It was 1969. The wind was blowing, the times were a-changing, and there was a psychedelic feel to everything from music and art to clothes and drugs. “Tune in, turn on, and drop out” was the cry, but underlying it all was an overwhelming desire to find Truth. We didn’t know what Truth was, but we felt that we’d know it when we found it.
I found it in a little hippie church just off Sunset Strip.
I had not believed in God since I was a kid, but there was such passion in the eyes of the kid who invited me to come hear “the Truth”, that I just had to see for myself what had turned this longhaired hippie on to Jesus.
I knew something was different as soon as I stepped into the sanctuary. I could feel a presence in the air. All of a sudden I knew. This was the real thing.
The Song Service was alive! I had never seen anything like it, but it was the preaching that struck deep in my soul and made me realize that this was the Truth I had been looking for. I was at the crossroads of my life, and I went down to the altar and chose God.
We didn’t have much. Basically, we had the clothes on our backs, we slept on the church floor at night, ate potato soup or whatever donation they could scrape up, and had no money to even buy a Coke, but it was the greatest time of my life! The Spirit of the Lord was there during the day and electrified the services every night, and that was good enough for us. We would just read our Bible, pray like crazy for revival, and then go out and witness our hearts out.
All we had to wear were old t-shirts and ragged jeans with patches covering the holes, usually accompanied by a rag around our head or something else outrageous. I guess we looked pretty scruffy and ragged to traditional church members. They didn’t like our long hair very much, either. Said it was unscriptural and that we weren’t really of the Lord.
I don’t guess God agreed with them because He kept sending more and more souls our way to get saved. Every night the altar would pack out with 40 to 50 souls getting saved. From priests to prostitutes, housewives to drug addicts, and even some movie stars, God would send a new crop of Truth seekers every night to get saved and filled with the Holy Ghost. Over the course of 10 years, close to 100,000 souls were saved.
In spite of the churches that looked down on us, there were some old folks who absolutely loved us. They were the old-fashioned Pentecostals that had been birthed out of the Azusa Street Revival there in L.A. They would come by and fuss over us, feed us, and give us clothes and anything else we needed. It must have looked really funny to see these old women with their grey Pentecostal buns and old calico dresses hanging out with us hippies. But they saw in us a resurgence of a move of the Holy Spirit like they had experienced 50 years prior. We weren’t dirty hippies to them. We were God’s army that He was raising up to bring the gospel to a world that had been given over to sin. They made us feel like we were special. And I guess we were.
I miss those days. I have been rich and poor, have been all over the world, and have preached in large churches and out in the bush, but I still remember those raw times when we had nothing but faith, a tattered Bible and a handful of ragged gospel tracts. The Spirit of God set us on fire and we spread that fire around the world.
We may have looked like dirty hippies to the world, but to God we looked like heroes. He took us from ashes and made us beauty unto Him.
“To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.” (Isaiah 61:3)
Brother Dale