Community And Friendship 3

This series would be sadly incomplete without due mention of my own experiences of community.  Much has been already documented elsewhere on this blog but maybe I could present this in a new perspective.  In this series I will offer an overview of my various experiences of Christian community, almost all rather unorthodox and out of the ordinary.

It all began with the Jesus People Army in late 1970 when at the tender age of fourteen I experienced my conversion to the Christian faith.  I would never have gone anywhere near a church.  There was nothing less hip than church.  It was such a symbol of the establishment, of everything that any self-respecting evolving young bohemian would find lacking, inferior, puerile and absolutely boring.  The church, ostensibly representing Christ, to me bore absolutely no resemblance to God made human in the form of the preacher from Galilee.

Not wanting to go anywhere near a church where I wasn't likely to encounter Jesus, it was Jesus himself for whom I longed and yearned and the church could do absolutely nothing to provide this for me.  I could only access the Lord on his own terms for me and with people whom I could relate to and trust.  The Jesus People were absolutely strategic to my entrance into the Christian life.  They really did nothing to facilitate me with the church and my later experiments with the church, especially Anglican, ratified my earlier suspicions: the church is not a worthy nor adequate intermediary of Christ, or at least not for a lot of people who would otherwise turn to him but for the church's obstruction of the Holy Spirit.

Many of the Jesus Freaks, as they were commonly known, were hippies or street people.  In many cases they came to Christ already having nothing and they gave their lives unconditionally to God, his people and his service.  Because of the quality and strength of the repentance and love the presence of the Holy Spirit was very powerful and very intense.  This was nothing at all like church and I certainly, through these contacts with these wonderful people, had little or no desire to ever visit a church.  People lived together in shared houses, the ancient wooden houses that once filled the slopes of Fairview.  They were of course poor but shared everything in common in the spirit of the original Christians from the Book of Acts.

I experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit there, in the basement of their coffee house, which, when I was fifteen, was my second home.  The baptism of the Spirit opened wide the floodgates for me and ever since then, as much as I have been willing to walk faithfully with God, I have experienced a close and intimate sense of his presence, love and power in my life. 

Of course this would be too beautiful to last, and it didn't.  They were taken over by a dangerous cult and I escaped by the skin of my teeth.  I found a new spiritual home in St. Margaret's Community Church, which I will write more about tomorrow.