Lonnie Frisbee

[PIRATE]

anyone know who he is ? I just watched a documentry on him last night that is just Mind Numbingly awesome....... iF you get a chance deffinetly check it out.

[PIRATE]

OC weekly : First page of about 5

The First Jesus FreakA pot-smokin', LSD-droppin' seeker turned Calvary
Chapel into a household name. So why is Lonnie Frisbee missing from
church history?
By MATT COKER
Thursday, March 3, 2005 - 12:00 am

Lonnie Frisbee put the freak in Jesus freak. With his long brown hair,
long craggily beard, dusty clothing, scent of Mary Jane and glint of his
last LSD trip in his eyes, he showed up out of nowhere, at the height of
the '60s, literally on Chuck Smith's doorstep.

Smith was just another conservative Orange County pastor. He'd moved
from a small church in Corona to an even smaller one in Costa Mesa, yet
had impressively boosted membership from three people to more than 200.

According to a scratchy recording of Smith's voice in a new documentary,
the pastor would look at "dirty hippies" and wonder, "Why don't you take
a bath?" But his front-porch meeting with Frisbee in 1968 was awash in
the wonderful coincidences Christians point to as proof of God working
in mysterious ways. The hippie was fresh off an LSD-juiced vision in
which God told him he'd turn hordes of young people on to Christ.
Smith's wife, Kay, had just had a vision of her own: that her husband's
church would reach out to those damn (but not necessarily damned) dirty
hippies. "I turned and saw the tears streaming down her face," Smith
says on the recording, "and I could see she was praying." So he asked
his daughter's boyfriend to pull a random hippie off the street, bring
him to the pastor's home and let him get inside the Flower Child
mindset. Along Fair Drive in Costa Mesa, the boyfriend picked up a
hitchhiker with flowing brown hair, flowing scraggily beard and a Bible
clutched against his dusty shirt. The random hippie was Lonnie Frisbee.

Before long, the two men bonded. Despite his misgivings about hippie
hygiene, Smith was always fascinated by the peace-and-love rhetoric. And
this kid's Bible knowledge impressed him. Frisbee saw in Smith a
much-desired father figure. They went on to stand side by side off
Little Corona beach, dunking thousands of young people in the chilly
waters for the most informal and joyous of baptisms. At his Calvary
Chapel, Smith taught about the End Times on Monday nights and Frisbee
packed in the hippies on Wednesday nights. Church membership
skyrocketed. Young people around the land heard about "the hippie
preacher in Costa Mesa" who was goofy, brusque and looked as if he's
just walked out of the Bible. "People say I look like Jesus," he once
said, "and I can't think of anyone else I'd rather look like."

He peppered his testimonies with "far out" and "we're blowing people's
minds." Witnesses say Frisbee blew their minds by walking into large
crowds, yelling, "Jesus" and suddenly being surrounded by strangers.
He'd stop random people on the street and engage them in gentle
conversation; pretty soon, they were having long one-on-ones about God.
A conservative-Christian intellectual swears that when he was a young
man, he saw Lonnie-like Jesus-actually make a blind man see. They call
that being "anointed" by God.

His ministries enrolled thousands of kids. Some were so turned on they'd
soon set out to become preachers themselves; many today are evangelical
pastors at churches around the world. Time and Life magazines ran cover
stories in 1971 on the so-called Jesus People-known in less polite
circles as Jesus Freaks; words and images of Frisbee figured prominently
in both. People would yell out his name when he walked the streets of
Denmark, South Africa and Great Britain.

Lonnie left after about four years as Calvary's unofficial youth pastor
and, after a brief time in the Shepherding movement, wound up at the
soon-to-become Vineyard Church of Yorba Linda. Same thing happened
there: his presence sparked a worldwide movement. Calvary and Vineyard
have each propagated about 1,000 churches across the planet. Along for
the ride in the early years was Greg Laurie, who was so taken by his
mentor Lonnie that he'd dress in the same David Crosby-style faded
leather jacket with fringe hanging off the arms. Laurie is more
conservatively attired these days as he leads Riverside's Harvest
Church, whose annual Harvest Crusades pack stadiums nationwide like
mainstream rock tours.

But if you were to take a look at the written histories of Calvary,
Vineyard and Harvest, you'd find barely any-if any-mention of Lonnie
Frisbee. Vineyard doesn't even cite him by name, referring only to "the
young man." Three local Christians I've asked about the original hippie
preacher at Calvary assumed I was referring to Smith, as if the
bald-headed Christian firebrand had been the preacher with the flowing
brown mane in those old news photos. Mentioning Lonnie to Laurie is said
to be verboten.

Besides inciting excitement, Frisbee could be volatile, argumentative
and disrespectful toward authority. But that is not what has made him
the invisible man of God. Turns out he was a special kind of sinner.
Christians could overlook his past drug use, but at age 17-the year he
accepted Christ-Lonnie was already immersed in Laguna Beach's gay scene.
He succumbed to AIDS in 1993 at age 43.

"It's like John the Baptist walked through Southern California," says
Lake Forest historian David Di Sabatino, "and nobody wants to talk about
him because he died of AIDS."




Connie and Lonnie Frisbee

Thirty-eight-year-old Di Sabatino never met the hippie preacher but kept
hearing Lonnie Frisbee's name while doing research on the Jesus People
movement for a planned book. As the author dug deeper into the many
complex layers of Frisbee's life, he realized his story deserved
something bigger than just another religious book "that'd be read by 100
to 200 people, including my parents." After 10 years of "sitting on the
story" to make sure he'd nailed it, Di Sabatino recently unveiled an
excellent new documentary, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie
Preacher.