California Baptism

I already posted this picture below, but I remain fascinated by it. It really captures the essence of the time and place I first became a Christian in 1981. It reminds me that my spiritual journey has such different roots from those I know who currently share the journey with me. That time was full of so much inner and outer beauty and wonder, which I found incarnated in my encounter with the living spirit of Jesus, not necessarily the church. And that has carried me to where I am today.

Lonnie Frisbee

"It's like John the Baptist walked through Southern California and nobody wants to talk about him because he died of AIDS."

-- filmmaker David Di Sabatino.

Lonnie Frisbee, besides having a great name, was a prophetic, charismatic "Jesus Freak" who ministered in California in the late 60s and early 70s. He was a primary -- but mostly unrecognized -- influence in the founding of two of the most important evangelical churches today, Vineyard Christian Fellowship and Calvary Chapel.

Frisbee led innumerable young people to Jesus, his presence sent crowds around the world into convulsions through the Holy Spirit, and he is said to have healed a blind man.

Frisbee was the source for much of the post-denominational charismatic Christianity that came out of California in the 1970s, which is the stream in which I first became a Christian.

He was also a gay man.

What a fasinating life, and truly a sign that God works in mysterious ways....

Here's more:

Lonnie Frisbee Wikipedia entry: Frisbee was an American Pentecostal evangelist and self-described "seeing prophet" and mystic in the late 1960s and 1970s. Despite his hippie appearance and being a closeted gay man, Frisbee had notable success as a minister and evangelist. Contemporary accounts attributed his accomplishments to his incredible anointing of the Holy Spirit.

"Frisbee" by Erik Davis: Frisbee had an authentic, infectious passion and spiritual intensity that Christians would call the Holy Spirit, but which in this context had as much to do with the mystic counterculture as it did with all but the most Pentecostal wings of American Christianity.

The First Jesus Freak, by Matt Coker, OCWeekly: Lonnie Frisbee put the freak in Jesus freak. With his long brown hair, long craggily beard, dusty clothing, scent of Mary Jane and glint of his last LSD trip in his eyes, he showed up out of nowhere, at the height of the '60s, literally on Chuck Smith's doorstep.

Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher. An Emmy-nominated documentary by David Di Sabatino.


Lonnie Frisbee in the early 70s, baptizing people in the ocean as hundreds look on.