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WhyDidn’tSheFly?

WHY THE JESUS MOVEMENTNEVER GOT OFF THE GROUND

S U M M E R 2 0 0 6

All who believe are together and have all things in common... Acts 2:44

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A Twelve Tribes Freepaper

IT TAKES ACOMMUNITY still

In 1971, Look magazine proclaimed, “Jesus is rising in

California!” The Jesus Movement, as it was called, was heralded as the beginning of a radical shift in the hearts of America’s young people towards God. Thousands of young people were heeding the call to, “Get high on Jesus” as they flocked into the Pacific Ocean, seeking forgiveness and a new life in Christ. These were electrifying times that left a deep, indelible impression in the memories of all who experienced them.

What happened to the Jesus Movement? Where is it today? Did it ever really get off the ground? Did it fly? Although it began with much zeal and enthusiasm, it soon lost momentum, and many found themselves right back where they

started, wondering why they hadn’t been able to take flight and ride the heights of the earth. Most have gone on with their lives, settling back into a system they had once hoped to change.

This freepaper contains a very important message for both the veterans of the original Movement and those who are hoping to rekindle that same excitement in this generation.

Remembering the

ABOUT THE COVER(1970) Ocean baptism — Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, California. Photographs by Jack Cheetham.

For those who are embarking on the exciting journey of revival, we hope what we have written can help you to benefit from the past, to learn from the experiences of those who were just like you 30 years ago, with high hopes of making a difference. We sincerely want you to find the hope that doesn’t disappoint.

For you who 30 years ago were caught up in the excitement of the Jesus Movement and longed for something new, but now wonder whether life short-changed you or where you took a wrong turn, we hope what we have written will rekindle a hope in you to actually find the abundant life that Jesus promised all those who truly trust in Him.

Jesus Movement

4 www.twelvetribes.org 51- 888 -TWELVE-T

Between 1967 and 1972, the Vietnam War caused a deep unrest in the youth of America to surface. Along

with the three assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in a five-year period (1963-1968), growing anti-war sentiment catapulted that restlessness into a movement that could not be contained. It broke out on the Berkeley campus through the Free Speech movement. Almost overnight, opposition to the war became the catalyst for speaking out against the infrastructure of Nixon America and

the American culture.


t first it was not so clear that there was an underly-ing spiritual hunger in the

youth of America. Their collective cry reverberated feelings that “We are not our parents,” “We are not university trustees,” “We are not American capitalists,” and “We do not want to die in a senseless war.” They had given up on the values of past generations and were willing to strike a new course, even though they did not know where it would lead. They saw established Christianity as having nothing and doing noth-ing about the problems they were concerned about. The last thing they wanted to do was to sit on a pew and hear another sermon that fueled the status quo of main-stream American life.

There was also a very strong reaction against the misuse of America’s great wealth. The ’60s was the height of the empire, a time when the government and the people had access to the most money ever available. But in the eyes of this generation, America’s wealth was being squandered building a war machine and fat-tening the pockets of giant corpo-rations while many lived beneath the poverty line in a near welfare

state. Neither the politicians nor the preachers were doing any-thing to end the economic injus-tice this generation saw all around them. This environment was the hotbed of rebellion for that whole generation.

Love was the answer! LSD was the way! A revolution had begun! “Make love, not war” was the philosophy that caused the youth at Berkeley and all across the land to shed their parents’ values, their religion, and their American dream. They cast off restraint and followed their own dreams. In their search for a place to belong they participated in “acid tests,” went to Merry Pranksters events, “Human Be-Ins” in Golden Gate Park, Whole Earth Festivals, Grate-ful Dead shows, and experiments with communal living.

But it didn’t take long for the dreams to shatter. The leadership of the Movement was a disaster, old-fashioned greed began to raise its ugly head, and the LSD didn’t work. Drugs only eased the pain but didn’t change the reality. John Lennon’s song Imagine was only good ideas with no way to attain to them. Free love didn’t last, so neither did relationships. A lot of young people were deeply

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damaged by this. They still want-ed love. They wanted something radical. They wanted something real, not just a utopian ideal.

Even before the hippie move-ment crashed, the preachers were ready to cash in on it. They, too, showed up for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and took advan-tage of the oppo r tun i t y to speak out on campus. They latched onto the same themes of the ’60s and pointed the d i s i l lus ioned hippies to Jesus. These preachers had long hair, wore beads and blue jeans. Through their dark shades and hip talk, they promised these searching young people that Jesus would give them love, he would solve their problems and he would heal the damage from the failed Movement of the radical hippies.

These brand new “Jesus

Freaks” heeded the call, thinking they were being led out of the camp of dead religion that had no answers and no life and into the camp of Jesus where they would find the love they were looking for. This was the real revolution...

the Jesus R e v o l u -tion! They had finally found a life of love — a Jesus’ love! It looked so real and it felt so real to them. Af-ter all, these p r e a c h e r s were part of them, or so it seemed. Gone was the rigid structure of o r g a n i z e d

religion they had known grow-ing up. They were not meeting in church buildings but on beaches and in parks. They weren’t singing stuffy old hymns, but their own music, with beautiful melodies played on acoustic guitars. Love, peace, and harmony were pos-


sible and they believed it couldn’t fail. They were getting high on Je-sus and didn’t need anything else. There was a free-flowing stream of good feelings, good vibes, and praise to the Jesus that made it happen. Yes! This was real, and this was going to last forever.

The Jesus People thought they had truly escaped the mainstream camp of dead religion that Jesus said you had to leave in order to follow Him.1 However, as time went on, the beach ministries moved into buildings and things began to shift back toward what the Jesus Freaks thought they had left behind. Some old skeletons began to raise their ugly heads. More than a few fell into sexual immorality, and the age-old plague handed down for genera-tions in Christendom — division.

History is a great teacher, if we will pay attention. Time and time again, the voice that has led disillusioned believers out of their dead churches has not had the authority to restore the church to the dynamic life of love it once had in the beginning. It has not had the power or the authority to call people outside the camp

and into the place where Jesus is, because those making the call are entrenched inside the divided camp themselves.2 The Jesus Movement was no exception. This is the history and legacy of Christianity.

But the spirit of Christianity is a powerful drug. Even though it doesn’t have the authority to call anyone out of the camp, it does seduce those in its ranks into ac-cepting the old established norms of society and religion. Now that the Jesus Movement has proven to be just a more streamlined, contemporary expression of the divided and corrupt religious camp most thought they were leaving behind, it would be fair to ask old Jesus Freaks if they got hoodwinked into smoking the spiritual opium that sedates the masses.

Getting high on Jesus has, 30 years later, led the throngs of people “saved” in the Jesus Move-ment back into the status quo. In fact, the Jesus Movement has become the status quo for thou-sands in mainstream America. It now occupies the same place in their lives that “old time religion”

1 Matthew 21:43; Hebrews 13:13 2 John 12:26


did in their parents’ lives. It is truly the opiate of the masses.3 People used to be burned at the stake for disagreeing with the favored denomination. Now they are so numbed by the ecumenical spirit, that they don’t even notice when others divide. Chuck Smith, the founder of Calvary Chapel, se-

dates his followers with this pow-erful drug. He even says it right on his website: “The more spiritual a person becomes, the less denomi-national he is. We should realize that we’re all part of the Body of Christ and that there aren’t any real divisions in the Body. We’re all one.”

Now that spirit isn’t allowed to kill people who disagree, so it must be content to sedate them into staying inside the camp, becoming ever more comfortably conformed to the traditions and ways of the world around them.

These drugged followers accept Billy Graham’s kissing the ring of the Pope. They accept their pas-tors committing adultery without stepping down. They barely muster the strength to discipline priests who sexually abuse chil-dren. This is the ecumenical spirit that is taking over the world.

True sheep know they are trapped by this spirit in Christi-anity but they don’t see a way out. Always, always, always the tendency is to believe it can’t happen, that there can’t be a witness of love demonstrated in hundreds of communities that are in true unity, at least not until Jesus comes back. If this is true, it means that the Holy Spirit is not great enough to bring about John 17:23, so another spirit leads Christians to just overlook their differences.

But Jesus prophesied that a vis-

“The more spiritual a person becomes, the less denominational he is. We should realize that we’re all part of the Body of Christ and that there aren’t

any real divisions in the Body. We’re all one.” Chuck Smith – Calvary Chapel


ible witness of the kingdom would be raised up in the last days to be a light to the nations that puts the evidence of God’s love before all the nations — and then and only then will the end come. When this happens, it will be a Jesus move-ment that never ends, that will not be given to another people.4 When God raises up true messen-gers on the earth that are actually sent by Him, they will have the au-thority to call His sheep out of the divided camp of lifeless religion, just as Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus Himself did. This is the voice of the true Shep-herd that has authority to save people from their sins and from

this wicked and perverse society.5 This voice is the one that will

give hope to old Jesus Freaks if they still have a nagging con-science about what the Jesus Movement has become. True sheep have nagging dissent in their heart – not rebellion, but dis-sent — because they really want to do God’s will. True sheep hear His voice and they never quite get high on the spirit that tells them division in the church doesn’t matter. They know they are lonely and that they really don’t have the radical life Jesus called His disciples to spend their lives establishing.6

3 What Karl Marx really said is more interesting, for he actually saw the comfort religion provides in “a spiritless world,” which is all one is left with trapped in a system without the Spirit of love quickening and gathering the disciples into true community.

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” (Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Cam-bridge University Press, 1970. Ed. Joseph O’Malley; translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley)

See We are One in the Spirit on page 18 for more on the topic of unity.4 Daniel 2:44 5 Acts 2:37-42 6 Matthew 24:13-14


othing has gripped the soul of Americans like the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The dev-

astation of what happened that day has changed not just America, but the whole world, in ways unimagined before that sobering day…

It is hard to envision the world recover-ing from the long-lasting ripple effects of that day. The course of history has been set in a direction of bloodshed, violence, and insecurity that seems irreversible. Did you ever wonder what the black box would re-veal about what happened on those planes before they crashed? Maybe if we knew, we could prevent a tragedy like that from ever happening again.

In the early Seventies another tragedy occurred in America. It didn’t get the same media attention as 9-11, but its conse-quences were perhaps even more devas-tating. It was the crash of what seemed to be a truly radical movement, one that

People have wondered for 30 years what

happened to the Jesus

Movement and whether there would ever be

answers to help us understand its

tragic demise. It has taken a long time to sort out

the wreckage, but now we

are beginning to grasp the

magnitude of what the black

box reveals.

The Black Box reveals:


promised to bring peace to the earth. But like a flawed airplane rolling down the runway, it was doomed before it could even lift off the ground.

People have wondered for 30 years what happened to the Jesus Movement and whether there would ever be answers to help us understand its tragic demise. It has taken a long time to sort out the wreckage, but now we are beginning to grasp the magnitude of what the black box reveals. One thing has become painfully clear: unbeknownst to the sincere radicals on the plane, there were hijackers onboard!

There has been a masterful conspiracy to cover up the real cause of the crash. Some “ex-perts” even claim that the crash never happened, and that the Jesus Movement actually brought tremendous revival to this coun-try. But what does the evidence reveal? Who was onboard dis-guised as a passenger, but whose motive was to hijack the plane? Were there any warning signs? Where were the pilots and those assigned to protect the safety of the passengers?

Without understanding the contents of the black box, the

theories about the cause of the crash are mere speculation. The black box can tell us very clearly what failed and why the Jesus Movement never really got off the ground. Was it a malfunction of one of the flight systems or a de-parture from the flight plan? What it might reveal could be shocking, stunning… and until we grasp the truth of its incriminating contents, we cannot be set free to embrace the radical truth.

Catastrophic crashes make us insecure, afraid to trust, especially when we don’t know the cause. But if we can know the cause, then perhaps through God’s wisdom and understanding, we can find the courage to get on a plane again, and finally make it to that ultimate destination our souls long for.

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Let’s take a look at some of the facts leading up to the crash. The flight of the Jesus Movement started out as a spontaneous, grass-roots desire to find radical answers to the problems facing a young, hopeful generation. The


survivors of the crash of the ’60s Movement were badly injured in their souls and disillusioned by their counter-cultural experiences. But they were still looking for a solution that worked in a world full of hatred, greed, and injustice. They turned to the “Radical of Radicals” to find the answers to their questions about the mean-ing of life, the meaning of love, and understanding of the world’s perplexing problems. They finally found their answer in Jesus!

A lot of hippies used to read the Bible. They knew there had to be a spiritual aspect to their lives and that life must mean more than just material comfort and sensual pleasure. Cat Stevens wrote Morning Is Broken about the dawning of creation from the words of an old Episcopal hymn. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young told us very plainly that we “got to get back to the Garden” to

get the life we wanted on earth. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll didn’t get us there, but some were still determined to find true love that would inspire them to really share everything and put an end to the economic injustice they hated in society. They read in the Bible that the first disciples lived together and shared everything they had to meet the needs of their brothers. They knew love meant caring and sharing all you had, but who could get them there, besides Jesus, who lived His life as an example for us all to follow? This was the heart of those first hopeful ones who boarded the plane called “The Jesus Movement.”

These ex-hippies started giving their lives to Jesus and proudly took on the name “Jesus Freaks.” Little one-house communes started springing up everywhere, starting in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Within a short


time a number of independent communes had sprung up all across North America. By 1971 there were over 3000 of them. These Jesus Freaks wanted life, not doctrine! They knew that if you wanted a better world, you had to live differently than the people who were running the world and were making it a sorry place to live. They had a radical heart. They weren’t afraid to abandon the status quo and take on a life of sharing. The way they saw it they had nothing left to lose. If Jesus wasn’t the answer, there wasn’t an answer.

Underground Jesus newspa-pers sprang up all over California and then across the country. These “Jesus Freaks” were not afraid to use the rock & roll music of their generation to proclaim their radical message of the love of Christ, which they saw as the heart of their movement. But even in those early days, the hijackers were beginning to formulate their

plans for this “movement.” They disdained their “devil music” and their long hair, but they saw great potential to convert the naïve ones into their own way of thinking.

Leaders from established denominations of Christianity

began to recognize the hunger for direction and leadership in the disillusioned hippies. They saw the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley as an avenue to draw them back into the fold of organized religion. They set

aside their three-piece suits and donned more casual attire, slipping in among the Jesus Freaks to bring their gospel to the masses. They even brought some of the hippies into their camp, promising them the radical life of love that Jesus taught. These hip-talking young evangelists1 were the ones they would send out on the front line to reach out to young people on college campuses, city streets, coffee houses, and public beaches.

These ex-hippies started giving their lives to Jesus and proudly took on the name “Jesus

Freaks.” Little one-house communes started springing up everywhere.

1 Lonnie Frisbee of Calvary Chapel and Breck Stevens of Bethel Tabernacle were notable examples of this.


But as time went on, the subtle trappings of dead Christian religion encroached upon the hearts of these young people. In all this they didn’t see the beginnings

of a plot to hijack the movement. Somehow these young people who saw so much didn’t see what was working in those from the Christian establishment to undermine their cause and rip the heart and soul out of it, taking full control for their own advantage and glory. They forgot that Jesus and His disciples were not trained in seminary, but were raised up outside the camp of the religious establishment of their day. Jesus didn’t look to the Pharisees and Sadducees to legitimize His movement. They must have lost sight of the fact that He was truly the radical of radicals and His followers were just like Him!

Some of the more insightful leaders of the Jesus Movement could see it coming. Larry Norman was one of the most charismatic spokesmen for the fledgling movement. He wrote some of the most radical songs of the era, calling all believers to a more sincere walk with Christ. He was viewed as a renegade by most, but to many of the young enthusiastic Jesus Freaks he was the voice of their revolution. Norman saw the handwriting on the wall:

I don’t really enjoy saying things that I know I’m going to

“In 1967, [Bill] Bright launched a campaign called ‘Revolution Now’ on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley... In order to have an impact, Bright appointed several of his staffers to adopt the appearance of hippies and form a front for Campus Crusade, called the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF), so christened to mimic the campus’ Third World Liberation Front... Eventually CWLF formally split off from Campus Crusade, but not until it had developed a reputation as a leading ‘ministry’ in the ‘Jesus People’ movement, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew thousands of young hippies – active or potentially active in progressive causes – into an appealing form of born-again Christianity.”

Diamond, Sarah, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right; Boston:

South End Press, 1989.


get shot down for. A long time ago I tried to warn people that Jesus movement was going to crumble if certain things continued to occur. But this was just shortly after it had begun, so of course people really didn’t want to hear anything that they considered ‘negative.’ Because of my close association with its origins, people assumed I would be quite enthusiastic about rushing it along into greater prominence, but I was concerned with it becoming exploited and co-opted by the middle class religious structure. That is exactly what happened, so I had to stand there and watch it die.2

Keith Green, a young hippie who was saved along with his wife Melody in the early days of the Jesus Movement, did an album called “No Compromise” at about the time he was being pressured to come under the umbrella of well-established Christian teachers. A number of influential Christian leaders were concerned that Keith wasn’t “grounded in the Word” and worried that he was becoming too radical. They

were threatened by the fact that his message was attracting more and more of these young hippies. In many ways he succumbed to the pressure and compromised, coming under the sway of those men. Shortly afterwards his plane crashed, killing him and two of his children, sending shock waves through the movement, like the death of John F. Kennedy had done to an entire generation almost two decades before.

The Jesus People knew that they needed authority in their lives. They bore the scars in their souls of their rebellion against authority, both civil and moral. Most of them saw Jesus as their last hope of finding good authority from the true God that could lead them to a way of life based on the love of God poured out in the human heart. Many of the early Jesus Movement groups turned to Christian ministers for guidance and instruction. Some sought spiritual covering from established Evangelical associations. This is well documented in various histories of the Jesus Movement.3

What is not documented is the fact that these seemingly

2 Larry Norman, interview in New Music, Vol 2 No 1, C. July 1980


well-meaning Christian leaders were actually the hijackers of the Jesus Movement. Although most of the young converts wanted to find the vibrant communal life of the early church, there was no leadership raised up outside the camp of establishment Christianity to bring it about. Almost without exception, all of the groups were wooed back into the fold, trusting the leadership of men and women trained in the seminaries of Evangelical Christianity. This was their fatal flaw. They were destined, by the nature of the influence they came under, to conform to the status quo of Christianity, and thus disintegrate into the already-existing thousands of denominational churches. And whatever groups refused to be assimilated into mainstream Christianity, they branded as heretical cults.

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The crucial moment of the takeover was perhaps the huge Explo ’72 festival in Dallas, Texas, referred to by some as

the “Christian Woodstock.” That event was promoted by Billy Graham and Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. These men were icons of Evangelical Christianity, which had nothing to offer that generation, but through Explo ’72 they wooed the unsuspecting passengers of the Jesus Movement into trusting their leadership. The result is clear. The hijackers successfully took the Jesus Movement off course.

The plane crashed almost without a sound. But we can see its wreckage strewn across the landscape of contemporary Christianity over the past 30 years. The mediocrity and hypocrisy that the Jesus Freaks hated in their youth is now being perpetuated by many of them to this day. These hippies, who had turned away from that same stale Christianity, which had offered nothing deeper than a seat on a pew, had now come full circle, back into the pews they sat in with their parents when they were children. The re-bellion of the ’60s was as much a reaction to a Christian religion that couldn’t save them as it was a re-action to the corporate greed that

3 DiSabatino, David, History of the Jesus Movement, chapter 3.


had robbed them of their parents and was destroy-ing the earth. To that genera-tion Christianity and the beastly system were one and the same.

Those who have survived the fatal crashes of the ‘60s Movement or the Jesus Movement, or both, are certainly reluctant to get on another airplane. Our purpose is not to throw stones at the survivors, but to shed light on the mystery of why that once vibrant and hopeful movement never got off the ground, for the sake of those who are still looking for the salvation of God, and the establishing of His Kingdom here on the earth as it is in heaven.

We want to live a life together that bears the fruit of the kingdom – an individual and corporate

demons t ra t i on of love being perfected in unity in the wonderful environment of the common life that the love of Yahshua in the human heart

always produces. We desire to reach out to our reluctant and injured brothers and sisters in kindness and truth because we’ve been there.

Only one seed was preserved and survived the conspiracy that overthrew the Jesus Movement. Miraculously, we have been led out of the wreckage and are being bonded together into a dwelling place of the Most High, where we can finally experience the love and justice we have longed for. The dawning of a place to belong is appearing like the faint light in the early morning sky.

The crucial moment of the takeover was the huge Explo ‘72 festival in Dallas, Texas, referred

to by some as the “Christian Woodstock.”


This song was an endearing an-them of the Jesus Movement.

Thousands sang it with the hope its words project — that when our unity is restored someday, the world would know we are Christians by our love. The person who wrote that song evi-dently knew there wasn’t unity in the church, but still he proclaimed, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the

Lord,” which is a contradiction. How can you be one in the Spirit and one in the

Lord as Jesus prayed we would be1 and at the same time not be in unity with one another? As Paul

said, “Who hopes for what he already has?”2

So what does the term restored mean? Restored to what? When was there unity in the church that we could be restored to? And how would restoration happen? Restore means to go back to the original, functioning condition. The original, functioning condition of the church is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles:

“Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need. So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:44-47)

Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. And with great power the apostles

OneWe Are in the Spirit

“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord…

And we pray that our unity will one day be restored…

And they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”


gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great grace was upon them all. Nor was there anyone among them who lacked; for all who were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and they distributed to each as anyone had need. (Acts 4:32-35)

What is recorded in Acts 2 and 4 is the authentic original document that proves the authenticity of what the one Spirit of God produced in the believers after Pentecost. It is what Jesus prayed for just be-fore He was crucified:

“…that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.” (John 17:21-23)

Paul also makes it clear how God intended the Body of Christ to be:

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one

faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6)

But unity can’t be restored until God’s love is restored because unity is the fruit of love.3 It can’t be the other way around. Love is the foun-dation upon which unity is built.4 So, love must be restored first:

“This is my commandment that you love one another. By this, the world will know that you are My disciples.” (John 13:34-35)

To love Him with all your heart is the greatest commandment. This is what must be restored first. If a person does not obey Him, he does not love Him.5 If a person says “I know Him” and does not keep His commandments, he is a liar and the truth is not in him.6

God could not pour the new wine of the Holy Spirit into the old wineskin of Judaism. They loved their traditions more than His word. They weren’t willing to do His will. So, the kingdom was taken away from the Jews. Jesus promised that the kingdom would be given to a nation that would produce its fruit.7 That fruit is the life that love always produces. The first church, which was inaugurated on the Day of Pentecost, was that new nation, the new wineskin that He poured

1 John 17:21-23 2 Romans 8:24 3 Romans 5:5 4 John 13:34; 17:21 5 John 14:24 6 1 John 2:4 7 Matthew 21:43


the Holy Spirit into through the apostles. God’s love was poured out in the hearts8 of all who be-lieved because they were willing to go outside the camp of Judaism and bear the reproach in order to have His life.

When this song, We Are One in the Spirit, was sung in the Jesus Movement, they evidently knew they didn’t have the love and unity of the early church but that some-how they wanted to have unity and they wanted the world to see the love of Jesus in them. The reason there wasn’t unity in Christianity at the time of the Jesus Movement is because it had become dry, rigid, and brittle like an old wineskin. God couldn’t pour His new wine into that old wineskin. But nobody told them where they could find the new wineskin.

No one told them they had to go outside the camp of Christianity to find it. And if anybody did tell them, there wasn’t the power and authority to actually call them out and give them the new wine.

Instead, the Jesus Movement was an attempt to patch up the old garment of Christianity with new cloth. They tried to patch up the old cloth, but it required restora-tion, not reformation – going back to the original, not trying to put a new patch on the old garment. You can’t doctor up an old wineskin. The only thing old wineskins can hold is old wine.

Without receiving the new wine of the Holy Spirit into a new wine-skin, believers will not be able to love one another the way He loved


— that is having the power to lay down their lives for one another.9 Love that gives itself up is what produces the unity Jesus prayed for in John 17:21-23. If this unity is not present, it’s because this particular love that signifies the presence of the Holy Spirit is not there. But who will admit to this?

Without real unity, the ranks of Christianity go forward with the master plan of ecumenism — unit-ing all of Christianity into a form of unity that agrees to overlook division and accepts disagreement among the members. Could the spirit that inspires ecumenism be the Holy Spirit? The ecumenical spirit says, in effect, that the Holy Spirit is not great enough to bring about the unity of John 17:23. Without the binding power of love, all that can be said is that there is a

mystical unity, which ignores the reality of division.

There are two great ex-amples of this kind of think-ing and they come from two of the great leaders of evangelical Christian-ity — Billy Graham and Chuck Smith. Billy Graham bridged the gap between mainline churches and old fundamentalism at his

crusade in Madison Square Garden in 1957. From that time on, Graham has made “practical ecumenism” a hallmark of his ministry.10 On page 31 of his booklet, Growing as a Christian, Graham says, “I have learned that although Christians do not always agree, they can disagree agreeably,” and “within the true church there is a mysterious unity that overrides all divisive factors” [emphasis added]. This is classic “doublethink.”

Pastor Chuck Smith is a great doctor who gives out regular pre-scriptions of medicine to his flocks — the opiate of the masses — like this prescription from his book Answers for Today: “The more spiritual a man is, the less denomi-national he is. We should realize that we’re all part of the Body of Christ and that there aren’t any real divisions [emphasis added] in the Body. We’re all one.”11 In other words, the more spiritual a man is the less he notices divisions. This statement is an indictment against Paul who said:

“Now I plead with you, breth-ren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divi-sions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the

8 Romans 5:5 9 1 John 3:16 10 U.S. News and World Report, December 23, 2002; p.40 11 Answers for Today, 1993, p.157


same mind and in the same judg-ment. Now I say this, that each of you says, ‘I am of Paul,’ or ‘I am of Apollos,’ or ‘I am of Cephas,’ or ‘I am of Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

(1 Corinthians 1:10,12,13)According to Chuck Smith, the

apostle Paul was not a spiritual man, but a mere natural man, be-cause he called attention to the divisions, the disunity, the denomi-nations of Christianity beginning to form.

The fruit of the Jesus Move-ment was just more divisions in an already hopelessly divided religion. Ever since the first church lost its first love, the result has been the religion of Christianity, whose history is full of division and blood-shed. Some version of it has always been the favored religion in West-ern society. It is in the mainstream. It is the status quo. It is not outside the camp where Jesus always is. The world hated Him.12 The Jews rejected Him and had the Romans execute Him outside the gates of Jerusalem. He was an outcast from His own people. He went outside the camp and stayed there.

God still wants that new nation that will produce the fruit of the kingdom and be the witness of love and unity that will bring about

the end of the age. This new nation is the prophetic fulfillment of Isaiah 49:6 which is promised in this age:

“It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also give You as a light to the Gen-tiles, that You should be My salva-tion to the ends of the earth.”

It is the restoration of this na-tion in the last days that will have efficacy (the capacity to produce a desired effect) to fulfill the Great Commission.13 The desired effect is to be the universal witness of the kingdom, the demonstration that puts the evidence of God’s love and unity before all the na-tions so that the end of this age can come and Jesus can return to rule and reign on earth.14 When this foretaste of the undivided kingdom to come is seen on the earth, the words of that song can be changed to say:

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord;

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord;

And we know that our unity has finally been restored;

Because all men can see it by our love, by our love;

Yes, the whole world can see it by our love.

12 John 15:18 13 Matthew 28:18-20 14 Matthew 24:14


M y name is David. Born in the Fifties, I was raised

as a Catholic. My parents were good people who loved me and tried always to do the right thing. In spite of this, as an adolescent I rebelled against their middle-class expectations and discarded my Catholicism. I journeyed

through my adolescence in the counterculture of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and then into the Jesus Movement.

I found in the ’60s counterculture a moral compass I thought I could actually follow. At least in the beginning, the counterculture held out a much

My Search for a Holy People

After leaving the Jesus Movement, I moved my family eleven times over the next 23 years through

almost 20 different groups and movements that claimed to offer what I hoped for.


more worthy dream than just the pursuit of pleasure. My friends and I wanted to love one another. We rallied under the banner, “Make love, not war.” We wanted to bring peace to the world, not more division. We wanted justice, not exploitation. We wanted to do everything together and share, not compete with each other as individuals. We wanted to be real, and expose the hypocrisy we saw all around us. And we wanted to be a part of something significant, something momentous that could make the world new and better.

It seems laughable now, but back then, for a short while, the “Woodstock Nation” seemed very real and attainable. We were actu-ally going to set up a new culture, a new nation, in opposition to the one we had rejected. Our hopes soared. Then they crashed and burned. The pursuit of pleasure together was not an ethic capable of making the rest of that dream real. On the contrary, it destroyed it.

By the time I was 21, I was burned out, torn up, lonely, and hopeless. Then in 1976 some of the “Jesus People” came to my hometown of Olympia, Wash-ington. This particular group was

from a ministry called Gospel Outreach. They had begun in Eu-reka, California, with a handful of young, burned-out druggies who had become Christians in the early days of the Jesus Movement. This handful of young men had gone to a local real estate broker, Jim Durkin, looking for a place to establish an outreach to the hip-pies. A former Assemblies of God pastor, he was leading a small Pentecostal church in addition to selling real estate and building up his own real estate holdings.

Jim gave these young men a place to establish an outreach in one of his broken-down buildings. In time, the leader of the group left. Those that remained asked Jim Durkin to be their “elder.” He agreed, and after some time he acquired an abandoned Coast Guard station south of Eureka, which they dubbed the “Light-house Ranch.” The young men moved their outreach ministry to the Ranch.

This small community explod-ed in size, drawing in hundreds of the multitudes of counterculture young people that were constant-ly traveling though the area, hitch-hiking the Pacific Coast Highway. The Ranch would send out people


to pick up hippie hitchhikers and bring them to the Ranch for the night. There they were introduced to a Jesus very different from the one they had known in the middle-class homes they had been raised in.

This Jesus, like them, was a rebel determined to expose the hypocrisy and unreality of the religious leaders and institutions of His day. He was so effective in exposing their hypocrisy that they tortured Him to death. This Jesus loved justice and mercy and want-ed to set people free. He promised forgiveness of sin and eternal life to all who would believe in Him.

Over the course of three years several thousand of these hippies responded to Jim Durkin’s version of the gospel — the standard Charismatic Evangelical Christian message with an additional “dis-cipleship” step added in order to appeal to the radicalism of these counterculture young people.

They sent out dozens of groups of these young people to establish communities in other places, bringing their version of the gospel with them. Some of them came to Olympia. They set up a Gospel Outreach house called the House of Mercy on one of the

town’s busiest streets. In June 1976, in despair, I

walked into their home looking for someone to talk to. They looked like freaks, just like me. They lived together and shared everything. Unlike any Christians I had known, they seemed real. They seemed radical and outside of the Estab-lishment. All of this completely disarmed me. They preached their gospel to me, and I accepted it.

What was this gospel they preached? Realize that you are a sinner, ask for God’s forgiveness based on the fact that Christ died for your sins, and ask Jesus to come into your heart. Do this, and God will forgive you, give you His Holy Spirit, and write your name in the Book of Life. Overwhelmed with guilt and despair, I gave my life to God according to this gos-pel. I cried and had a huge sense of release. Then I went back home to the house I was renting at the time.

When I got there, I realized that I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be with those who had led me to God. I went back the next day and told them I re-ally wanted to do more than I had done. In response, they told me about Christian discipleship.


Once you were saved, if you wanted to become a whole-hearted follower of Jesus, you had to be willing to deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow Him. You had to forsake everything you owned by giving it to Gospel Outreach and live in commu-nity with them according to the pattern in Acts 2 & 4. You should then “obey them that have rule over you” and serve the Body in whatever way you were asked. You were told that Jim Durkin was one of God’s Apostles, sent in restoration of the government of God outlined in Ephesians 4:11. True disciple-ship was only possible under the authority of the government of God. Of course, all of this was for those who wanted to go the ex-tra mile and be disciples, not just saved believers. It was an optional “second mile.”

Having realized that Jesus gave everything for me, it seemed completely reasonable to take the second step and pay the price to be a disciple. I went home, got my

stuff, gave it all and moved in the next day. For the next eighteen months, I lived as a single brother in community with seventy other people. I gave myself to serving as best I could in whatever way I was asked. I found it a wonderful way

to live. There were problems and messes and chaos at times. But we were together and it seemed back then that we could get through anything as long as we hung onto God and each

other. My hopes for a meaning-ful life rose to the heavens during that time.

There were about 2,000 people scattered through the different branches of Gospel Outreach. Similar things happened in dozens, even hundreds of other groups, to hundreds of thousands of young people. For a while, it seemed we had recaptured the reality of the early disciples of the Book of Acts.

In spring of 1978, I was sent to Phoenix to help plant a new community there. Stopping in Eureka on the way, I discovered

I expected my search to be easy. After all, what I was looking for was plainly in the Word of God; so surely it must

exist in Evangelical Christianity.


that Jim Durkin had not forsaken his own real estate holdings. On the contrary, he was buying old fixer-upper homes, having the disciples fix them up, and then charging them high rents to live in them. Fish rot from the head down.

When I got to Phoenix a week later, I found that Gospel Outreach had decided that forsaking all and living in community was limiting our effectiveness in reaching the lost and isolating us from the rest of Christianity. The elders had already gotten their own homes, and staked out territories for their own personal businesses that the rest of us were expected to stay out of. We sheep who arrived later were free to live together if we wanted, but now it was optional.

Very quickly the life we had signed up for virtually disappeared. All of the strong ones who had been supporting the weak left community life to seek selfish gain as middle-class Christians. The weak that needed care all scattered into the wilderness of society, completely disillusioned. What was left was just another extremely small sect among 50,000 plus Christian sects. Within a few months, I

left “G.O.” for a large Charismatic church to pursue my own self-directed and selfish middle-class life while still being a disciple of Jesus.

What is astounding and tragic is that the most idealistic young people of that whole generation, who had dreams of countering the culture that they despised, were diverted into a totally hypocritical middle-class Christian life — a life that you could not have forced them into at the point of a gun in the beginning.

Within a few years, through the ministries of men such as Chuck Smith, John Wimber, and Jim Durkin, this explosion of hunger for God was diverted into either despair or a middle-class Christianity different from the world only in pretense. We began by living together and sharing the Word, and ended up in pews. The weak perished while the strong died inside from the cares of life and the deceitfulness of riches.

In my first self-confident flush of freedom from the burden of having to pour my life out for the weak, I met the woman who became my wife. I still thought of myself as a radical disciple because of my experiences. I confidently


got married, expecting to success-fully pursue middle-class living and still be a true disciple of Jesus. I expected that my life would bear good fruit in my wife, my children, and the Kingdom of God.

Within a short time after I married, my conscience began to gnaw at me. I realized that the huge Charismatic Church we at-tended was not what it appeared to be. When we attended a young married class and the associate pastor justified abortion and gross sexual perversions within marriage, we could not go back. Within a year, three of the pastors at that church had divorced their wives. I then began a 23-year search for a holy people that could give my conscience peace. I knew I had to find a City that had foun-dations, whose builder and maker was God, or there was no hope for my wife, my children, or me.

I expected my search to be easy. After all, what I was look-ing for was plainly in the Word of God, so it must exist in Evangelical Christianity! Here are a few of the Scriptures that drove me, the mea-suring stick that everything that I found fell short of:

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another;

as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

(John 13:34-35)“I do not pray for these alone,

but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Fa-ther, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that you sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one; I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent me, and have loved them as You have loved me.”

(John 17:20-23)“Now all who believed were

together, and had all things in common, and sold their posses-sions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need… The multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he pos-sessed was his own, but they had all things in common. And with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great grace was


upon them all. Nor was there any-one among them who lacked; for all who were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and they distributed to each as anyone had need.”

(Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-35)True love, true unity, and true

community, with genuinely apos-tolic leadership and vision, would be the self-evident fruit of the Gospel, it seemed to me.

I moved my family 11 times over the next 23 years, through almost 20 different groups and movements that claimed to offer what I hoped for. I would find a group that promised apostolic authority, community, and love, throw my life and family into it, and then get crushingly disap-pointed. This happened over and over and over again.

Three separate times I grew so hopeless of finding anything real that I took the proud step of trying to bring it into birth myself, start-ing at different times a street-level outreach, an urban neighborhood community church, and an apoca-lyptic rural Christian commune. I knew deep down I was in no spiritual condition to genuinely

help anyone; it was the blind lead-ing the blind all over again. I was unable to proclaim the true gospel because I had never received it or obeyed it myself, much less been sent from a people that had.

“Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate has father and mother, wife and children, broth-ers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple… So, likewise, who-ever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple. Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its flavor… it is neither fit for the land nor the dunghill. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

(Luke 14:25-27,33-35)

According to the very words of Jesus, the most radical, self-congratulatory groups in all of Christianity, including the ones I presumed to lead, are not even fit for the dunghill. Of course, I got what I deserved. I tried to save my life and almost lost it. I tried to serve God and money and deceived myself. I even became a deceiver myself. I lost most of my


family. I utterly wasted the best years of my adult strength.

At first, my wife and children believed me when I told them the Kingdom of God was the most important thing on earth, that it was the only thing that had eternal reality. But they could not help but see that every time I claimed to have found God’s Kingdom, it turned out to be a mirage. They could not help but see the hypocrisy in my life and the life I led them and others into. Gradually they lost respect for me. The nice Christian family façade by which I kept my conscience at bay finally crumbled completely. I was teetering on the brink of utter destruction behind my successful Christian businessman and family man façade.

Then, on November 21, 2002, I stumbled upon the Twelve Tribes website. The name seemed odd, but I was so desperate that I pushed past that. What I found as-tounded me. I read and read, and grew more amazed. I wrote four e-mails to them that night. To my amazement, they wrote right back and invited me to a large wedding of two of their young people to be held on the next Saturday.

My oldest daughter and I drove

200 miles to the wedding. Within 30 minutes after I walked in, I was utterly undone. For the first time in 48 years on this earth, I saw the Gospel and the Kingdom of God in a real demonstration of the love of John 13:35, the unity of John 17:21, the life of Acts 2 & 4, and the good government of Ephesians 4:11. They preached the true Gospel to me in the power of the Spirit. I believed in it, and will forever.

In obedience to the true Gos-pel, the one that unlike all the others is actually found in the Gospels, I have surrendered my-self utterly to God to serve Him where He is — with His people and nowhere else. I am a new man. For the first time in my life I have a clear conscience and the power to do the will of God with my brothers, rather than try and fail alone.


Our Master told a parable about the days to come when the new wine of His Spirit would be poured into the hearts of a people. He made

it clear that the new wine must be put into new wineskins, since the old wineskin (the religious system of Judaism) was old, dry, stiff, and brittle. It could not contain the active new wine.

“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new

The Jesus Movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s was a spiritual phenomenon, the culmination

of social, spiritual, and political unrest for Americans and indeed for most western cultures of the world.

The Jesus Movement shot off with a “bang,” but like an airplane revving its faulty engines, readying for take-off, it was doomed before it could even lift off the ground.

Why the Jesus Movement Never Got Off the Ground


wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’” (Luke 5:37-39)

Knowing that most would pre-fer the old wine to the new, Jesus did something miraculous at the wedding in Cana that was prophet-ic of what would happen when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Day of Pentecost. After the old wine had run out, He turned water into new wine, which the master of the feast proclaimed to be better than the old wine.1

Lessons from the First Century Church

The fresh revelation from God that Jesus Christ brought to Israel in the first century, and that He passed on to the apostles such as Peter and John, could not be contained within the religion of Judaism. This is why the Holy Spirit created a new home for Himself 2 on the Day of Pentecost – a new wineskin that could be filled with the new wine, the Spirit of love poured out into the hearts of the

believers.3 The love of God that was

poured out into their hearts at Pen-tecost demanded a total abandon-ment of their lives to the One who totally abandoned His life for them. This is what their first love for Him was.4 This love created a communi-ty in Jerusalem and it would always take a community to contain it. As long as the believers maintained their first love, being filled with the Spirit (the new wine), the commu-nity flourished. Meeting the many demands of love kept their wine-skin fresh and supple. This made it possible for them to continue to re-ceive revelation from the Holy Spirit through the apostles’ teachings. The purpose of this new wine filling the new wineskin was to establish a united twelve tribe spiritual na-tion that would produce the fruit of the Kingdom.5 Isaiah prophesied that this twelve-tribed Israel would be restored to be a light to the na-tions and to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.6 Jesus told His disciples that when this gospel of the kingdom was proclaimed to all the nations as a living demonstra-tion of His love and unity, the end of the age would come.

1 John 2:3-10 2 John 12:26 3 Romans 5:5 4 Ephesians 6:24; Revelation 2:4 5 Matthew 21:43 6 Isaiah 49:5-6; Acts 13:47


“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14)

Yet when Jesus spoke this, its fulfillment was over 1900 years away. We know this because the end of the age didn’t come before the first church lost its first love and its lampstand was removed.7 It could no longer be the wit-ness of Matthew 24:14. It was destroyed not from without, but from within.8 The vibrant life that had resulted from the new wine filling the new wineskin gradually became a divided institution, dried and cracked, rigid and brittle – an old wineskin unable to hold the new wine of revelation ever again. And once this first new wineskin became dry and parched, the old wine began to taste better and better to them, even as it does to this day.9

The Jesus Movement —Something Old or Something New?

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of dissatisfied young people left the stale tradi-tions of organized religion, hoping

to find the love of Jesus, a love that was real, that would not fail, that would not disappoint. The multi-tudes of young people in the Jesus Movement wanted something new – the new wine of a new wineskin.

But what is the fruit after 30 years? Haven’t the harbingers of the Jesus Movement, Calvary Chapel, and its offshoot the Vine-yard, led their followers through a revolving door, back to the same old form and traditions they left thirty years ago? They went from sitting on the floor in a circle play-ing guitars, worshipping outside the confines of church buildings, and ministering on beaches and in coffeehouses to sitting silently in the pews once again looking at the preacher and the back of everyone else’s heads.

So was this Movement really a result of new wine being poured into new wineskins? If Jesus was truly revealing Himself to them, would He have led them to be-come just another denomination, as it seems Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard became so soon after they started in the ’60s?

When the hippie movement of the ’60s failed, the hippies went back to their old roots. They are

7 Revelation 2:4 8 Deuteronomy 28:47-48; Revelation 2:4-5; Hebrews 3:6


Although the Jesus Movement seemed to take off, when the smoke cleared

they were still right where they started — just going to church on Sunday.

now the established, successful ones in the mainstream of American business and society, having become the very thing they once hated. Just as the hippies found themselves turning into “hippie-crits,” so the Jesus freaks became what they had first rejected — religious hypocrites.

Rebirth of a Nation —When Will It Happen?

Is it even possible that a new wineskin can be restored in this day to receive new wine from heaven? Can something old be reborn? What will it take? It will take something new — a people

truly willing to do God’s will (new wineskin) and the Holy Spirit (new wine). And how would anyone recognize this restoration if it happened? It would be evident by its fruit. It would produce the same life from the same essence as what was begun at Pentecost. It would remain soft and pliable, not become hard and crusty. We who write this paper believe that this restoration is taking place in our midst. It has been thirty years since we began to form and receive the new wine, and we are very encour-aged to see our children taking on our hearts, being filled with that same new wine. A distinct culture


is forming that fills us with hope.

Just as Jesus propheti-cally demonstrated at the wedding in Cana, the best wine will be poured into the new wineskins in the last days,10 and it will not fail. All who are not content with the flat religious ritual of the old wineskin will taste and see that the new wine is better.11 The master of the feast tasted it before mak-ing a hasty judgment. In the same way, no one should make hasty judgments in favor of the old religion — the old comfortable religion of Judaism or Christianity. One should withhold judgment until the nature of the new is tested and made clear.12 Only when the new wine in the new wineskin has had time to develop its own unique character can its worth be estimated. But in the last days this restoration will come about quickly — the new wine and wineskin will not grow old before it accomplishes its purpose.13

Most will continue to say the old is better. But as this demonstration

of the Kingdom becomes more vis-ible and grows to full stature, there will be no valid reason for people to say the old is better, no room for the dogmatism that says that no wine is fit to drink until it is old. This is only a tradition of men. Old tradi-tions will be left behind by those who thirst for the new wine.

They went from sitting on the floor in a circle

playing guitars, worshipping outside the confines of church buildings,

and ministering on beaches and in coffeehouses to sitting silently in the

pews once again looking at the preacher and the back of everyone else’s heads.

9 Luke 5:39 10 Daniel 2:28 11 Psalm 34:8-10 12 Acts 5:38-39 13 Romans 9:28


The early disciples in Jerusalem were respected by their neighbors, but socially they were shunned. The book

of Acts says, “…they were all with one accord in Solomon’s portico [a public meeting place in the Jewish Temple]. But none of the rest dared to associate with them; however, the people held them in high esteem.”1

To the average Jew of the time, this group was strictly off- limits, no matter how moral its members were or how much good they did for others. After all, their leader, supposed to be the Messiah, had been condemned by the Priests and Rabbis and teachers of the Torah as a blas-phemer – one who curses God. He had been turned over

Saul of Tarsus was a rabid persecutor of the early

disciples. When he repented and received the Holy

Spirit, he never persecuted another soul

but devoted his life to loving people. He went

outside the camp into a radically new life.

Outside the Campor, “Can’t get there from here…”


to the Gentile authorities with a demand that He be executed, and the Romans had taken Him outside the city and crucified Him along with common rob-bers. Since then, a number of the group’s leaders had been jailed. There was no telling what might happen to them next, and being linked to the group might sud-denly become as dangerous as it was scandalous.

The disciples, however, ex-pected such treatment. The Mas-

ter Himself had said, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you”2 and, “If they have called the head of the house Beelzebul [the prince of demons], how much more the members of his household?”3 They were reminded that their Master’s crucifixion resembled the way carcasses of sacrificial animals were disposed of:

The high priest carries the

“Excuse me sir. Where’s the camp exit?”“Can’t get there from here.”

1 Acts 5:12-13 2 John 15:18 3 Mt 10:25


“Outside the camp” is where disciples ought to be, because

that’s where their Master was.

blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. (Hebrews 13:11-14)

“Outside the camp” was where the disciples ought to be, because that’s where their Master was. But what was “the camp”? According to their Master’s teaching, it was a religion full of hypocrisy (pretend-ing), marked by well-advertised charitable donations, long public prayers, and showy religious acts.4 People in “the camp” honored God with their lips while their hearts were far away.5 Their reli-gion was based on the traditions of men rather than the commands of God.6 They were careful in their rituals but neglectful of the people

around them.7 They looked good to other people, but inside, where only God could see, they were full of self-indulgence, dishonesty, and lawlessness.8

The most striking picture of “the camp” was one the Master Himself gave:

“Hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the

graves of the righ-teous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fore-fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shed-ding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves that you

are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!” (Matthew 23:29-32)

That was the ultimate hypoc-risy – they traced an unbroken religious heritage back through history while pretending not to have inherited the sins of their fathers. As most Bible readers should realize, it doesn’t work that

4 Matthew 6:2-6, 16-18 5 Matthew 15:7-9 6 Mark 7:6-9 7 Matthew 23:14,23 8 Matthew 23:25-28


way, because God “visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth gen-eration of those who hate Me.”9 And, as just about everybody knows, the people He was addressing went on to kill both Him and many of His followers, proving His point.

But what really proved His point, His ultimate point, was the life that His disciples lived “outside the camp.” It wasn’t just that they got re-viled and persecuted and killed for the sake of His Name. It was that they actually lived a radically dif-ferent life from those who were inside “the camp.” They actually obeyed the Master’s teachings and did the opposite of what the hypocrites were doing. They did their good deeds and prayed their prayers in secret. They drew near to God in their hearts and lived to please Him, rather than men. They emphasized love and justice and mercy and loyalty rather than tithes and offerings and traditions and ceremonies. They concentrated on their character and let their reputation take care of itself. And most importantly, they loved each other the way He had loved them – without reserve, not holding on to their time or their possessions or their opinions or their own agendas. They 9 Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 5:9


contributed all they had to meet-ing each other’s needs. They were abandoned to the Spirit of Love (which is the Spirit of God) and dedicated to seeing His Kingdom established on the earth.

The effect was galvanizing. People called them “these men who have turned the world upside down”10 and “this sect [cult] that is spoken against everywhere.”11 Yes, they were being spoken against, just like the head of their house had been called the prince of demons. And who, mainly, was speaking against them? Why, those “inside the camp,” of course – the ones whose false religious game was being shown up for the empty shell that it was. The disciples were hounded from town to town by religious pre-tenders – slandered, and beaten, and killed. But everywhere they went, people were being saved, becoming disciples, and learning to love others just as their Master had loved them.

Now we come to a difficult point in the story. It is a turning point, one marked by many pas-sages in the New Testament, but especially by the book of James

and the first three chapters of the book of Revelation. All along, the disciples had found insincere people in their midst. The Master Himself had picked Judas Iscariot to be an apostle, but the man had chosen to be a traitor. Ananias and Sapphira had been hypocrites, pretending to give all, while hold-ing back a portion for themselves. Even some of Paul’s co-workers had deserted him when difficult times came. But, sooner or later, the light of the “life outside the camp” had exposed the insincere.

When we come to James and Revelation, however, we get the picture of a faithful few, surrounded by many who had subtly compromised and lost their love and stopped caring for widows and orphans and had become stained by the world. In some places, the whole group of “believers” had stopped loving and had become self-satisfied and complacent and unaware of their spiritual bankruptcy. Rich guests were preferred over poor ones, and there were apparently even rich “disciples” and poor “disciples.”12

Some people might read these

10 Acts 17:6 11 Acts 28:22 12 Revelation 2:4-5; 3:1-4, 14-19; James 1:26-2:9; 4:1-4; 5:1-6 13 Acts 4:34-35 14 Matthew 15:7-9; Mark 6:7-9


things and say, “What’s the big deal about that? All down through Christian history there have been rich and poor in the Church, and the rich and important have had places of honor.” Well, the “big deal” is this: that’s what life “in-side the camp” had been like. The rich religious men had made long public prayers to show how much they loved God while “devour-ing the houses of widows” who were made in God’s image. And the Son of God had cried out in warning about the judgment that was going to fall on such pretend-ers. Those who heard the call had gone out to Him, outside the camp, where there were no rich

and poor.13

By the time the book of James was written, life “outside the camp” had all but vanished, and it had been replaced by “the camp” – only it was called by another name. It was the “Christian camp” instead of the “Jewish camp.” The “new religion” had become focused on various “teachings and traditions of men” that were dif-ferent from the “old religion,” but they had stopped paying atten-tion to “the commands of God.”14 What followed was nearly 2000 years of “camp life.”

Now, this is where just about everybody gets overwhelmed. Trudging through 20 centuries

By the time the book of

James was written, life

“outside the camp” had all but van-ished, and

it had been replaced by “the camp.”


of Church History can be pretty overwhelming, and we are not going to do it here. But even just a casual acquaintance with the fa-mous people of Christian History causes people to protest, “What? 2000 years of nothing but empty religion? What about the great theologians like Augustine, or the great reformers like Luther and Calvin, or radical groups like the Anabaptists of the 16th Century? And what about Billy Graham or Mother Teresa or the Jesus Move-ment, for goodness sake?”

Well, the “what” about all of them is that none of them brought back the “life outside the camp” that the Son of God established in the beginning. Augustine wrote many persuasive arguments about the nature of God and sin and so on, but his writings don’t produce disciples with fervent love for one another. On the contrary, they portray an unknowable God who predestines some to eternal life and others to eternal damnation based, not on their choices, but on His own cosmic whims. Augustine was preoccupied, not with loving people in the same way that our Master loved, but with refuting “heretics” and working out neat theological arguments to justify

the use of physical force to change people’s religious opinions.

Luther and Calvin were both Augustinian monks before they became reformers, and they brought Augustine’s horrible doc-trine of “just persecution” into the churches they established. Calvin was the driving force behind having Michael Servetus burned at the stake for the “sins” of ques-tioning the doctrine of the Trin-ity and rejecting infant baptism. Luther wrote several pamphlets vehemently calling for the death of Anabaptists and the persecu-tion of Jews. They were very concerned about moral principles and the stability of the societies they lived in, but not about the teachings of the Son of God, like turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, loving one’s en-emies, etc.

Probably someone will say, “Well, those men were just products of their age. Don’t be too quick to judge them because religious persecution was com-mon back then. Roman Catholics had been persecuting people for centuries.” But that’s exactly the point. That’s all Luther and Calvin were – mere products of their age, and nothing more. By con-


trast, Saul of Tarsus, 1500 years earlier, was a rabid persecutor of the early disciples, but when he repented and received the Holy Spirit, he never persecuted an-other soul but devoted his life to loving people. He was a product of something greater than the age he lived in. He went “outside the camp” into a radically new life and then spent the rest of his days spreading that life everywhere he went. Calvin and Luther merely re-formed the Roman Catholic

church, establishing another form of the same “camp life” they had been raised in.

Contemporary with the here-tic-hunting Catholics and Reform-ers was a different movement, the Anabaptists. This movement arose among disillusioned people, many of them young, who were dissatis-fied with the empty rituals of the established church. These non-conformists burned with zeal for liberty of conscience and freedom to determine their own forms of

The Anabaptist movement arose among disillusioned people, many of them young, who

were dissatisfied with the empty rituals of the established church.


worship. They were a loose and spontaneous movement whose bold rejection of infant baptism quickly drew persecution down on them from every side. But they were convicted that they should obey the commands of Jesus in the Bible. So, rather than fight for their rights, they let their Protes-tant and Catholic enemies torture and kill them by the thousands. Their defenseless slaughter by the Christian authorities caused many of their neighbors to reject Prot-estantism and Catholicism and join the Anabaptists. The fire and zeal of the movement flourished in spite of persecution (and, per-haps, because of it) from around 1525 to around 1560. Meeting in secret, fleeing from place to place, they took care of each other, shared all they had with each other, and refused under the most inhuman torture to betray one another. For a while it seemed that the same self-sacrificing life of love that the early disciples had lived was being restored. At the very least, they were outside the camp, and they were definitely bearing reproach.

But less than 35 years after the movement had begun, they started disintegrating. One leader

disagreed with another, and instead of resolving their differ-ences, they wound up dividing from one another. Their followers divided from each other as well, and each group refused to have anything to do with the other. Before long, each of those fac-tions split too, and soon all that was left of the Anabaptists were little splinter groups with strange names and rigid customs – the countless Mennonite, Amish, and Hutterian sects.

As for the world-famous Christian icons, Billy Graham and Mother Teresa, much could be said (and is regularly) about all they have done. Dr. Graham has preached a message acceptable to nearly every Christian denomi-nation for half a century. He has perhaps done more to bring Christianity together on common ground than any single human be-ing since the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine required the quarreling Christian bishops to hold ecumenical councils and sub-scribe to a standard set of beliefs. And Mother Teresa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work, has done much to make the Catholic Church acceptable to Evangelicals, who half a century


ago viewed the Roman Church with suspicion.

These two Christian figure-heads have a vast reputation for integrity, but have they obeyed the command of the Son of God to do their good deeds in secret and to “beware of practicing your piety before oth-ers in order to be seen by them”?15 Are they “outside the camp” bear-ing the disgrace the Master bore? Or do all men speak well of them?16

The Jesus Movement of the 1970s was a little like the Anabap-tist movement in that it was loose, spontaneous, and made up mostly of young people who were dissat-isfied with mainstream religion. They also wanted to do what Jesus had said in the Bible. Many of them started living together and sharing their possessions. But there the resemblance to the Anabaptists ended. They experi-mented with different forms of

worship and alternative lifestyles, but they didn’t separate from the mainstream, and they weren’t persecuted. Within a few years almost all the Christian communes had disbanded and the people involved had either given up on

Christianity alto-gether or settled into some congre-gation somewhere, quietly listening to the preacher or teacher. They didn’t go out to the Master, outside the camp, bearing the disgrace He bore.

Of course, that’s not the whole story. There have been many Chris-tian movements in the last 2000 years that broke

away from the status quo, and many stirrings within Christian congregations, but they all wound up having one thing in common: they didn’t recapture the vibrant, self-sacrificing life of love and one-ness that was present in the first disciples. It’s almost like the story of the traveler who got hopelessly

The best efforts of the best

people in the best positions to do the most good on earth have only managed to slow down

the pace of the destruction.

15 Matthew 6:1 16 Luke 6:26


lost in the back roads of New Eng-land and finally pulled up to an old farmhouse to ask directions. The aged farmer listened silently to the man’s story for awhile, and when the traveler finally named the des-tination he was trying to reach, the old man began to thoughtfully stroke his chin. Finally he replied, “Can’t get there from here.” Many people have reached this conclu-sion, that there is no way to get to that place “outside the camp” where the first disciples bore the disgrace of their crucified Master, the one to whom they belonged, heart and soul, body and posses-sions. It was just for that time back then, they say. The world is different now.17

But that’s not the whole story, either. 2 Chronicles 16:9 says, “The eyes of the LORD move to and fro throughout the earth that

He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His.” We who write this paper think that this means that all down through history God has been stir-ring things up on the earth to see if He could find people who would turn themselves over to Him com-pletely, ready to do nothing but His will. We think that when there is a “stirring,” He tests people to see what is in them. And He is still stirring, still looking, still ready to strengthen, because His will has not been accomplished yet. Satan’s tyranny over mankind has not been brought to an end. War, terrorism, crime, poverty, im-morality, hypocrisy, greed, broken families, etc., all point to the grip that the evil one has on the earth.

The best efforts of the best people in the best positions to do the most good on earth have

17 A Different World? The ecumenical movement is a powerful force on the earth today. Even though Christian groups continue to divide, at the same time, splintered factions are being drawn back together. This is not a return to the perfect unity that the Son of God prayed for in John 17:22-23 — being one just as He and His Father are one. It is more like the cooperation between quarreling bishops that Constantine secured in the 4th century. Vastly diverse groups are encouraged to ignore their differences and work together as a positive force in society. The goal is to get everyone together under one immense religious umbrella. To put it another way, one big camp is being established where all the smaller camps can camp together — including Judaism — a clear picture that there is essentially no difference between the Christian Church and the camp that cruci-fied the Master outside its gates. 18 Matthew 24:14; Acts 2:42-45; 4:32-35


We invite all men everywhere to join us in being devoted to the life of love that our Master gave His blood to establish on the earth – outside the camp.

only managed to slow down the pace of the destruction. Only the triumphant return of God’s Mes-siah is going to bring the end. And the end will only come when the Good News that He preached (not some watered-down version) is proclaimed everywhere. And it will only come if that message produces the same witness of the coming Kingdom that was seen

in the love and unity of the first disciples in Jerusalem.18

We have felt the stirring, we have heard the call, we have been through a little of the testing, and we know there’s a lot more to come. But we invite all men every-where to join us in being devoted to the life of love that our Master gave His blood to establish on the earth, outside the camp.


All Gene wanted was to surrender his life to God and do whatever he had been created for. He only

wanted to love. This was the cry of his heart.

C alifornia, 1971. The Jesus Movement was in full swing. There was an excitement

there such as Gene had never seen in all of his religious childhood. It was easy to get involved — praising the Lord, witnessing on the streets, and passing out Jesus tracts to the endless stream of hitchhikers traveling up and down the coast of California. He volunteered to work in a rescue mission and developed a special burden for this radical generation of youth.

A New Wineskin


It wasn’t long before he realized that most people in the movement did not have a deep conviction in their heart, but were just caught up in the impulsive enthusiasm of the times. He observed that even the sincere ones did not seem to have the power to overcome the sins of their former life. Despite the popular movement’s outward zeal, which Gene so admired, he could see that their fire was only a fading ember. Already the seemingly radical changes in people’s lives were beginning to wear off, and they began settling back into the status quo of rote1 religion.

In the midst of these circum-stances, walking alone on the California beach, Gene came face to face with the truth of John 15:5: “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.” If his life was to mean anything, if he was going to actually do what he had been created for, it could only come about through obeying and ut-terly depending on his Savior

— and teaching others to do the same. Eventually Gene left California and headed east to the Rocky Mountains. He had heard there were lots of “flower children” disillusioned with the “Woodstock Nation” and people who had dropped out of tradi-tional lifestyles who were living in the mountains trying to find peace. Perhaps there he would find people who wanted to hear the good news of the salvation he had found in Jesus, the Savior of the world.

A Radical Atheist

In a small, unspoiled moun-tain village in Wyoming lived a young woman named Marsha. Unlike Gene, she had been raised knowing nothing about the Bible and could count on one hand the times she had even been in a church building. Her college philosophy courses, combined with the religious hypocrisy she had seen all her life in southern California, had convinced her there couldn’t be a God. She couldn’t believe the Christians who said they had a “personal relationship with

1rote — routine or repetition carried out mechanically or unthinkingly.


God” when their lives were full of the same ambitions, pleasures, pursuits, and mundane daily routines as her own. She knew in her heart that if there really were a God and someone actu-ally knew Him, that person would be radically dif-ferent!

The emptiness of college and the shallow re-lationships there had caused her to drop out and move to that small village, looking for love and peace and a life that was closer to na-ture. There she had found others who seemed to want the same thing — to really live and be real. But before long her friends traded in their ideals for a subtle conformity. Their passion for justice and love started gradu-ally being replaced by the same old greed and selfishness they had all tried to leave behind.

When Gene showed up in the village, she admired his passion but was offended at his Bible. Yet when he read to her

about the love of this man called Jesus and the high standard of justice His words called for, she was intrigued. If people actually did what this man said, it would result in a society that was

everything Mar-sha had always dreamed of. She barraged Gene with challenging questions: Why had she never seen these words lived out? Why did Christians do little more than dress up in fancy clothes and meet

in elaborate buildings, even in countries racked with poverty? For these questions Gene had no answers. All he knew was that the Son of God had saved him, had filled his heart with a love for others, and would do the same for anyone who sincerely called out to Him. It wasn’t the Savior’s fault that people weren’t obeying His words.

Marsha couldn’t ignore the truth of what she was hear-ing. Amazingly, this confirmed atheist put her trust in the Son

She knew in her heart that if there

really were a God and someone

actually knew Him, that person would be radically

different!


of God, for she had become con-vinced that He was mankind’s only hope. Soon afterwards, she and Gene returned to Califor-nia and were married — joined in a covenant that has withstood the test of time for over three decades.

The Last Place on Earth

Even though Gene had a new life and was married to a woman who shared his convic-tions, he knew that many things from his old life in Tennessee were unresolved. And he could not be devoted to the purpose God had called him to until his conscience was completely clear. Facing his past in Chat-tanooga was painful for Gene, and the south was the last place on earth that Marsha wanted to be, steeped as she was in the stereotypical prejudices of her California upbringing. But their lives no longer belonged to themselves. They were living for their Savior now, so off they went to Gene’s hometown.

They both got jobs there, and soon all the debts were paid and (as much as possible) all the wrongs were righted. During

this time they attended services at several of the churches in the area where their zeal for the Lord attracted much attention. They also opened their home to anyone who wanted to come and learn about their Savior. Many young people came to meetings in their living room just to sing and talk about Je-sus. Because of the things they heard and the love they expe-rienced there, many teenagers quit taking drugs. People hailed their ministry as “a great work.” Every Sunday they would bring a truckload of young people to the different churches they at-tended. Their little group was popular, and everyone was happy.

The Light Brigade

The little brown house on Ringgold Road where Gene and Marsha lived became known as The Light House, and the little band of believers began sharing their faith through an


“underground” paper called The Light Brigade Freepaper. They were excited about experiencing love, a clean conscience, and a new life. W h e n e v e r there was a concert or oth-er public gath-ering, the Light Brigade would be there handing out papers.

The response was amaz-ing. Teenagers showed up at all hours of the day and night. Some had nowhere else to go and needed a place to stay. But how would Gene and Marsha have time to care for these people if they continued working their regular jobs? Unwilling to turn away anyone sincere, they were in need of a bigger house. But how would they make ends meet? Asking for donations was out of the question. The Bible taught them to do honest work with their own hands to have something to share with those in need.2 That’s just what they wanted to do — work

together and share everything they had with each other.

Thus was born The Yellow Deli restaurant. They did

yard work to get a few dollars together and

rented a small building. Af-

ter a couple of months of reno-

vation and a coat of bright yellow

paint, the cozy little sandwich shop was ready to open. It was a place where they could work for a living and still be together, learning all about their Savior and His teachings. Anyone who came in to get a meal could also get a glimpse of the new life they had found — the result of being forgiven and having the Holy Spirit living inside. On the menu they printed, “We serve the fruit

of the Spirit. Why not ask?”

People loved to come in and

talk and sit for hours in this res-taurant. It was a peaceful place, not full of the usual tense atmo-sphere of a typical sandwich 2 Eph 4:28


shop. The local papers did big full-color stories about them, giving glow-ing reports of their work and their menu.

For a rea-sonable price they were able to find a big house in need of much repair, which they fixed up and began living in. It just happened to be on “Vine Street.” The name reminded Gene of the Bible verse he had come to know so well: “I am the vine, you are the branches… apart from Me you can do nothing,” so they called their new home The Vine House.

They still attended services at various churches, but prob-lems were beginning to surface. There were murmurings in the congregations about the “hip-pies” and black people invading their respectable gatherings.

The young disciples were starting to ask difficult q u e s t i o n s , too. They w o n d e r e d how the peo-ple they went to church with could be so wealthy when there were so many poor people around. And why did they act so cold and distant?

Hadn’t Gene told them that Christians were called to live a life of selfless love for their neighbor?

The Super Bowl

One Sunday it all came to a head. The church they were attending cancelled their eve-ning service because the Super Bowl was going to be on TV. Even though the preacher had many good things to say in his sermons, it didn’t seem to make much difference in the lives

The Vine House in 1975


of the people. Their priorities seemed to be like the ones Gene had given up when he was saved.

From that day on, the little band of disciples stopped at-tending services. Instead they just went to a nearby park on Sunday mornings to sing and worship. After all, the Bible never said there had to be a preacher in a pulpit and everyone else listening quietly in pews. On the contrary, the Bible taught that everyone should bring something to say, or a song to sing.3

That choice was very signif-icant. When we stopped “going

to church” and started being the church something wonderful began to happen. We began discovering who we were, and what God wanted to have hap-pen on the earth. Verses in the Bible that we hadn’t really no-ticed before began to stand out. With excitement we discovered that the disciples in the first century lived just as we were living. Acts 2:44 said, “All who believed were together and had all things in common.” And Acts 4:32 was even clearer: “All the believ-ers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his posses-sions was his own, but they shared everything they had.”

Early gatherings in Warner Park

3 1 Corinthians 14:26


The Vine Christian Community

From that time on opponents rose up from the ranks of the re-ligious against our little band of disciples. No longer were we just a nice little ministry to young people that made up for how the churches were fail-ing to reach the youth. Now we had become an in-dependent entity, The Vine Christian Community. We weren’t asking the churches for dona-tions, teachings, seminary train-ing, or approval. We were paying our own way and raising up our own lead-ers. People who hadn’t wanted us at their churches in the first place were now offended that we had stopped coming. We didn’t really understand what was going on and tried to make peace, but found all our efforts futile. When we tried to explain that according to the Bible we were just doing what was nor-mal for believers, it only made matters worse. “You’re saying

that you’re the only ones!” was the most common response. Lies and slanderous rumors began to surface about us. Suddenly we weren’t so popular anymore.

All this time, however, our numbers were growing. We had to buy another house to accom-modate all the people who came

to live and work with us. And when a disciple from a nearby town wanted a Yellow Deli back where he had come from, we moved people there, got a house, and found a build-ing for the restau-

rant. Then came more houses and more delis. Within four or five years’ time we were running seven delis and occupied a dozen large houses in Chattanooga and the surrounding area. And we still handled all of our assets as we had at first — voluntarily sharing all that we had.

And so it went. Often be-cause of difficult circumstances, and always at great personal cost, disciples were sent out to establish communities. But

When we stopped “going to church”

and started being the church

something wonderful began

to happen.


that, after all, was the founda-tion we had been on from the beginning: meeting the press-ing need, giving out of what sustained us, doing whatever love demanded. We hadn’t sat down and planned out how to spread our beliefs or our lifestyle. We hadn’t anticipated becoming more than what we started in Tennessee. Neverthe-less, by 1990, communities had been established in four other countries, several were going in the New England area, and one in the Midwest. By the year 2000, communities had begun in several other countries, as well as in many other parts of the United States.4

Dry Bones

Just as we had never in-tended to become a worldwide movement, we had also never imagined ourselves to be a part of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. But over the years it gradually became clear that a restoration was taking place in our midst, and that we were living at a very significant time in history.

In the 1970s we knew from our heart and our experience that there was more to follow-ing the Savior than going to church. As we tried to pursue our desire to live a life pleas-ing to our Savior, we began to see things in the Bible that confirmed us. The accounts we read of the first-century church portrayed people who lived a radical life of self-sacrificing love for one another and were distinctly different from the society around them. It was all too obvious that such a life was missing from the Chris-tian Churches of the twentieth century.

The reason was fairly obvi-ous, too. There was no radical difference between church-goers and non-churchgoers because there was no authorita-tive message being proclaimed to tell people what God wanted them to do. Jesus’ love for His Father caused Him to obey His Father’s word. He, in turn called His disciples to the same love. He went before them and was their example. His message called them to abandon their fishing nets and tax booths


and to give away their personal possessions. He commanded them to sever their ties with any family members who opposed their devotion to the cause. The apostle Paul had even re-nounced his training as a Bibli-cal scholar in order to know this Jesus whom his colleagues despised. But Christianity did not preach such “hard sayings.” Instead, it has intellectually dissected the words of Messiah and rationalized away the need to obey them.

It wasn’t hard for us to see why that authoritative message was missing in modern times.

Someone would have to consis-tently live that life of self-sacri-fice and care himself, because of his love for Jesus, before he would have the authority to call others to abandon everything to follow Him. Thus, a major focus for us in the 1970s was learning to be obedient to the message we had received.

During the 1980s we contin-ued to seek in the Bible for the foundation of the early church to find our identity. Gradually it dawned on us what the first Church had been — not just a religion, but a nation.5 That nation had been known as the

The Peacemaker — “We know the way, we’ll bring you home.”

4 See the back cover for addresses of some of our communities, or our web site for a complete list. 5 1 Peter 2:9


C o m m o n -wealth of Israel.6 It had been made up of priests (each one a representa-tive of God on earth) and had possessed its own c u l t u r e . Piece by piece, the puzzle began to take shape. There had been a radical separation between the Church and the world in the first century and there had been a very good reason for it. The nations of the world functioned on the basis of Natural Law — the things that all men knew in their consciences to be true and right7 — but the priesthood had a higher law and greater ac-countability.

As we studied the his-tory and prophecies of the Old Testament, passages from the New Testament became much clearer. Living according to Natural Law was not bad, and

God had an eternal reward for all who struggled to do right (see www.3eternaldestinies.org for more on this), but good morals alone could not accomplish the purpose of God on the earth. There had to be a holy nation that proved their love for Messi-ah before He could return to the earth to establish His kingdom with them. There would have to be a people separate from the nations of the world who would live their lives obeying His commands. Matthew 24:14 and 21:43 were very clear on this point.

By the close of the 1980s, though, it became obvious that

6 Ephesians 2:12 7 Romans 2:14-15 8 1 Timothy 2:1-8

At our Common Ground Cafés we continue to serve “the fruit of the Spirit”


this holy nation would not even be able to exist on the earth apart from the influence of righteous men in the govern-ments of the nations — men who would up-hold freedom of religion and other basic hu-man rights.

As we en-tered the 1990s we began gathering every morning and evening to pray for the rulers of the nations in which we dwelt.8 At the same time, our message

became much more sharply fo-cused. We gained more under-

standing about the ways in which society was violating the Natural Law — to the point of calling evil good and good evil. It was becoming obvious that the t i me -honored ideals of the hard-working

man, the submissive wife, and respectful children were under attack in the world around us. Men were striving for positions

Gradually it dawned on us what the first century church had been — not just a

religion, but a nation. That nation had

been known as the “Commonwealth of

Israel.”

Our family keeps growing...


The challenge is to rely on the Spirit

of Love, and not on our own natural abilities, so that we will not fall

prey to the pride, selfish desires, and compromise that have caused every other movement of the last two

millennia to fail.

where they could make the most money with the least sweat pos-sible. Women were demanding at least a 50-50 partnership where there was no acknowl-edged head. Children were increasingly be-ing left to them-selves to choose their own course and form their own values. The concept of fam-ily was being re-defined to the point that ho-mosexual part-nerships were being given the same legal status as marriage in some places.

We felt a growing urgen-cy to let people know about the good, clean life our Savior had given us. In addition to passing out literature at public events and backpacking in pairs across the countryside to share our message, we established a toll-free number and later a website where people with

questions could find answers. We continued to print our freepapers, calling our main publication The Twelve Tribes Freepaper.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, various Biblical prophecies stood out to us. Isaiah 49:6 spoke of the “raising up of the tribes of Jacob to be a light to the nations so that salvation could reach to the ends of the earth.” It was becoming clear that salvation reaching the ends of the earth (which Matthew 24:14 said must happen in order for Messiah to

return and bring about the end of the age) depended on a na-tion composed of twelve tribes. These tribes, we came to under-stand, would not be the natural descendants of Jacob, but a spiritual Commonwealth of Israel9 — twelve self-governing


t r i b e s . E a c h t r i b e w o u l d be com-posed of the dis-ciples in a geo-graphi-cal area, l i v i n g a com-mon life together that would be a light to the people around them. It would be restored gradually, like the vision of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, member by member becoming united together and fleshed out into a host of com-munities — the resurrection of a spiritual nation whose hope had dried up at the end of the first century.

We realized that this was our future, if we proved worthy of it, but many movements have come and gone in the last nine-teen centuries, and none have fully recaptured the fervor of the first-century disciples and spread it to the ends of the earth. Always there have been selfish

motives, factions, cor r up -tion, and compro -m i s e . N e v e r has there been a p e o p l e such as the pro-p h e t i c

dream Daniel10 describes — a “stone kingdom” made up of people hewn from the mountain of the world “without human hands.” Attempts at restoration have always involved fleshly human effort in forms such as political alliances between church and state, the use of military force, and persuasive propaganda. But the Stone Kingdom of Daniel’s prophecy can only be established through love, bonding people together by a deep affection based on the sacrifices they have made for each other.

And so we have reached a critical point. There are commu-nities being raised up in twelve geographical areas by respon-

We see apprenticeship as a vital link between the generations

9 Ephesians 2:12 10 Daniel 2:31-45

62 www.twelvetribes.org

sible people who have been disciples for decades. Their children, for the most part, are building this nation with their parents. A rich culture is emerging in our midst. We have a clear vision for the future. But we face a supreme test. Will we continue to allow the new wine of the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts and change our lives? We will if we remain true to our Master’s words in John 15:5 — “Apart from Me you can do nothing.” The challenge is to rely on the Spirit of Love, and not on our own natural abilities, so

that we will not fall prey to the pride, selfish desires, and com-promise that have caused every other movement of the last two millennia to fail. Everything, quite literally everything, de-pends on this. And with this vision we press on, for the love of Messiah compels us.

“For the love of Christ compels us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.”

(2 Corinthians 5:14-15)

Dancing is an important aspect of our culture

62 www.twelvetribes.org

Hippies wanted the Body without the Blood.

Christians want the Blood without the Body.

But Hippies could not have it without the Blood,

And Christians cannot have it without the Body…

As Hippies found out,

And Christians never learn.

No one can have Community without the Blood;

And no one can have the Blood without Community.

All who are forgiven live in Community;

Who knows what Community is except the ones who are forgiven?

Body and Blood

The

the

IT TAKES ACOMMUNITY

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Jesus Movement LTR Qtr - Twelve Tribes communitiestwelvetribes.org › sites › default › files › media › itac... · like you 30 years ago, with high hopes of making a difference