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About Jesus Steve Sweetman My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze Part 16 The
Jesus People Movement The Jesus People Movement
began in the mid 1960’s and consisted mostly of
young people who dropped out of society, and in their dropped out
state of being, Jesus met them. The
movement came to our town in the early 1970’s when Jesus found His way
into the hearts and lives of many young people.
With my long hair, I considered myself a “Jesus Person”,
although I didn’t come out of the hippie culture.
I was a straight-laced church
kid who had never even smoked a cigarette let alone done drugs.
Still, I found myself in the midst of those who had done both. Those were exciting and
busy days for us. We went
across the countryside, involving ourselves in all sorts of Christian
activity. There are too many
stories to tell about those days, so I’ll just share a few of them.
I’d like to say that I
suffered persecution for Jesus when I found myself flying over a table
and onto a cement floor
after being kicked in the head, but I can’t.
After getting re-orientated from my fall, I got up, only to be
kicked again. I wasn’t
being persecuted for my faith. I
was simply trying to stop a drunk guy from beating up a friend in our
Christian coffee house.
Everywhere we went we
talked to people about Jesus. We’d tell His story in Christian coffee
houses, in bars, in parks, in schools and colleges, and even in the
occasional church building. We
once led three members of a rock band to Jesus while they were
performing in a local bar for a month.
They quickly learned a couple of Christian songs that they added
to their play list. When
their set was over, we’d go upstairs to their hotel room to pray and
share Biblical truth with them. While a couple of us
walked through a high-school hallway, one of my friends got talking to a
student about Jesus. Within
minutes a crowd of about fifty kids gathered around him to hear what he
was saying. Upon noticing
the growing crowd, my friend whipped out his over-sized Bible and began
to preach away as if he was Billy Graham preaching in Yankee Stadium.
This caused quite a commotion which prompted the principal to
tell my friend to stop preaching. My
friend answered by saying that no one could stop him from preaching
Jesus. The principal
responded by saying that he wasn’t opposed to my friend preaching. He
just wanted him to preach in a more orderly fashion.
So the principal let us have a classroom after school to preach
in, and he even announced the event on the school’s public address
system. That sure couldn’t
happen in today’s schools. Students and teachers
alike squeezed into that classroom.
One teacher scoffed at us for the nonsense we were preaching.
We were full of boldness back then, mixed with a little naivety
and stupidity, so my friend quoted from 1 John
1:6 to this teacher. It
reads, “If we claim to have fellowship with Him (God) yet walk in
darkness, we lie…” The
teacher didn’t appreciate my friend’s Scripture reference so he
walked out of the room. As
he walked out my friend continued preaching to him by quoting 1 John 1:8
which reads, “if we claim to be without sin, we deceive
ourselves…” These words
made the teacher madder than ever. Even
though that particular teacher walked out on us, another teacher invited
us back to her history class to talk about Jesus. While talking about Jesus
to a girl on our main street one Saturday night, she asked us to be a
part of a spoken report she was preparing for her college’s world
religions class. Her teacher
was a non-practicing Jew who aggressively refuted what we said, but we
didn’t back down. Sad to
say, two weeks later this teacher was
killed in a car accident, but not before hearing the gospel. We had our own Jesus
newspaper. Everyone was
“into something” back then. Young
people were into drugs, into sex, or into whatever. We were “into
Jesus” so we called the paper “Into Jesus”.
We printed our own tracts as well, one of which was entitled,
“Help Stamp Out Religion”, which would still be relevant today.
We passed out tracts and
Jesus Papers everywhere. I
was in We once told our story to
another class in another school. I
really felt the presence of the Holy Spirit as we spoke.
One student came up to me after and asked me what drugs we were
on, because according to him, we looked a little spaced out.
I told him we weren’t stoned.
It was the presence of the Holy Spirit he saw in our lives.
I felt a little like Peter on the day of Pentecost when he was
accused of being drunk. I mentioned earlier about
the Children of God first entering Somehow the police and
the local office of immigration knew
my friend had a green van and had joined the Children of God a few weeks
earlier. Even though my friend had left the Children of God by then, the
officials were suspicious of him, and of us as well.
We’d often see a police car drive slowly by our house until one
day we were called into the local immigration office and intensely
interrogated. We had nothing
to hide so we answered the questions as best we could.
When the questioning ended, I placed one of our tracts on the
officer’s desk and began to preach Jesus to him.
That really didn’t help our situation. The immigration officer
wasn’t impressed with me. You
might fault us for being naïve but you
couldn’t fault us for having a lack of boldness.
Feeling a little like Paul before the Roman government, we left
that office with great joy, having the privilege of sharing Jesus with
this immigration officer. We also felt like Paul
when he was questioned before the Jewish Sanhedrin.
It wasn’t only the government of The pastor told us that
if we had nothing to do with the cult, we should join his church.
We didn’t want to do that.
We’d rather be out on the streets for Jesus than sitting around
looking at one another in a church building’s youth room.
We felt the pressure from
both the ecclesiastical maze and the government of
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