If you liked Eric Metaxas’ 2013 book 7 Men, you’re probably not gonna care for my current series, 7 Broken Men, about the fragile and unlikely people God has used to glorify himself. You can find my first post in the series here.
But if you are up for it, put on your old Larry Norman or Keith Green records. It’s time to hit the beaches of Southern California in the 1960s to meet the remarkable, but ultimately tragic hippie preacher, Lonnie Frisbee.
Maybe Lonnie Frisbee could have grown up to be a cult leader or serial killer if Jesus hadn’t got hold of him. His early life pretty much mirrored that of his contemporary and fellow Californian Charles Manson.
Frisbee grew up in an unstable home where he was exposed to the dark underbelly of 1960s Californian society. He was sexually assaulted as a child, introduced to drugs in his teens, and at 15 he had his first homosexual encounter, which ultimately ushered him into the Laguna Beach gay scene.
School didn’t take much of a priority, so by the time he was 18 and heading north to San Francisco with thousands of flower children for the Summer of Love in 1967, he could barely read and write.
Lonnie Frisbee was a hippie straight out of central casting – good-looking, wide-eyed, and mystical. He talked vaguely about becoming an artist or a dancer. But he wasn’t that good at either.
He was a bearded, long-haired dreamer. People said he looked like Jesus. He preferred to describe himself as a “nudist-vegetarian-hippie”. He tried his hand at hypnotism and dabbled in the occult. He talked incessantly about UFOs.
He was pretty much unemployable.
This mattered little in California in the late 60s and early 70s. Charles Manson, Hunter S Thompson and the Weather Underground all managed to exist with no visible means of support. And so did Lonnie Frisbee.
But things took a slightly different turn when Frisbee led a group of drug-addled friends on an LSD-fuelled pilgrimage into the desert outside Palm Springs. Things could’ve got real crazy (they did for Manson, in the same desert), but for a fateful trip he took to Tahquitz Canyon. Frisbee started reading the Gospel of John to everyone and before they knew he was baptizing his cadre of stoned hippies in the Tahquitz Falls.
An evangelist had been born!
At first the gospel according to Lonnie Frisbee included getting high, talking about flying saucers and reading the Bible, but he soon fell in with other Christians who directed him to a more conventional path.
After stints in Haight-Ashbury and Novato, Frisbee landed back in Costa Mesa, where he had grown up. Here he met a young woman, got married, joined Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, and started to straighten up and fly right. Kind of.
The thing was, Lonnie was gay. And filled with the Holy Spirit.
He would walk the beaches during the day, converting young people seemingly at will. Then he would bring them back to the nightly church services for lashings of groovy Christian folk-music and intense Bible teaching. Afterwards he would dispense the Holy Spirit, leaving the room looking like a battlefield as young people hit the floor, began to shake and speak in tongues.
He was a freak. A Jesus freak. And soon he became a leading light of the so-called Jesus People, an organic movement of converted hippies, yippies and surfers that sprang out of Calvary Chapel. He went on to exercise direct influence over people like Chuck Smith Jnr, Greg Laurie, John Wimber, Mike McIntosh, Derek Prince and Bob Mumford.
In fact, whether it’s the charismatic movement, the Vineyard, the Shepherding Movement, the contemporary Christian music scene, or Calvary Chapel itself, Lonnie’s fingerprints were all over it.
He was no ordinary hippie anymore.
But he was no ordinary Christian evangelist either.
His marriage had broken down in 1973 and he had started having sexual liaisons with men again.
Frisbee was tortured by it all. He was clearly touched by the hand of God. But he believed his sexuality was a sin. He would speak openly about the challenge of keeping his desires under check, but the dissonance between his beliefs, the evidence of the Spirit’s presence in his life, and his sexual desires caused him overwhelming stress.
He was eventually asked to not be so open in public about his struggles with same sex attraction. Later still he became estranged from the very movements he helped launch. He was marginalized from the Jesus People and later written out of the histories of that period of Southern Californian Christianity.
He contracted AIDS in the 1990s and died in 1993.
Chuck Smith, his original pastor at Calvary Chapel, preached at Lonnie’s funeral and compared him to the wild, marauding brute, Samson, a man used by God despite his sinfulness. Lonnie’s closest friends took offense. He was no brute, they said. He was a fragile flower crushed by a church that couldn’t make room for him. I’m not sure Lonnie would have seen it that way.
Today, it’s reckoned that the “Jesus revolution” of 60s and 70s surpassed even the Great Awakening as the greatest ingathering of souls in American history. And dear, fragile, weird, little Lonnie Frisbee was right there at the beginning. Unremembered and unlauded, expunged from the histories of the very movements he was used by God to launch.
Thanx. But as I know it, he is remembered nowadays very much. He became a hero for many. He is well known, better known than Chuck Smith. At least in modern societies. And in Europa.
He was hardly known at all until David Di Sabatino’s 2005 documentary. I admit he is better known in some circles these days because of that film. But I’m riffing off Metaxas’ ‘7 Men’ and it’s fair to say he’s not as well known as Chuck Colson or Pope John Paul II, both of whom were highlighted in that book.
I started off chasing up links to Bethel Church, Westminster Theological College and the NAR…
My search led me to a vid about Lonnie Frisbee, which was quite interesting, especially as it said that Lonnie Frisbee was one if not the major influence on the Vineyard and Calvary Chapel, going on into the new theology as preached by Bill Johnson at Bethel Church and others.
I am old time born again evangelical Christian, and I believe it is by the love we have for one another that men will know we are Christians. John 13:35.
That doesn’t rule out the gifts of the Spirit, or healing or signs and wonders, but Biblically speaking it is those who do such things for the wrong reasons that get slated by our Lord.. Matthew 7:23.
That the Lord loved this man Lonnie I have no doubt. He was a victim of ‘the Me’ culture, ‘If it feels right do it’, etc. It would also seem that the enemy of our souls had a real hold on his life, and he never got to that place where the Holy Spirit was able to do an enduring work of sanctification in him. At the end of the day we must feel compassion and trust that the Lord knows the heart..
More important to me is this outburst of signs and wonders and releasing your ministry and attending schools of anointing etc.
I don’t get that. I don’t get the pounding music, the repetitive, inane choruses, that stir up the carnal man rather than the spiritual. The preaching that is focussed on signs and wonders rather than abiding in Christ etc.
It seems to me that something has gone seriously wrong.
Am I the only one?
No
No Sir, Mr. Keith, You are most certainly not the only one who is well aware that something(s) have gone very wrong indeed. You see, it was first Paul Cain who held sway over the august Charles W. “Chuck” Smith. Lonnie-boy, also holding sway over not the Jr. but the Sr. Smith. Also, in correction of another error in the above post; The “Jesus Movement” was not launched out of CC Santa Ana/CosMes, but emerged from a few different locations around the U.S. with no connection with the So. Cal. religious fiasco.
Hi, your not the only one. This movement is still going threw Bethel. I have heard strange things happening in that church. The real gospel gas been watered down and added too it. True conviction and real repentance is fading out in churches today. I don’t understand why a man as Lonnie be in bondage of sexuality and still preach and baptise. This kind of twisted Christianity is how I was raised by my dad. Taking me to church, and preaching and then abusing me for years. Still going to church and be just like Lonnie. I must say the devil is real and he had did a messy job at messing up the real character of Jesus.
I have no idea what Im supposed to take away from this
Nothing is one option :^)
Strange comment.
Got to love a God who will fill a social outcast with His Holy Spirit and use him to gather other outcasts. I” guessing Frisbee was filled with God”s love also which would have touched the hearts of those who would have felt rejected by the Church because of their hippie lifestyle. It” sad he isn’t as well known as other influential Christian as his willingness to serve God whilst also being open about his struggles would give many hope especially those from the gay community. Sin is sin, whether we struggle with homosexuality or gossip, it’s the same thing in God” eyes. Unlike churches who push out those that do not fit into the ” good Christian costume” God”s unconditional love and His willingness to work with us through our sinful nature in order to bring about our best heals, mends and empowers us to overcome our flesh. Maybe Frisbee didn’t overcome his homosexuality but God was able to turn him from someone who could not function in society to someone who transformed society. If that’s not a testament to God” grace, glory and power I am not sure what is. Thanks for honoring this broken man”s testimony Mike.
Is being excluded from church because you’re gay the same thing as brokenness?
This much-needed re-telling of Lonnie Frisbee’s story has a beautiful way of allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about where the “brokenness” is evident. But the word “brokenness” has a long history of use within ex-gay organisations, particularly those who promote the theory of a “reparative drive”.
These have conflated homosexual orientation with brokenness. Those of us who have been there in that movement are going to see that connection every time we see the word “broken”.
We’re all broken by sin. But the fact that Frisbee was gay is not a sign of his “brokenness”. This is where I see brokeness in this story: Frisbee might be alive today if “family values” and “moral majority” activism in the U.S. hadn’t held back AIDS research for decades.
Frisbee was a man of God who was trampled by a broken church.
I agree we’re all broken and that’s the context it was meant in. I wasn’t aware broken was a term used in exgay ministries. It’s a rare thing for people in Christian leadership to admit any of their struggles- usually issues surface in some sordid way and there may be a public apology then a resignation. I think Frisbee was brave and authentic in admitting his struggles. You’re spot on that the church failed him.
I thought I was clear in referring to Frisbee’s extremely unsafe upbringing, his sexual assault as a child, his drug use, and his dissonance about being gay and an evangelical/charismatic leader.
My feeling was that the exact nature of his “brokenness” is left open in the post.
I was just feeding back one way it might come over to a reader who’s context is the reparative therapy movement. Certainly, the childhood trauma followed by adult “same sex attraction” fits that narrative of “brokenness”.
Words have their baggage…
Really appreciating this series, stoked for the next five. More than brokenness, faults or human fragility – I see the Grace of God at work in the lives of those He loves. So encouraging. Thanks Mike.
I’m really enjoying this series Mike. When I saw the tagline for this one, I wondered if the story of Lonnie Frisbee didn’t in some way lend itself to Harold Robbin’s “Spellbinder” novel. It may well have. As the central figure was a hardened ex Military dope smoking street preacher that enjoyed the company of his disciples. It was also quite possibly a commentary on the commercialization of the American Church. Anyhow great article. God can use the most broken of us, we only have to allow him to move through us, is what I think you’re pointing us too.
That explains why Calvin’s theology lacks a real concept of Gods love or grace.
“The fundamental conflict between Calvinism and Arminianism is not sovereignty but God’s character. If Calvinism is true, God is the author of sin, evil, innocent suffering and hell. That is to say, if Calvinism is true God is not all-loving and perfectly good. John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” “God so loved the world.” Calvinists must explain this as meaning that God loves “all kinds of people,” not everyone. Or that “God loves all people in some ways but only some people [the elect] in all ways.” Arminians believe these interpretations distort the clear message of the Bible about God’s love. If Calvinism is true, John Wesley said, God’s love is “such a love as makes the blood run cold.” It is indistinguishable from hate—for a large portion of humanity created in his own likeness and image.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/03/whats-wrong-with-calvinism/
Quite unfair to suggest that Lonnie was expunged by the Vineyard. He is well recognised as the broken vehicle God used in the history of the movement, very much lauded, remembered AND appreciated in all his quirkiness, simple faith and incredible anointing.
MUST SEE http://www.lonniefrisbee.com/ David Di Sabatino documentary