Greg Lorry, pastor and author of Jesus Revolution, explores how the 1970s hippie movement turned to Christ amid cultural upheaval, bridging Time magazine’s "Is God dead?" (1966) to its "Jesus Revolution" (1970) cover. With Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee at its core—whose ministry Lorry compares to Lennon-McCartney—this revival reshaped skeptics like himself, turning anti-establishment rage into patriotism and biblical study. The film adaptation captures this awakening but omits Frisbee’s later struggles, including relapse and AIDS, framing his early work as a flawed yet transformative force. Lorry argues the movement was socially conservative, contrasting today’s Christian divisions, and hopes it sparks a new cultural revival amid crises like Nashville’s school shooting, proving faith’s power to heal even broken people. [Automatically generated summary]
So obviously a good week to be talking about Jesus.
We have Greg Lorry with us here, the senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship.
He's authored a lot of books, but one of them is called Jesus Revolution, How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation, which is basically the story of his coming to Christ and the movement that came with him.
It has now been made into a hit film that I watched last night.
Here is just a clip of the trailer.
Hey, Square.
I am not a square.
I think we should invite Greg this weekend.
What's this weekend?
The mountain is high in Southern California.
These people are hippies, rebels against old-fashioned authorities.
I think these kids need help.
They needed to bath.
You're passing judgment on people you know nothing about.
Maybe that's why your church is so empty.
When God walks in here, brings me a hippie.
I'll ask him what it's all about.
Because I do not understand.
His house has a very good vibe.
That's Jonathan Roomi, who plays, obviously, Jesus on what's that show, the iPod show, The Covenant.
Greg, thank you so much for coming on.
I watched the film last night.
I have been very loud about talking about how much I dislike Christian films, but I found it enormously moving, especially the Jesus scenes, the scenes of Christianity in action, which is always moving to me, but it was really well done.
How'd you like it?
I was very happy with it.
You know, I'm pretty apprehensive when someone says they want to make a film about your life.
But John Irwin, the director, approached me and he had a copy of a Time magazine.
You may remember this kind of a psychedelic image of Jesus with the words, Jesus Revolution.
And three years earlier, Time magazine had another cover.
It was black cover, reversed out red letters asking the question, is God dead?
So you wonder what happened between is God dead and Jesus Revolution.
And what happened was a spiritual awakening.
So this excellent film director, John Irwin, said, I want to make a movie about this movement.
And someone told me you were there.
And I was.
That's when I came to faith in 1970.
But then I was sort of surprised when he made it about the story of my wife and my life together, sort of a love story.
And then also the story of a pastor, Chuck Smith, and this hippie evangelist named Lonnie Frisbee, how it all came together.
It was sort of like peanut butter met jelly, nitro met glycerin, Lennon met McCartney.
Those two guys just had an explosion together and this movement happened.
And I walked right in the middle of it as a kid using drugs, lost, not knowing where I was going in life.
And my life was transformed.
So I really liked the movie, I have to say, and I'm not a fan of Christian films in general, but I feel the success of this movie is due to the fact that Christians are not the only ones showing up.
People who are not Christians are coming and connecting to the story of this film as well, because it's a story of love.
It's a story of hope.
It's a story of how conflict can be resolved.
It's a story of how Christians make mistakes even after they believe that none of us are perfect.
And it's a story of the last great awakening.
And the director and I had this hope that maybe this would inspire this generation to pray for their own Jesus revolution.
You know, that was one of the things that actually did touch me about the film that it made me a little heartsoar.
The movie, just so people understand that this is about the hippie movement, which we all know what that is, but a segment of the hippie movement basically found that they had been, one of the lines in the film is they're looking for all the right things, but they were looking in all the wrong places.
And they found that Jesus actually was a better answer than some of the things they were trying.
And so that became a movement.
Now it seems almost unthinkable that such a thing could happen.
Do you have any feeling like that, or do you disagree?
No, I think it could happen.
I pray it will.
In fact, I'll take it a step further and say, I think it has to happen because I don't know what else could change culture.
Let me just take myself as an example.
I was a 17-year-old kid.
My mom had been married and divorced seven times.
She was an alcoholic.
I started using drugs.
I was smoking weed every day, taking honesty.
My life was going fast in the wrong direction.
And I heard about Jesus Christ in a way that I understood as a kid when this hippie evangelist came on our campus, played by Jonathan Roomi in the Jesus Revolution film.
And it rocked my world.
And so I changed.
Our whole generation changed.
My values changed.
In fact, I really started to develop a worldview after that from reading the Bible and learning about so much more.
I became a patriot.
I became someone who loved America, which I, like many other kids, would have just parroted the speech we would be using in the day, you know, cops were pigs and the government was bad.
I began to change, and the government can be bad, obviously, many times, but my whole life changed and then my mind changed.
My views changed because of Jesus.
And so I think this is the way we reach people is, you know, we can get on our political sites and debate all day, but people need a change of heart.
And so our hope is that we can build bridges.
This movie is a great way to do it to people who would never enter into a conversation and ask them questions like, what is the meaning of your life?
What's going to happen to you after you die?
Why do you exist?
That's more the space I'm in, Andrew, trying to address and calling people to a relationship with Christ, no matter what their background is, no matter what their political persuasion is, because I think the gospel can change anyone.
It changed you.
I mean, I've heard your amazing story, the most unexpected conversion with your background, your upbringing, your childhood, really the deck stacked against you ever becoming a Christian, but God got a hold of you.
And God can do that for anyone, anywhere.
And it's a rolling blessing.
I mean, it just continues and gets deeper and deeper.
An amazing, amazing experience.
Totally unexpected by me, as I think it was by you.
I want to raise my biggest criticism of the film.
I want to raise it in the context of my really enjoying the film, finding it very moving, of finding it overcoming a lot of the Christian things that make Christian films sink.
Jonathan Rumi is really good in it.
He's just funny.
He catches the humor of it, but also the torment of this guy, Lonnie Frisbee, who is this hippie who comes and starts and helps start this movement.
And it shows you how he starts to go off the rails.
And I don't want to spoil too much of it.
But it doesn't talk about the most controversial thing about it and in terms of the truth, which is that the Jesus Revolution, the Jesus freak movement, as I used to call it, was a socially conservative movement.
It was actually included ideas about sexuality that were very traditional.
And yet Rumi was secretly gay.
I mean, he died of AIDS ultimately.
And that's never touched on in the movie.
And the only reason that disturbed me is because it's such a central point right now of Christian conflict.
I mean, there are many churches with gay pride flags outside and many other churches that think this is a complete disaster.
And of course, a tremendous amount of pressure from the culture to conform to this.
I guess what I want to ask you is, Where do you stand on this question, A, and B, what did you feel about that being left out of the story?
Well, first of all, it wasn't left out of the story because it wasn't in the story.
Here's the reality of Lonnie Frisbee.
And there's some information out there that's incorrect.
And you can read his own books to get his own account.
Lonnie Frisbee himself said in a book that he knew homosexuality was a sin.
He never was an advocate for it.
He never identified as a gay man.
He was molested when he was a little boy.
He did experiment sexually before his conversion.
But after he came to Christ, he was married.
And there was no incidence of this kind of activity during the entire time that this movie was made, the Jesus movement, period.
Therefore, we didn't feel the need to address it.
Now, later, by his own admission, Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roomi, fell away.
He was upset because of the way his life had gone.
He got into drugs.
He got into promiscuity and he got AIDS.
And he knew AIDS was the result of his bad decisions.
And I actually went and visited him in hospice care when he was literally on his deathbed.
And he knew what he had done was wrong.
He asked God to forgive him.
But he knew he was paying a price for that.
And of course, myself, you know, I believe what the Bible teaches.
And the Bible teaches that homosexuality is sin.
Bible teaches a lot of other things are sinful as well.
Extramarital sex, premarital sex, and the list goes on.
But 100%, you know, we hold to what scripture teaches.
So, you know, but we did try to show in the film, Andrew, the struggles that Lonnie faced.
For instance, in an early conversation he has with Chuck Smith, played by Kelsey Grammer, he says of his old life, we did everything and we did every one.
And then later in the film, there's a scene where Lonnie is praying in front of a fire.
He's in anguish and he says, God, help me.
So we wanted to show the struggle that was there.
But look, here's the reality.
God uses flawed people and he uses broken people.
And Lonnie was a flawed, broken person.
But yet he, along with Chuck Smith, were used by God to, you know, touch the world.
And he looked at the Bible and there's so many instances of broken people being used by God, people that had moral failures, but then returned to the Lord as well.
Samson, David, Simon Peter openly denying the Lord.
The list goes on.
So that's why we dealt with it, the way we dealt with it in the film.
It's a great question.
And I've written an article about it called The Long, Strange Trip of Lonnie Frisbee, where I very honestly deal with the issues, but also give the timeline, again, emphasizing during this time this film was made or the story was happening, and that's what the film is about, about a two-year period, there was none of this going on.
He was not a secretly gaining.
That's a fair answer.
A Drop of Rain Here00:02:56
When you look back on this, you know, it's part of your history, not just part of American history.
When you look back on it, obviously each person who is saved is an eternal, an infinite victory.
But as a movement, as a movement in American history, do you think it has a lasting effect?
Or do you think these are things that come and they go and fade away?
I think it's had a lasting effect.
Some historians, there's been four great awakenings in American history.
The first was before we were a nation led by an evangelist from the United Kingdom who preached the gospel all around our country.
And then the most recent before the Jesus movement was the prayer movement in New York City that happened right before the stock market crashed and so forth.
The preacher was named George Whitfield from the first movement.
And the most recent was the Jesus movement.
Many historians believe not only was it the last great spiritual awakening, they believe it was the greatest spiritual awakening.
You know, there were things that were born in this time, what we call contemporary Christian worship and music was born at that time.
But there were great things that were happening where all of a sudden the church was permeating culture.
Prior to that, it was like the church was so disconnected from culture.
But I think in many ways we've caught up and now we're making a difference.
The church is flawed.
It's filled with flawed people.
It always will be.
But the only organization Jesus ever started when he walked this earth was the church.
And he said the gates of Helena will not prevail against her.
And so our objective as Christians is not to isolate from culture.
It's to permeate culture.
It's to influence culture.
And so I do believe the effects of the Jesus movement are still resonating in the church today.
And I've even seen some promising signs here and there that we might see another spiritual awakening, most notably what happened recently in Asbury on the college campus there.
That to me is like, wow, could this be a sign of something to come?
You know, when I walk outside with my wife, I'll say, it's raining.
She'll say, it's not raining.
She has very thick hair.
I said, no, it's raining because bald men always know when it's raining first, Andrew.
And, you know, so a gift we have.
It's like, it's like prophecy.
We just sense these things.
But in the same way to me, like what happened in Asbury and other places, could that be a drop of rain here, a drop of rain there?
Hope of a spiritual awakening.
Because after this horrible tragedy in Nashville and this act of pure wickedness and the murder of these innocent people and children, our hearts are just broken.
God needs to change human hearts.
A Drop of Rain00:00:46
And, you know, we were very, things are very divided back in the late 60s and early 70s.
And even people on the left, what we would call today, but on that side, they were rioting.
They were setting bombs off.
They were, you know, they were getting more militant.
And many people just thought there's no way we can bridge this divide.
And God sent a spiritual awakening.
It wasn't a moral awakening.
It wasn't a political awakening.
It was a spiritual awakening.
And I think that needs to happen again.
That's great.
Well, I really enjoyed the film, Greg, and I thank you so much for coming on.