Back during my student days, I attempted to invite a co-worker to church. In response, he told me about a time in the past when he and some friends, then teenagers, occasionally visited a church. They seemed always to hear the preacher opine against young men wearing long hair. Looking around and seeing no other males with long hair, they figured that the sermon must be directed at them. Whether correct or incorrect, they soon quit going and did not seem to hear any message other than the criticisms of the length of their locks.
That story came to mind while watching the recent movie sensation, "Jesus Revolution." My own reactions to the movie were rather complex, finding more of value in the diagnosis than in the cure presented over the course of the film. The strength in the film lay in its exposure of knee jerk reactions against those in need of the Gospel. Yet, the film also, sometimes unintentionally, exposes weaknesses in the Jesus Freak movement that require correction, rather than emulation.
Though the movie takes the sort of cinematic short cuts that must be taken to reduce real life events to a 2-hour film, it attempts to recount the story of the Jesus movement of the late 1960's, as it occurred at Calvary Chapel. Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammar) had no interest in or sympathy for the hippies until he actually met one, Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie). When Frisbee convinced Smith that hippies were looking for truth about life's meaning, and some were learning to prefer the message of Jesus over Timothy Leary, Smith's attitude changed, and hippies began showing up at Smith's church, much to the chagrin of some of the church's leadership.
In the face of opposition to outreach to the unkempt, unshod hippies, Smith showed admirable courage and earnestness. At what I found to be the movie's most poignant scene, church leaders complained that the dirty bare feet of the new visitors would destroy the church's carpet. Those leaders arrived at the church on Sunday to see a long line at the entrance, as Pastor Smith, on hands and knees with basin and towel beside him, washed the feet of each young person before they entered.
How could one not be moved at that?
The movie has been called a fluff piece on the Jesus movement. While that is partially true, it does expose weaknesses that were largely responsible for the implosion of the movement after about 5 years. As mentioned above, Smith had earnest concern for the spiritual condition of these hippies, but once they arrived in mass he actually seemed at a loss as to what to tell them, and in the movie, at least, he basically turned everything over to others who themselves were novices in the faith. Frisbee focused on evangelical concerns at the start of the movie, but soon gave in to extravagant and sensational claims of Spirit prompted healings. In the movie's version of events, immature leadership eventually led to a fracturing of relationships among leaders, as well as a tendency toward abusive leadership models based on charismatic qualities. The movement as such ran its course in about 5 years, though it has had numerous long term impacts on the larger church. The various imitative "calvary chapels," as well as Vineyard churches spread over the country are the most obvious examples, and many of the changes in church music and focus on charismatic leadership in the last 50 years have their origin in the movement. Such changes have tended to attempt to retain attendance and evangelism at the expense of reducing biblical content. These changes have also tended to produce unhealthy authoritarian leadership structures in churches.
Those thoughts regarding impacts notwithstanding, I have attempted to focus this review on the contents of the movie itself. I am aware that there are others giving more attention to whether events portrayed in the movie cohere with reality. Not having the time or inclination to perform that research, I will leave that task for others.
Nonetheless, I will say that efforts to develop all sorts of extracurricular materials designed to use this movie to foster a revival movement would seem to reflect the unhealthy tendency within evangelicalism to use history as prologue by reducing spontaneous movements into techniques. The Spirit blows where He wills, and we would do better to engage in faithful practices related to the proclamation of Word and sacrament while asking the Spirit to use the means that He has commanded.
