Jesus People

In Mill Valley, Calif., inside a quaint sanctuary filled with wooden pews, a four-person choir sways to the old-timey Gaither tune, “Something Beautiful”: All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife, but He made something beautiful of my life. The music spills out onto the empty street, quiet except for bike riders whizzing by en route to Mount Tamalpais. Its sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay Area overshadow the affluent and largely irreligious Marin County city where Miller Avenue Church has been a fixture for 78 years.

“If we have 20 people today, I’ll be shocked,” says Kent Philpott, who’s served as Miller Avenue’s pastor for 40 years. Sitting outside the sanctuary, armed with a stack of church bulletins, the 83-year-old pastor delivers that ­anemic attendance prediction with an enthusiasm unusual in the megachurch era. Even now, he seems expectant that this little flock could once again play a part in a wider move of God.

Nearly six decades ago, Philpott and Miller Avenue Church played key roles in the small beginnings of the Jesus Movement, an offshoot of the hippie counterculture that is widely considered the last revival to sweep through America.

At the height of the 1967 Summer of Love, Philpott, then a 25-year-old seminary student and shoe salesman, let his hair grow out and swapped his suit for jeans, a military jacket, and boots. In San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the epicenter of both the hippie counterculture and the earliest days of the Jesus Movement, they called him the “straight hippie preacher.” John MacDonald, Miller Avenue’s pastor at the time, welcomed into the congregation the first known hippie converts, seeking to shepherd them as they quickly began evangelizing their friends.

Within a couple of years, what started with a handful of hippie converts spread to Southern California and across the nation and world. The so-called “Jesus freaks” persuaded hundreds of thousands of baby boomers to forsake drugs, promiscuous sex, and an anti-­religious and anti-establishment ethos. In the process, they formed a new ­hippie-inspired brand of conservative Christianity.

Today, the Jesus Movement still perplexes believers and nonbelievers alike, even as it has woven itself into the fabric of modern evangelicalism. For many, it’s loaded with nostalgia, unlikely heroes, and hope-filled pleas for a similar renewal in our day. Others are skeptical of both its mixed results and its lasting effects. And for a handful of the lesser-­known hippie evangelists who experienced its earliest manifestations, it’s all of the above, and yet still misunderstood.

Kent Philpott Photo by Gary Fong / Genesis

CONNIE BREMER, then just a teen, spent some of her earliest days as a believer with the Jesus Movement’s initial members in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bremer, now 76, was married to hippie evangelist Lonnie Frisbee. On the morning we met for coffee, she wore antique pink-shaded glasses and an embroidered jean jacket, her graying hair trimmed shoulder length, her tattered Bible set out on the table. As I asked her to describe the Jesus Movement, she broke down crying.

“It’s a hallelujah story, a Greek tragedy, and a cautionary tale,” she said.

Two years ago, the movie Jesus Revolution captured the “hallelujah” aspect of the narrative. It traced the movement’s viral spread from Southern California to the rest of the country. After spending time with the early converts in San Francisco, Frisbee took their message about Jesus to hippies in Orange County. His dynamic partnership with Calvary Chapel Pastor Chuck Smith transformed Smith’s church into one teeming with long-haired, bare-footed hippies, including Harvest Ministries founder Greg Laurie, whose conversion is the film’s focus.

Jesus Revolution director Jon Erwin had a specific goal with the movie: inspiring a similar move of God today. When he first approached Laurie in 2016 with the idea for the film, he brought a copy of a 1971 Time magazine with him. The cover featured a psychedelic-looking depiction of Christ and the headline “The Jesus Revolution.”

“I want this to happen for my generation,” Laurie recalled Erwin telling him.

Judging by the film’s box-office success, plenty of Christian viewers identified with Erwin’s desire for revival inspiration. But for Bremer and other early converts, the story behind the Jesus Movement is not as clear-cut as its Hollywood depiction or its historical highlights.

Bremer and Frisbee married when she was 19 and he was 18. Both came from childhoods marked by abandonment, neglect, and severe abuse. They met through mutual friends in the emerging LSD scene. In a cave in Tahquitz Canyon, Frisbee claims a vision persuaded him that “Jesus was real and that he was calling me to follow him,” according to his posthumous 2012 autobiography, Not by Might, Nor by Power. He began witnessing to his unsaved friends, including Bremer. She made her profession of faith while tripping on LSD and was baptized naked, a testimony she quickly learned made church folk squirm.

While the Jesus Revolution movie hints at Bremer and Frisbee’s almost immediate marital tension, it left out the tragic elements, including Frisbee’s well-known lapse into homosexuality. The couple separated in 1973 and divorced several years later. Frisbee died of AIDS in 1993. He was only 43. After their separation, Bremer “fell out of fellowship with the Lord” for more than a decade but told me she eventually experienced restoration: “Even though I walked away from Him … He did not walk away from me.”

The movie’s producers never contacted Bremer, despite the film’s portrayal of her in the events that took place at Calvary Chapel. “We would have loved to have interviewed Connie, but unfortunately we had no way of finding her,” Erwin told me. Previously, Bremer sparred with the documentarian responsible for a separate 2005 film on Frisbee, claiming it inaccurately emphasized her former husband’s homosexuality—something she said he only spoke of to her as a besetting sin, not an orientation.

Even now, Bremer seems uninterested in the spotlight. But she cares deeply that the truth of what happened is preserved for future generations, or as she says, “the kids.” She talks with a sense of urgency, her voice often quivering. In recent years, she’s attended the funerals of many of the early converts. For others, the memories of what happened are fading.

Critics have long pointed out the movement’s flaws. Grace Community Church Pastor John MacArthur has critiqued the movement’s ties to seeker-­friendly megachurches and excesses within the charismatic movement. Others blame it for spawning rock-­infused corporate worship and birthing the cult known as Children of God. Writing for Religion Unplugged, culture critic and filmmaker Joseph Holmes noted that since the Jesus Movement’s height in the 1970s, the number of Americans who identify as Christian has only decreased—and division worsened. “Even if the Jesus Movement created a temporary revival, it’s not obvious that its lessons could be applied today,” he wrote.

Legions of believers would disagree, especially since the effects of the Jesus Movement hardly seem temporary. For many youth caught up in the chaos and tumult of the 1960s, it changed the trajectory of their lives. They went from rejecting “straight” values and morals to launching Christian communes, coffeehouses, and fellowships across the country, and eventually the world.

Lonnie & Connie Frisbee Courtesy of Connie Bremer

THE JESUS MOVEMENT STORY began in the mid-1960s at Kent Philpott’s church, before the hippie scene emerged, when Liz Wise slipped into the pews. Disillusioned with San Francisco’s beatnik scene, she petitioned congregants to pray for her husband Ted. In his 1970 book The House of Acts, Pastor John MacDonald described Ted as a philandering, drug-experimenting ex-Navy man.

Ted resented his wife’s church attendance, but his frequent LSD trips had brought him face-to-face with his own depravity. “I went into the palace looking for the prince on the throne but discovered only the rat in the basement,” he later told Ed Plowman, a former pastor who worked as a WORLD reporter between 1997 and 2018. In his 1971 book The Jesus Movement in America, Plowman, then serving at a Baptist church in San Francisco, documented Ted’s unusual conversion and his immediate influence on his peers.

Ted’s longtime pal Danny Sands, then a beatnik living in Berkeley, still recalls the day Ted proclaimed “Jesus is my Lord and Savior” to stoned party­goers sprawled all over Sands’ home. “It was like a bomb went off,” he told me. “Everyone was confused.” In the days and months that followed, Sands observed changes in Ted, even though he continued to use drugs, and they often got high together. But Sands’ life was plummeting fast. He battled depression and suicidal thoughts, until one day in 1967 he asked Ted over and uttered words he never thought he would: “Jesus is my Lord and Savior.”

Sands was one of Ted’s first friends to convert. In a few short years, he transformed from a “nonthinking atheist” to possessing awareness of a spiritual realm—he attributes this to peyote and LSD—to a Christian who dropped everything to witness to hippies.

The day I met Sands, now 86, he choked up as he recalled his conversion. We sat in the shade at a small table outside his Santa Rosa, Calif., mobile home. It backs up to a preschool next to a dry field where goats graze. Recently retired from office work as a psychologist, he looked relaxed in worn jeans, bare feet, and a purple-and-green-striped T-shirt. He spoke softly and took long pauses between sentences. He’s mostly steered clear of media interviews about his involvement in the Jesus Movement. Its lesson, he says, “is that God is full of surprises.” While modern-day evangelists try to understand the Jesus Movement in hopes of replicating it, Sands believes it’s presumptuous to try to explain a move of God.

Since the earliest days of the Jesus Movement, many have tried. In January 1968, a Christian Life magazine piece titled “God’s Thing in Hippieville” first introduced the wider world to “psychedelic evangelist” Ted Wise and his friends, including Sands and his then-wife Sandy, and two other couples: Steve and Sandi Heefner and Jim and Judy Doop. “They are, by all conventional standards, a weird mob,” journalist Maurice Allan wrote.

By then, the couples, all in their mid-20s, had idealistically abandoned their careers, sold their belongings, and at Sands’ behest, moved with their young children into a Novato, Calif., home they called the House of Acts. It is believed to be the first Christian hippie commune. The group sought to model their lives after the Book of Acts, literally, Sandi Heefner told me.

With support from a group of more seasoned believers—Baptist pastors MacDonald, Plowman, and Philpott, among others, who formed an oversight group called Evangelical Concerns—the Wises and their friends opened a storefront they called the Living Room in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Each day, they drove 30 minutes from Novato to the city, serving up soup, coffee, and the message that Jesus saves. Hippie convert Dan Pauly recalled being with the group as they witnessed to singer Janis Joplin, cult leader Charles Manson, and others.

Countless hippies came through the Living Room. Many ended up carpooling and hitchhiking back to the House of Acts in Novato. Wise’s group pooled its resources to offer a meager meal, a shower, and a place to sleep. The couples always seemed to have enough, Sandi Heefner recalled. In many cases, they acted as temporary surrogate parents to runaway youth, urging them to call home or paying their bus fare to send them back.

The group’s home and the San Francisco storefront seemed uniquely poised to reach the estimated 75,000 youth who had flocked to San Francisco during the height of the hippie counterculture. In his 2013 book God’s Forever Family, historian and author Larry Eskridge estimates that during an 18-month period in the late 1960s, Wise and his friends witnessed to more than 20,000 youth.

Danny Sands (left) and Ted Wise Maurice Allan

I FIRST MET CONNIE BREMER in May 2024 when she arrived at Steve and Sandi Heefner’s modest mobile home in Santa Rosa, Calif. She carried her Bible, a large bag of tortilla chips, and toilet paper—necessities for a weekend stay. The Heefners and the other couples at the House of Acts once welcomed Bremer and Frisbee as brand-new Christians who owned nothing. Bremer told me she didn’t want to leave. But Frisbee insisted they needed to move to Southern California to link arms with Smith.

In the spring of 1968, Frisbee and Bremer joined Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. Hippies began showing up in droves. Smith’s youngest daughter, Cheryl Brodersen, then age 9, remembers the excitement: “I loved to go to the Monday night Bible study. The hippies would get up and sing and share their testimonies,” she told me. “It was thrilling to hear how the Lord had worked in their lives.”

The church opened its first commune, the House of Miracles, and then quickly started a half dozen more. By 1969 “the phone was ringing off the hook,” according to a timeline compiled by Kathy Gilbert, Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa’s local mission chaplain, and others. One hippie musician recounted “smiles and hugs from young hippies who had become Jesus freaks. The whole place vibrated with joyful praise … young and old digging into God’s Word together—so rich and alive.”

Gilbert joined Calvary Chapel in 1973. Three years prior, she had been a disillusioned hippie hitchhiking in Oregon when John Higgins, a hippie convert-turned-missionary from the church, picked her up. He shared the gospel with her and invited her to a commune he started with hundreds of other hippie converts. Gilbert embraced the faith. She spent two years at the Eugene, Ore., commune called the Shiloh Youth Revival Center, where she met her husband of 52 years.

Gilbert told me she thought what she was witnessing—sprawling communes and church plants, street evangelism, mass baptisms at Pirate’s Cove Beach in California, and new, hippie-­inspired Christian rock bands—was “just a Calvary Chapel thing.”

“We had no idea there was a move of the Spirit all over the place.”

Connie Bremer Photo by Mary Jackson

By the 1980s and ’90s, the ripple effects of the Jesus Movement had spread throughout Eastern Europe and elsewhere, said Brian Brodersen, pastor emeritus of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa.

But Calvary Chapel’s “hallelujah” moment—and the viral spread of the Jesus Movement across the country and world—coincided with the movement’s “cautionary tale.”

Back in Northern California, the small band of new converts at the House of Acts attracted considerable media attention for their sway among hippie youth. But they also caught the attention of religious leaders who wanted in on the action and ultimately led some of the hippie converts into offshoots involving unorthodox beliefs and practices.

Legalism also crept in, and some sought to curb cigarette smoking and employ other rules in what previously felt familial and loosely structured, Sandi Heefner recalls. By 1969, the once tight-knit group of early converts at the House of Acts had disbanded, and the couples dispersed.

Meanwhile, new cults or quasi-cults, such as the Children of God and the Way International, began sprouting up within the Jesus Movement.

One pair of early converts, Megan and Rick Saks, recounted their own Jesus Movement cautionary tale. They also lost their way amid the religious offshoots that followed.

The Sakses were among the early converts coming out of the hippie counterculture in San Francisco. They married at House of Acts, with MacDonald performing the ceremony, and spent their wedding night in a makeshift bedroom made out of sheets in the basement.

Rick and Megan Saks Photo by Mary Jackson

Today, 57 years later, the Sakses live in Mendocino in a simple wood-cladded cottage they built, surrounded by tall Redwood trees. Since 1977, the couple has run a sign-making business from the wood shop behind their house.

Hours before I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, the Sakses logged on to a YouTube livestream to watch their teenage grandson share a testimony at his family’s North Carolina church. Rick got emotional as he described how it felt to consider his own conversion “having this effect that is going on through generations.”

As we talked, 76-year-old Megan rested her legs on Rick’s knee. For them, the Jesus Movement still carries wonder—Rick, 77, uses words such as logic-defying and miraculous to describe that period in their lives.

But the years that followed are part of their story, too.

Like other hippie converts, the Sakses migrated to Southern California, in their case to help a friend run a commune for single mothers. For six months, they lived in a walk-in van plastered with Scripture that they parked at a motel Calvary Chapel used to house hippie converts. But as Calvary Chapel exploded with growth under Smith and Frisbee’s leadership, the Sakses got lost in the mix.

Amid loneliness and a lack of purpose, Rick became involved in a fringe cult he describes as rooted in un-Biblical economic principles. He continued smoking dope on and off until finally giving it up in 1980. “Sin is always right there,” he said. “You can always go right back to it, you know?”

Philpott preaches at Miller Avenue Church Photo by Gary Fong / Genesis

THAT’S WHERE THE Greek tragedy comes in.

As the Jesus Movement waned, for some hippie converts the seed of the gospel was choked out. Brodersen believes his father-in-law Chuck Smith’s “confidence in Scripture, that people need to know it … grounded us in a way that perhaps some of the other early groups missed.”

“A lot of people had an initial experience with the Lord but didn’t go on to a mature state,” he said.

For all the bewildering, enduring testimonies of faith, some of the movement’s leaders experienced divorce, adultery, substance abuse, theological drift, and other entrapments—struggles that, for some, tarnish the movement’s legacy.

Bremer still wrestles with the what-ifs, such as whether her marriage to Frisbee could have been salvaged.

Back at Miller Avenue, Pastor Philpott talks about the “hallelujah” aspects of the movement but tells me “we don’t cover up the rough parts”—the tragedies. He writes in the dedication of his 2016 book Memoirs of a Jesus Freak, “Awakenings are not always pleasant; there is ‘collateral damage’ … while there is glory accrued to God.” Even he was not immune: His daughters confessed to feeling like his passion for witnessing to the hippies overshadowed his roles as husband and father.

The day I visited the church, Philpott preached on a passage from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus instructs a rich young ruler to sell everything he has to follow Him. Philpott referred to his days ministering in Haight-Ashbury with what some today might call a simplistic message.

“I always said, I’m a follower of Jesus. Come follow me.”