Just watched this week a DVD documentary about the Christian hippie preacher and evangelist, Lonnie Frisbee, not a name most people would recognize. Yet his influence on the church has been very wide.
When I was 10 I was given a wild looking New Testament called 'the Jesus book' which was produced as a result of the 'Jesus Movement' - a move of God among the Hippies on the 60s and 70s. Not that I was a hippe or even alive in the 60s (well only just). It has fatastic pictures or hundreds of people being baptised in the Pacific, radical discipleship, communal living, people lost in worship, healings. It's a classic. At the centre of this movement was Lonnie Frisbee.
His story is amazing and also challenging. For he was an unknown called by God to help others see God. He was controversial in that he believed in miracles and in following Jesus to the enth degree. He had a wide impact when he prayed for John Wimber and saw the start of the Vineyard movement and 'signs and wonders' that hit the UK church in the 80s and 90s. His life was an up and down movement of being caught up in God and yet facing many personal issues. His marriage ended and he was also gay. He died of AIDS in '93.
It was provoking because God used this man despite his own fragility and wounds and personal character. As one witness said - 'all God asks for is that we open our hearts to him, as we are, and offer our lives to be used by him.'
If you get a chance to watch it - do. It leaves you with many questions but also with a certainity - God uses all who turn to him.
