As I mentioned last week, I've been shifting my online reading away from politics and toward more satisfying, spiritual fare. Here's an excerpt from an article I read on the Christian History Magazine site. I love reading about the early Jesus Movement days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. What I really like here is the description of new believers gathering in their homes and just making up songs out of the Bible as they fellowshipped together. That would be so sweet to experience now. Lord, please lead us all into such simple yet powerful times of fellowship and worship in our day and time.
"By the middle of 1968, the church was filling up with barefoot, blue-jean-wearing kids, and dozens of hippies and teenage runaways inhabited a string of communal homes sponsored by Calvary Chapel with names like the House of Miracles and Mansion Messiah.
The ministry of the "hippie preacher" Lonnie Frisbee and the warmth and Bible teaching of "Papa Chuck" were winning converts, but one aspect of the Calvary Chapel experience that proved less appealing was its musical diet of traditional gospel songs and hymns. John Higgins, one of the co-leaders of the youth contingent (and later the founder and leader of the nationwide Shiloh commune), remembered that early-vintage Calvary Chapel music was hardly "something that made you just leave and go into another world." In fact, he found it "boring" and admitted that despite his zeal for his newfound faith he would sometimes come late "just to avoid the music."
Meanwhile, an exciting, spontaneous musical movement was beginning to emerge within the communal Jesus houses in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, and Riverside. "We sang every day," Higgins recalled; "people were making up new songs all the time." And the new songs were not chained to the traditional conventions of hymnody; members were writing gospel lyrics "to things like Coca Cola commercials." By June 1968, Higgins estimates, guitars were making regular appearances in Calvary Chapel's services, along with some of the songs grown in the communes.
The change in the atmosphere was palpable. Within a few months there was a distinctly new, contemporary tone to the worship at the burgeoning church. Swarms of youth were soon packing its 300-seat sanctuary for multiple Sunday services and several weeknight Bible studies. For many of the kids, this new brand of "church music"—simple, melodic, heavily reliant upon Scripture for its lyrics—was the key to their attraction. Tommy Coomes, a member of a down-on-its-luck hippie band named Love Song, recalled visiting the church for the first time and finding the music there utterly unique: "I knew each line even before it was sung. I wasn't used to simple music like this, but it blew me away! It was a music which drew people into the Lord's presence."
Not surprisingly, the church began to develop and attract a growing stable of in-house musicians and songwriters. One was Karen Lafferty, a Southern Baptist girl from New Mexico. Convinced that she should pursue a musical ministry, she gave up a lucrative gig serenading diners at a chain of Los Angeles surf-and-turf restaurants. Scrounging to find teens for guitar lessons, Lafferty quickly became discouraged. But after one particularly inspiring worship session and Bible study in the fall of 1971, she went home, picked up her guitar, and applied a tune to the words of Matthew 6:33:
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God,
And His righteousness;
And all these things
Shall be added unto you,
Allelu, Alleluia.
"Seek Ye First" became a major hit at Calvary Chapel and quickly spread by song-of-mouth to Jesus People homes, coffeehouses, and "fellowships" all over Southern California—and then across the country. By the mid-1970s, it had also begun to pop up in a number of mainstream evangelical congregations as well."
The full article is at the address below (copy and paste) -
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/thepastinthepresent/storybehind/praiseworshiprevolution.html?start=1
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