Remembering Lonnie Frisbee, the Gay Man Who Sparked the Jesus Movement
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March 12 is the death anniversary of Lonnie Frisbee, the “hippie preacher” who sparked the Jesus movement. In 1967, two years before the Stonewall Uprising that sparked the Gay Liberation movement, 17 year-old Frisbee went into the California wilderness, stripped naked, and cried out, “Jesus, if you’re really real, reveal yourself to me!” He felt surrounded by a glowing, shimmering presence, and had a vision of thousands of young hippies streaming into the ocean for baptism.
First in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district during the Summer of Love, and later in Southern California, Frisbee was instrumental in drawing young people to a new kind of Jesus-faith, stripped of institutional trappings (which later, of course, returned in adjusted forms.) This movement began Rock & Roll Christianity, which has now morphed into marketing-savvy hipster churches like Hillsong. For a time, Bob Dylan landed in a Vineyard church connected to the Frisbee-influenced Jesus movement.
You can learn Frisbee’s story in a documentary by filmmaker David Di Sabatino, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher (2005).
John Wimber, a former manager-producer of the Righteous Brothers turned pastor, invited Frisbee to speak at his struggling church on Mother’s Day, 1980. By all accounts, the Holy Spirit fell on those gathered in a remarkable way and Vineyard, as an organized expression of the Jesus movement, took off. Those who long for the “glory days” of Vineyard’s early years are longing for what Frisbee unleashed. (I founded a Vineyard church in Ann Arbor, but lost my job there when Emily Swan came out as gay and I refused to fire her as the denomination demanded).
But Lonnie Frisbee, like so many of others of his era, and many still today, was a closeted gay man. He was closeted because the Christianity of his time (and much of Christianity today) stigmatized sexual minorities as “perverse.” In Frisbee’s time (as in ours) most churches applied a handful of biblical “terror texts,” that were probably written with practices like temple prostitution and pederasty (men who “mentored”…
