Jesus Revolution: Drawing the Right Lessons

I'm your host John Harris. We're gonna talk today about the movie that is out right now called The Jesus Revolution, and it's making a lot of waves in the

Christian world, mostly positive waves, and I'm mostly positive about the movie. I think you should go see it. I think they did a great job historically on representing what took place in the formation of Calvary Chapel.

I think it's an inspiring story, with the moral being that God uses sinful people. I think that there are some things, lessons being learned that we need to talk about, but overall

I'd say that it's worth your time. It's clean. So I saw this the other day with my wife.

It was a little bit delayed because we've been traveling, and I wanted to see it when it first came out so I could give you a podcast early on, but I guess the advantage now is that a lot of other people have weighed in.

There's been a lot of reviews, and so not only are we going to talk about the movie, but I want to talk about some of the things that I've read in the reviews, which gives you the impression, it lets you know what people are taking away from the movie, and I actually have a greater concern,

I think, about that than I do about the movie itself, but we'll talk about both. So we'll talk about the movie, and then we're going to talk about their reaction to it, and really

I guess I could put that under the heading of the movement. So there's the movie, and then there's the movement, the Jesus Revolution movement, and the director was pretty expressive in an interview saying he wants to kick -start another one of those things if possible.

He'd love to see another Jesus Revolution, and that's where I say I don't know if I want to see that. I don't think I do, and I'll explain to you why as we move into the episode here, but before we get started with all that,

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So let me know, and we will go from there. All right, well, let's get into the topic for this particular podcast.

We're gonna talk about the movie The Jesus Revolution, and I said I would talk about the movie first, and then we would talk about the movement.

So let's start there, and then these two categories can't be totally separate, but well, let me just let you know how the movie affected me.

I think most Christian movies, there's a template for them, have a moment about maybe two thirds, three quarters through the movie where there's a very come -to -Jesus moment.

It's an altar call moment, and it rips you out of the story generally. You're focusing on these characters.

You're trying to understand a plot line, and the more creative producers try to make it part of the movie, but it doesn't always feel natural, and I think there are some people that have come to expect that.

I saw that in some of the reviews that there should have been more of a gospel presentation. I'm actually one who thinks that it's not necessary.

It's good to have a strong gospel presentation, and if your purpose is evangelism, you definitely need that.

I don't think it's necessary, though, in a movie that's about Christian themes or about things that happen in Christian history to always make that the focus.

The focus of this movie wasn't the gospel, so you need to go in understanding that. Set your expectations accordingly.

The focus of the movie is the characters involved, so that would be Lonnie Frisbee, that would be

Chuck Smith, that would be Greg Laurie. Those are the three main ones, and in all three cases, each person had a different weakness, barrier, something that was lacking in them, and God used them anyway, and that's the moral of the story.

Now, some have said that Lonnie Frisbee died in his sins. He returned to homosexuality.

He was not a Christian. He was a false teacher, and that may be true to some extent, and the movie doesn't go into all that.

It only shows his contribution to sparking or helping the Calvary Chapel movement in its beginning stages, and I would say to that that even someone who's not saved, someone like a

Pharaoh, can be used by God, and I think the moral lesson at least holds there, that even if that's going to be used on the day of judgment against Lonnie Frisbee, that he did all these works in the name of Christ, as Jesus says, but Christ never knew him, that the fruit is not due to Lonnie Frisbee, it's due to the

Lord, and the Lord using not just flawed, but sinful humans.

Now in the case of Chuck Smith and the case of Greg Laurie, he's using people who have made a profession, who have shown through their life that this is a legitimate profession, that have done great work for God, and yet they had barriers, they had hang -ups, they had things that held them back, and Chuck, there's a humility you see in the movie from Chuck Smith, his character, that he doesn't always know what the right way to go is, and he admits that he has these limitations, and he makes mistakes, and you see the same thing with Greg Laurie.

Greg Laurie, of course, has the hang -up of not having a dad present in his life, in the early stages of his life, and having identity issues related to that, and then he overcomes those things, and he is used by God very mightily.

And so I think that those two things, and again I'm not saying either of those individuals theology was perfect, or I'm saying the opposite,

I'm saying they had issues, but they were used by the Lord to save individual souls from judgment, and that is worth celebrating, it's worth highlighting, it's worth watching a movie about, and I think that's the focus of the movie.

So the gospel is in the movie, but it's very short, it is a very brief, it's during a baptism,

Lonnie Frisbee talks about repentance and faith in Christ, and the importance of that, and that's pretty much it. So there is good news, but does it go into the full depths of talking about how evil we are apart from Christ and God's law?

Not really. It assumes those things, and I think for the story, though, that's probably necessary, if you're gonna tell it accurately.

That's what happened, and that's, I think, what the directors were trying to do, is to show what happened. I'm gonna share with you some quotes from the movie, and that will,

I think, be the bridge to start talking about the movement itself. So here's a very telling quote, it's supposed to be profound in the movie, this is when

Lonnie Frisbee sits down with Chuck Smith. Chuck Smith is a square, he's, in other words, someone who isn't with it, doesn't understand the hippie movement, of course the hippie movement, countercultural, anti -institution, anti -middle -class standards, and really,

I would say, influenced by the New Left. It was a movement that wanted to throw standards out, and that was part of rebellion.

It was more than just even the drug culture and the free sexual culture that they supposedly said it was free.

They had a penchant for socialism, for radical ideas, for Eastern mysticism, and that was already going on when the

Jesus movement started. Some would say that the Jesus movement predated this, depending on which lane you try to trace back and say, this is the

Jesus movement. I would favor that the Jesus movement started in San Francisco Bay Area in 1967 -ish, 1968.

That's when you start to see actual Jesus movement, so hippies that are following this

Jesus, and as the article in Time Magazine said, the psychedelic

Jesus, and you have to ask yourself, is this the same Jesus for a lot of these guys? But anyway, I'm getting into the movement now. Anyway, Frisbee, who is one of these

Jesus people, comes to Chuck Smith, who's a square, who doesn't understand all of what's going on with the hippies, and he sits down with him, and Chuck Smith at the time is, you know, suit and tie.

He's got a church that's more traditional. They do traditional songs, and they traditional sermon, traditional dress, and he says to him this, there's an entire generation searching for God.

Now, I'm gonna stop there in the quote. You have to ask yourself, is that true? Is that theologically true?

Now, Lonnie Frisbee may have said this, so this may be part of the story, but is that actually true theologically?

A bunch of kids searching for all the right things in all the wrong places. So are all these hippies on drugs, and in the context he's talking about sex and drugs mostly, are they searching for God in that, or are they searching for something else?

Have they been maybe robbed of, or they're missing out on things that would confer identity and a place of belonging, and now, or they've rejected those things, and now they're searching for substitutes for them in other places.

That's probably, that's more likely what's happening, but in so doing, are they deep down looking for God?

God may fulfill some of those things, but does that mean that that's who they're actually looking for without knowing it?

And I would submit to you, no, because if it's the true God of the Bible, there's gonna be judgment for sin, and robbers, you know, criminals don't want to find police officers.

They want to find fulfillment, and maybe there's fulfillment in keeping the law, and being a productive member of society to some extent, but that's, they're looking for, they're looking for something else, and I think if you understand how evil our hearts actually are, apart from Christ, then you're not gonna say what

Lonnie Frisbee says here. You're gonna say, no, I wasn't searching for God. I was going the opposite direction, and God found me anyway, if he truly did a work to help someone repent of their sins, to make someone repent of their sins, and put their trust in Christ.

So Lonnie Frisbee continues, he says, these kids are searching for all the right things in all the wrong places. The trouble is, he says to Chuck Smith, your people, so the traditional

Christians, reject them. We can only walk through the door, not open to us, and your church, well that's one that's shut.

Now this is convoluted. This is not true. Now maybe in the circumstance,

Chuck Smith's church, well there were really two major things that might have been barriers.

One is the attitude of some of the members, and that's legitimate, okay? So maybe there there is a sense in which Lonnie Frisbee's correct here, that the door is shut because who wants to go to a church and be around people that are not just judging you, but they're condemning you, and they don't see hope for you, and they don't want to be in the same building with you, and they think themselves much better than you, which is ridiculous.

If you wear a suit and tie and sing traditional songs, it doesn't make you better than someone, or more spiritual necessarily, just because of those things, those outward things, than someone else who is brand new to the faith and figuring things out, right?

So that could be a barrier. Let's just say that's legitimate. But here's the other thing, and I think this is the thing that's...

you see it throughout the film, where Chuck Smith has a suit on, and then by the end he's got a Hawaiian shirt, and he's more casual, and they change their music around, and they have a band that comes with people that are still even in drug rehab playing in the band, and much more simple songs, and this is presented as what's necessary.

They don't say it in the film, but that's the way a lot of people are taking it. This is what's necessary to reach out to the rebels and the outcasts.

You have to change everything to conform to them. And so instead of them coming in as sinners, humbled by the fact that they're sinful and they need

Christ, instead of them coming in and then conforming themselves to the Church and the way that the

Church is functioning, where hopefully godly and wise men have set the tone as far as even dress and style, even things that are aesthetic, they don't do that.

They come in expecting the Church to conform to them and cater to them. So they want a pastor who's going to be more casual.

They want music that's going to be more like the popular music they listen to. And that is actually an arrogance too, and you have to understand that.

That is a pride too, because it assumes a superiority of this more casual, rebellious culture, and it doesn't take into account the wisdom of the ages.

Those who have, over the course of centuries even, given us songs, and to some extent even the way we dress.

It's the men who are wise, who have been saturated in the Word of God, who have had experiences with walking with Christ through difficult times, who have shaped the way that the

Church is, to some extent. They've given us the traditions and some of the culture that's there.

And so is necessarily having hymns something that's biblical or not biblical?

Well, I mean, technically it's not something that is... traditional hymns are not in Scripture, obviously.

They're not commanded. Singing hymns, spiritual songs, etc., are, but hymns themselves, in the way that we think of hymns, not necessarily.

But what are hymns? Hymns are the songs that have been significant to the Church over the course of time, and that's not something to just throw out, casually at least.

It's not something to just take for granted and arbitrarily discard. Those are things that are important to cherish and value, because that's wisdom.

So it's on a scale of foolish and wisdom, it's not on a scale of right and wrong, I think, necessarily.

Dress is the same thing. What are the reasons behind the dress? Well, hopefully, wanting to give

God our best, wanting to make sure that we're not a distraction to our neighbor as we are worshiping

God, right? These are principles, they're not rules, I'm not being a legalist, but these are principles, right?

So I think there's room here. In fact, the tone today is very much like Calvary Chapel, 1971.

So no matter what church you go into, almost, it's gonna be casual compared to the standards that used to exist.

Pastors aren't wearing suits hardly anymore. They're not even using pulpits in many cases. And pulpits used to signify the preeminence of the

Word of God, but I think they served as a barrier in the minds of some of the Jesus Revolution people, and so that's not even used.

You don't want any barrier between the person presenting and then those in the audience. There's a lot of things that have changed.

Some there's some positive things about. I don't think it's wrong to not use a pulpit. There's no directive in Scripture, but you do want to think through things and take into account, well why are there pulpits?

Why do we dress this way? Why do Christians dress this way? And once you answer those questions, hopefully you can see reasoning behind them, and that it's not arbitrary.

When it becomes stale tradition, and it is arbitrary, and people don't remember the reasons, that's when

I think churches are ripe for having their cultures completely changed, for their styles, if you will.

And the Evangelical Church tends to reinvent itself every 10 years. The casual approach has still been there for a long time, but I think every 10 years it seems like it's a different, it's lagging the world styles, but it's like a different style, different songs, a lot of rebrandings going on out there in general.

And anyway, the movie I think, the lesson a lot of people are taking from the movie is that we need a rebrand.

We need another rebrand, and that's gonna spark the Jesus Revolution. And I don't know that that's necessarily the case, and I don't think that's the genius of Calvary Chapel.

So I'm pulling a different lesson from this film than the film, or at least people that are influenced by the film are promoting.

The lesson that they seem to want to pull is that it's time to conform to the rebels. It's time to welcome them in, and that means changing some things.

That's how we kick -start the Jesus Revolution. And I would submit to you the genius of Calvary Chapel, and I'm gonna demonstrate this in a moment, is that they actually did not do those things.

Now they did them to an extent. They went thus far and no farther. Chuck Smith never looked like a hippie, right?

He just went a little more casual. They had to get a tent, because the traditional church setting was too small, the building they had, so they got a tent.

They did baptisms by the beach. So a lot of this was scale problems that they had, and these were the solutions to them.

It wasn't intentionally trying to invent a new style, it was just, we have a lot of people, we can't put them in our building when they need to be baptized.

So let's go down to the ocean, let's have a tent. The music that was brought in may be the main thing that you could say maybe

Calvary somewhat contributed. This was in the water at the time, though it wasn't unique to Calvary Chapel. And that may be true.

Now that's just universal. The Jesus music, as they called it in the 70s, has influenced the

Christian musical industry, and now we have corporate institutional

Christian music, which is exactly the opposite of what they were trying to create. They didn't want institutionalization, they didn't want institutional religion, they didn't want that kind of organization, but the genius of Calvary was they brought that organization.

So in a sense, Calvary Chapel defeated the Jesus movement at their church. The Jesus people came, and they did not get to control things.

You see that with the showdown between Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee to some extent. There was a split, and it was those who held to traditional beliefs in the

Bible that prevailed, and even the house movement they had, which was communes, ended up getting disbanded, and eventually.

And not that the communes, and it's hard with Calvary especially, because it's not exactly like everything they were doing was communal living in the sense that other

Jesus people groups were doing communal living. But they did have a ministry that was these, the house ministry is what they called it.

And what happened though is that the people in those houses, the hippies, they ended up getting jobs, getting shaved, cutting their hair, going to work, being responsible, having children, and they had to leave those particular communes or houses.

And they kept going to church though, and so Calvary Chapel retained the people who were truly saved. And that's the genius, is that Chuck Smith kept the

Word of God as the focus, and people actually did get saved, and when they actually did get saved, there was a staying power to the movement, and it became institutionalized.

And that's the opposite of what the Jesus people movement was about originally, which was anti -institutionalization, trying to find this authentic Jesus, and this authentic Christianity that was not present in churches supposedly.

And it was very organic in that sense, and it was very communal, and it was trying to be like Acts 2, and share all things in common, and be in the same communes together, and the other places where this was happening ended up disintegrating.

Once people grew up, it didn't work anymore. And I want to show you some of that, some of where I'm getting some of this, because there's a reason that I'm saying these things.

And I had to do some study on this for the book called Christianity, or not

Christianity, Social Justice. Sorry, that's my second book. Social Justice Goes to Church is the book. Social Justice Goes to Church, the

New Left and Modern American Evangelicalism. And in particular, I had to study a group called the Christian World Liberation Front in San Francisco, area.

Sharon Gallagher was the one who was the leader of that, and it was...

they were about socialists, really. I mean, they were radical left, but also supposedly Christian in their thinking.

And it's interesting, because they love Mark Hatfield, but they love Francis Schaeffer. They had this politically left, but we're gonna keep conservative

Christianity, and conservative in the sense that we respect the Bible. And isn't that not what we're seeing today?

Well, that's why I had to write about them in the book, and that's why I had to cover the Jesus movement, the people movement, to some extent, because a lot of the

New Left socialist ideas came in on the Jesus people movement. Well, I want to show you one thing from the

Times article, the Time article that is promoted in the documentary, or not the documentary, the movie,

Jesus Revolution. And it's presented this way in the movie. It's this reporter comes and observes

Calvary Chapel doing these baptisms, and then writes an article about it, and Chuck Smith's holding the article and says, hey, they did a pretty good article.

And you assume that it's about them. It's not. This is the actual article from Time magazine, and the title of it is, and the alternative

Jesus, Psychedelic Christ. So, psychedelic drugs, right?

Psychedelic Christ. That's the actual article. If you read this article, you're gonna find it talks about all kinds of things.

It talks about charismatic Catholics, it talks about, or Pentecostal Catholics, I guess.

It talks about more traditional groups like Campus Crusade, it talks about the Jesus people, and that's mostly what it's about, is the

Jesus people. It talks about drug culture, because that's the language that was used by the

Jesus people, that you try Jesus like you would try a drug. And so, this is what the article is about.

Now, they highlight several groups in here. Several groups. Let me first read for you this.

The movement is apart from, rather than against, established religion. Converts often speak disparagingly of the blandness or hypocrisy of their former churches, but others work comfortably as a supplementary revitalizing force of change from within the movement.

In fact, is one of considerable flexibility and vitality, drawing from three vigorous spiritual streams that, despite differences in dress, manner, and theology, effectively reinforce one another.

So it's taking a very broad approach, and it has these three groups, the Jesus people, the straight people, that's like Campus Crusade, and the

Catholic Pentecostals. Which, you have to scratch your head, if that's the movement, then how

Christian is this, really? They're taking such a broad approach, but that's what you'd expect from time. Now, when they talk about these

Jesus people groups, they're talking about the Christian World Liberation Front. Here's the first one. They're talking about, in Spoken Washington, the

Voice of Elijah is another group. They're talking about all kinds of groups in here, and Calvary Chapel is one tiny paragraph.

They talk about churches that have tried to adopt some of this, like First Baptist Church in Houston, Chicago's Grant Park Bandshell Street Evangelist, Arthur Blessed, and what

Arthur Blessed was doing. So there's all this stuff. Here's the one paragraph on Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel.

There it is. And it goes into the next page, and that's it, of the whole article. It was not, the

Jesus movement cannot be boiled down to Calvary Chapel. Calvary Chapel is the best iteration of the Jesus movement for Christians, because it had staying power, and it was,

I think, legitimately Christian. They actually had the Bible, and they actually were helping these hippies come to a saving knowledge of Christ.

Whereas a lot of these other groups, there's David Wilkerson, there's an interview of him online, where he's talking to these

Jesus people, and they're saying things like, let's read

Revelation while we're on LSD and figure out what it means. And he's confronting them on it. Those were

Jesus people, right? Jesus people were all over the country. It started in the West Coast, but it was this communal living, and a lot of the coffee shop stuff started there.

I was actually surprised to learn that, because in college ministries, we would have these coffee shop events, and I'm like, what is this? This is unique to us.

Why do we do this? And then I was reading about it. Oh, that started in the 70s, or really the 60s, the coffee shop thing.

You could even trace that back to the Beatniks, I suppose, in the 50s. But the Jesus people particularly loved the coffee shop, and that means going up and doing like, usually it was like a talent show, but people would bring their guitars or sing a song, do a poem, recite that, and they would be on the theme of Christianity to some extent.

So that was the coffee shop thing. And then it was the communities that they formed, these communes.

And these are communes in the sense of like, you know, think Transcendentalist communes of the

Northeast, the Oneanda community. Now, not exactly like that, because a lot of them had rules, like you couldn't be on drugs, you couldn't have premarital sex.

Others though didn't have these same rules. And so it was so broad, it was so varied, and it obviously didn't last.

And one of the reasons it didn't last was because people tend to grow up. And that's what

I want to to read for you right now. This is from a book called God's Forever Family, which

I had to read a few years ago, and it's all about the Jesus people movement. It's probably one of the most comprehensive, best books on this subject.

And there's a few different quotes I want to share with you. One is this, they ask the question, what happened to the

Jesus people movement? And it says, in many ways, the transition from Jesus people to new homes, jobs, careers, families, etc.,

the transition was similar to that of any group of young adults who began to leave the ethos of institutions of youth culture behind as they settle into the adult world.

So in other words, that's what happened to the Jesus people. They just grew up. When they grew up and had to take responsibility, they could no longer live the way that they were living.

Now when it comes to Calvary Chapel, the book says, by the end of the 20th century, both Calvary Chapel and its offspring, the vineyard, had become major forces within American Evangelicalism, although these denominational denominations had lost their overt identification as Jesus people churches.

Like many other aspects of contemporary American Evangelicalism, they owed much of their style to the Jesus movement.

Now that is very telling, right there. What it's saying is that these organizations,

Calvary Chapel and the vineyard, the spinoff denomination, I guess, I don't know, that's how they're presenting it, they institutionalized, they were able to retain the membership of those who did grow up and got jobs, etc.,

and they kept a little bit of a flavor, but that's all they kept.

That was it. Everything else changed. So that's the genius behind Calvary Chapel, in part, is that's why we remember them, that's why they're still around, that's why there's staying power there, when there wasn't with these other movements.

Now I told you that in the Time article, which was presented in the movie as being about Calvary, it's only one little paragraph about Calvary, I watched a documentary from the

British Broadcasting Network from 1971 about the Jesus people movement. In that documentary, you know how many times

Calvary Chapel is mentioned? Zero. Not once is Calvary Chapel ever mentioned in this whole documentary about the

Jesus people. Now how can you do that? Because Calvary was only one small part of this, and it's a significant part today because of the staying power it had, and the staying power it had is due to the fact that it actually rejected many of the things associated with the

Jesus Revolution and the Jesus movement. That's why. And more importantly, because it actually was a real

Christian movement. It's the best version of how to deal with the

Jesus people that we probably have as far as a mainstream example, or a popular example.

So anyway, there's other things about the movie people have, people who have had negative things to say, have focused on, and I'll briefly mention,

I already mentioned Lonnie Frisbee and the fact that his end was not maybe as good as his beginning, and that's a little bit, let's just say that's undercovered in the film.

I don't fault the film much for that. I just, I don't. I think it's a little bit outside the scope.

Maybe it is misleading to say that his, he was, when he died, he was still hoping for another

Jesus Revolution or something. I don't know. I don't know enough about that, but it seems like it's a minor thing to me.

There's a quote in there that you will find that there are no guilt trips.

Yeah, there's no guilt trips. I think Lonnie Frisbee says that to someone coming to the faith. Maybe it was Greg Laurie. But now, see,

I've only seen this three days ago and I'm already getting fuzzy on it, but in that quote though, that someone coming to the

Lord and saying there's no guilt trips, is that true? Well, he talks about repentance in another place.

So I'm gonna take this in the best possible light, that there's no guilt trips, of that the sin is gonna constantly be before you, hanging over you.

Jesus has taken that. And so I don't feel the need to read things in a suspicious manner.

I'm trying to just read them straightforward, if possible. So I don't see some of the things that people who have said negative things about this movie have seen, or at least

I don't agree with them necessarily on all that. I think in general it's a, it's a great film to go see.

I think you should go see it, but just take the right lessons from it. That's what I would say. Take the right lessons being God uses sinful people.

That's encouraging. That in order to reach the rebels, you don't have to become like them.

Chuck Smith, that's the thing, Chuck Smith didn't become like them. Yes, he changed his dress to a casual, in a casual way.

He, they changed the musical styles around a little bit, and we can debate that, whether that was good or bad or wise or whatever.

But he didn't look like a hippie. He didn't conform to them completely. And he, long term, he certainly did not continue to cater to the hippie culture.

And the, some of the things that they would have wanted as anti -institutional and, and pro -communal living, and certainly the more radical elements like the pro -drugs and the sexual views, etc.

He didn't cater any of that. And here's what I want to, where I want to land the plane. You have to ask yourself, if the lesson we're supposed to get from this, and I disagree with this lesson, but if the lesson is we need another

Jesus Revolution. So first question is, what do you think the Jesus Revolution was? Because it wasn't just what you saw in that movie.

But if someone says that, what would it look like today, practically? What is it, who are the rebels today that need to come to the

Lord? We need to share the gospel with them, and that's the main thing Chuck Smith did. That's why he was successful. That's why it's a good movie, I think, in part, too.

He shared the message of Christianity, and he, and it was centered on the Bible. But who are the people today that would fit that description?

Because if you go into any church, just about, it's going to be casual. It's going to be, there's nothing rebellious about the way that Calvary Chapel was in 1972.

In fact, that's tame, and that's now considered the conservative square religion, right? That's what we're rebelling against now.

That's the, the revolution will always eat its own eventually, and because the previous iterations of it didn't go far enough.

And so, so that's just standard bigoted religion now. What's, what's the true, who are the true rebels?

Well, I think there's two answers to this. The first answer is the obvious one that I think most people are thinking. LGBTQ people.

We got to open our doors to them. We got to do the whole Tim Keller thing with the, what do they call that, the living out audit, church audit.

You know, make your church more comfortable to LGBT. Do the whole revoice thing. Bring in some of that queer culture.

And, and I'm sorry, a lot of these cultural things, they're not as neutral as you may think. I mean, androgyny in dress and in appearance, trying to make yourself sound androgynous, those things aren't actually

Christian things. Those are wrong. Those are against Christianity, and yet there's churches, there are some, that want to bring in some of these things to reach out to the rebels today, the queer people.

Well, that's gonna, the, it's a little bit different trying to reach out to Jesus people than reaching out to queer people.

Yes, both were countercultural, and, and there's a overlap there to some extent, I suppose, but the

Jesus people were, at least with Chuck Smith, he was able to take some certain, certain things that didn't affect the theology as much as, let's say, adopting queer culture would do.

You start adopting these androgynous cultural things, you are going to land yourself in a heap of trouble.

You're gonna compromise the very foundation that you have at your church. So you can't take the same approach of, and there's really no accommodation you can have.

Now, the accommodation is to people. It's not to LGBTQ culture, though, is what I'm trying to say, whatever that is.

And I would argue that's not even really a culture, it's a style, it's a false culture, because in order to have a true culture, you have to have a lineage, and it's impossible in that particular group.

So I try to resist the terms out there when they call that it's the

LGBT community or the culture. Really, it's neither of those things. It's a group of people who are in rebellion against God, who've gotten together, and some of the things that they've produced aren't...

they're not cultural things as much. I mean, there could be things tracing back to legitimate or authentic cultures, but it's more of an artificial attempt to parrot something that exists in reality.

So that's another tangent, but those are the rebels, right, today. Well, there's another group that I think is being overlooked, and those are the people who want to be traditional.

The trad husbands and wives out there who are trying to have as many kids as possible, and they want to dress more formal, in more formal ways.

They want to listen to older styles of music, and they want to bring back hymns. And that is a rising group of people out there, and they've realized they've been robbed in their minds of an inheritance that they want back.

And they are rebels as well. They're rebels just as much, if not more, than the Jesus people were, because now that we have these casual standards, you have some people who say,

I want to bring back formality, and they're young. So what do you do with that? Do you now change your whole church around? Let's do the hymns, and let's wear suits again, because while we have traditional people out there that...well,

if they're a sizable enough group, do you do that? These are questions that have to be answered. What would the Jesus revolution today look like if we're going to take the template of the movie and try to apply it?

And I think we shouldn't overthink that. I think what we should do is just take what the movie...the

positive things from the movie that are universal directives that Jesus has given all churches, which is to go and preach the gospel, to make disciples, to do it according to the

Word of God and the authority of the Word of God, and leave it there. And that's what you do. And no matter who the person is, whether they're rebels or they're not rebels, it doesn't really matter who they are.

You treat people the same, because they all have the same problem, and they all need the same Savior. So I think that's what

Chuck Smith in general did, and I think that's the genius behind Calvary Chapel. There's no new strategy session we need to have about the rebels today and what we ought to do.

We just do the same thing that Christians have always been doing. And so anyway, that's what I wanted to say about the

Jesus Revolution movie. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope it meant something to you. I want to say something on a personal note, just because many of you have reached out to me.

It's good to hear from you on this. I've been a little more personal, I've shared some things on this podcast that I wouldn't normally.

I mentioned about a week ago that my wife and I were having a doctor's appointment, and we were gonna find out really where we were at with our fertility issues.

And it looks like what we're gonna try is IUI, which is insemination, not

IVF, IUI. And so we're praying about it, we're moving forward with that, and I just appreciate your continued prayers for that.

Thank you for asking. Some people wanted to know what the update was and how the appointment went, and that's how the appointment went. So anyway, there will be more material coming this week on various subjects.

There's probably a stack of stuff that I can't quite get to. I know some of you in at least previous episodes of this podcast have asked questions about common grace and all of that, and I'm hoping to have somewhat of a live stream in a few days.

I'm hopefully gonna be able to give you a little bit of a heads -up about that, and we'll talk more about it.

The last thing I wanted to say is this. I am going to be, I'm gonna pull it up on my calendar, in Georgia, not far from Atlanta.

Well, actually, I'm two hours from Atlanta. I'm more near, I think, Columbus, Georgia, if I'm not mistaken. But I'm gonna be down there on, let's see, this would be

April 13th through the 16th. I'm at a conference, but the 16th, it ends on the 16th.

That's a Sunday. And so I'm gonna be in that Columbus, Georgia region on that Sunday, the 16th of April.

And I just put it out there on Patreon, but I'll say it here as well. If there's anyone out there in those areas that would like Pulpit Supply that morning,

I'm gonna be available, most likely. If there's anyone in the area, though, who just is holding a service, and I can come to the service and meet some of the people who appreciate this podcast,

I'd love that. One person reached out to me that is outside of Atlanta, like half an hour, but it is in the wrong direction.

It's not far, but it is in the wrong direction. So I'm seeing if there's anyone who's closer in the area, and I would love to meet up with people who support this podcast.

So anyway, I'm gonna be down there in Georgia on the 16th, that particular

Sunday of April, and look forward to hearing from some of you. You could drop a comment on the video, probably better, if you know how to get in touch with me through private messages on various social media, whether that's

Gab or Facebook. That's the way I'll probably see it more than anything else. Then we can coordinate from there if there is anyone in the area.