings. I never spoke in tongues. It never impressed me. It always seemed bizarre and foolish and unnecessary.

I never saw anything really profitable come out of it, in my experience with it. Nevertheless, I attended because I saw that these people seemed to be sincere. As I look back now, I realize it was pure Arminianism and Pentecostalism, which seems to be pretty much the whole Jesus Movement, you could say, was almost exclusively charismatic in nature.

Well, I didn't know anything. Like I said, at that time, I didn't know anything better. And to make it more confusing, I was a theology student in a Jesuit-run Roman Catholic liberal arts college. So I'm taking courses in the college that they were prescribing, and they were really the higher critical movement type courses that I was taking, which really threw a monkey wrench into my understanding of the Bible and the credibility and the dependability of the scriptures.