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Reaching the Hippies and the Birth of The Family |
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 "It had taken me 49 years ... to find my life's work! -- And there we found it among the poor hippies of Huntington Beach" |
Although David remained in active Christian
service during these years, he sensed that he had not yet found God's main calling for his
life. He later recounted: "I would often ask myself the question: 'What have I done with my life? What am I doing with my life? Am I really accomplishing God's highest and greatest purpose that He has in store for me?' -- And I always felt like there was something greater, something more that I could do, surely something else that would reach more [people] with more Gospel and win more souls to Jesus!" [22] In the mid-1960s, David's four children were in their teens. He was eager to give them on-the-job Christian training, so they began traveling with him in evangelistic outreach. In early 1968, at the invitation of his elderly mother, David and his family journeyed to Huntington Beach, California, a seaside town that had become a gathering place for thousands of hippies. It was here that he found his life's calling, and the movement now known as the Family had its birth. Of this time, David wrote: "It had taken me 49 years ... to find my life's work! -- And there we found it among the poor hippies of Huntington Beach! My mother had begged us to come help them, saying the church people didn't know how to handle them, even though some of them were trying. They were too churchy for the hippies, who were fed up with the church, and the feeling was mutual: The churches didn't like them, either! In fact, it seemed nobody loved hippies! They were the most hated, maligned, discriminated against, abused, harassed, persecuted, and downtrodden element in all American society." [23] David freely acknowledged that initially he, too had little love or sympathy for the hippie generation. "We saw no hope for them whatsoever. We were regular redneck Texans, anti-Communist, anti-hippie, the kind that thought [hippies] ought to be lined up against the wall and gotten rid of! [24] "We believed what we had heard, and although we'd never seen or known any, we simply took the word of the System and the media that they were a bunch of filthy, dirty, drug-ridden, vice-ridden Communist criminals." [25] "That was our Texas opinion of'm! I wouldn't have touched'm with a ten-foot pole!" [26] David then described the supernatural manner in which God spoke to him in California: "As I wandered amongst them, wondering about them, God spoke to my heart that all they needed was His Love and a good shepherd to guide them, and God asked me if I'd be willing to be that shepherd! I was startled and mystified by this revelation, and wondered what it could mean, as I hadn't the faintest idea of how to go about it!" [27] "When I saw those poor hippies, those poor wandering sheep without a shepherd, oh, the love God put in my heart for them! How my heart went out to them! I saw them and I wept for them! ... The Lord gave me such love and compassion for them! ... And that night I promised God that I would try to lead them and do everything I could to save them and win them to the Lord and lead them into His service." [28] Inspired by this new mission, David and three of his teen children enthusiastically began ministering to the youth in a small Christian coffee house, the Light Club. Within a few months, the coffee house was full every night, hundreds of young people had become Christians and stopped taking drugs, and about fifty had decided to live and work full time with "Uncle Dave" and his family. He later recounted: "We followed the hippies down into their gutters and their dives and their dope-dens and their hard-rock hells and we invited them -- not to come to church, not to sit in fancy pews -- but just to come to Jesus, and He would solve all their problems, answer all their questions, satisfy all their longings and hungers, and give them something wonderful to live for -- the truth of His marvelous Love! "They were not only quick, but gloriously enthusiastic in their reception of and their return to God's Love in Jesus and the answers of His Word! -- Which, after all, are the answer to all mankind's problems, not only the hippies'! So when I and my own teenage children came to them with the loving message of God in Jesus and His Words, and tuned to the language of their music, they were more than happy to receive it! "I had to trust the Lord to lead me and to help me obey His command to 'feed My sheep' (John 21:15-17), and I just did the same thing with those kids as I'd been doing with my own kids for years -- teaching -- and mostly something they were very interested in and needed to know -- Bible prophecy! If they didn't know that God had something better in store and a better future to offer, what was the use of learning about the present? "As more and more of them received the Lord and were freed and delivered from their old lives of drugs, degradation and death, I knew that we couldn't just turn them back to their former fearful haunts and dens. -- We had to take them in as part of our own personal family. "True, voluntary, genuine, unselfish sharing, ... the simple communism of the Early Church was our ideal and example, where 'all that believed were together and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need' (Acts 2:44,45). We soon found out that it worked for us just like it did for them!" [29] |
