Lonnie Frisbee: The Sad Story of a Hippie Preacher
A FORGOTTEN BUT INFLUENTIAL EVANGELICAL FIGURE
Category: The Church. Breakpoint.
March 10, 2017
Lonnie
Frisbee is a name mostly lost to history, but he could be one of the most
influential persons in the modern evangelical movement. There’s no doubt that he
is the man who put the “freak” in “Jesus Freak.” And in his life we see some of
the best and worst of evangelicalism.
To
understand that, a bit of his biography is helpful.
Lonnie
Frisbee was a quintessential baby-boomer, born in 1949 and fully immersed in the
hippie movement of the 1960s. He was in San Francisco during the famous 1967
“Summer of Love,” and even then, at age 18, he was a compelling figure, winning
awards for his painting and becoming known in the “gay underground” for his
dancing, bohemian attitudes, profligate drug use. He described himself as a
“nudist, vegetarian hippie.”
His
rootlessness may have been a result of a dark home life when he was a child.
Frisbee was raped at age eight, often ran away from home as a child, and was in
and out of school so much that he barely learned to read or write.
It
is, then, perhaps no surprise that Frisbee’s conversion to Christ included
unusual circumstances. A “spiritual seeker,” Frisbee would often read the Bible
while tripping on LSD. He claims he became a Christian while doing just that,
during a “vision quest” near Palm Springs, California. The group he was with
baptized him in Tahquitz Falls.
He
later said that on a different acid trip, after his conversion, he had “a vision
of a vast sea of people crying out to the Lord for salvation, with Frisbee in
front preaching the gospel.” (A lot of the material for this article comes from
David W. Stowe, “No
Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American
Evangelicalism,” UNC Press Books, 2011.)
This
all sounds too strange to be taken seriously, but one could argue that it is
precisely at this point that American evangelicalism goes awry.
Not
only was Lonnie Frisbee taken seriously as a convert, he was embraced by 1960s
and ’70s-era evangelical leaders. Calvary Chapel’s Chuck Smith was
smitten. “I was not at all prepared for the love that this young man would
radiate,” he said. Smith put Frisbee in charge of one of Calvary Chapel’s
ministries, “The House of Miracles,” which ministered to hippies, addicts, and
street people. Frisbee led a Wednesday night Bible study that quickly attracted
thousands and became an “on ramp” for the early growth of Calvary Chapel. All
this despite the fact that Frisbee, by now married, continued to use drugs and
engage in homosexual liaisons.
Still,
Frisbee’s powerful personality and speaking style had a remarkable impact. The
House of Miracles grew and eventually spawned 19 communal houses. It eventually
migrated to Oregon and became an important “Jesus Movement” commune, which at
one time had 100,000 members in 175 homes spread across the country. Also,
Frisbee was an early influence on later Calvary Chapel leaders Mike MacIntosh
and Greg Laurie.
But
Frisbee’s demons hounded him. He became involved with the such fringe
charismatic teachers as Kathryn
Kuhlman. As the Calvary Chapel movement matured and started seeing the
excesses of the “Jesus People” movement, Smith and Frisbee had a break in 1971.
Frisbee and his wife divorced in 1973, and Frisbee became a part first of the
controversial Shepherding
Movement led by Bob Mumford, and
then John
Wimber’s Vineyard Movement.
During
this whole time, while he was preaching in some of evangelicalism’s largest
venues, his moral failings were more or less an “open
secret.” He would “party on Saturday night and preach on Sunday
morning.”
Lonnie
Frisbee’s lifestyle eventually caught up with him. He contracted AIDS and died
of complications from the disease on March 12, 1993—24 years ago this weekend.
Chuck Smith, to whom he had been more-or-less reconciled, preached at Frisbee’s
funeral, saying that Frisbee was a “Samson figure”
who was powerfully anointed by God, but who was a victim of a desperately broken
childhood and his own struggles and temptations.
The
post-World War II evangelical movement has produced many great and godly
leaders—Billy Graham, Chuck Colson, Frances Schaeffer, Bill Bright, and many
others come to mind—and I thank God for them. But it has also produced more than
a few men like Lonnie Frisbee, and we do well to remember them—and learn from
their lives—if we want to have the kind of witness to a skeptical world that
truly brings glory to God.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
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