What were we doing standing outside in a winter storm? Since John had a car and was heading to what he claimed was a well-heated church building, I gladly agreed to accompany him and meet his preacher friend.
I hadn’t been inside a church since a visit with my 10th grade Temple confirmation class. We had visited Catholic, Methodist and Unitarian churches as part of a Comparative Religions class. And, I was required to attend Sunday services at the base chapel as a recruit.
John’s church was run by a Pentecostal preacher from the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. John was both new to born-again Christianity, having been raised Roman Catholic. He was also naïve enough to believe that there would be some sort of affinity between this preacher and me because we were both from Kentucky!
The building was empty since it was noon on a weekday, but the heat was cranked up, so I was happy. The preacher was a hillbilly high school dropout who had spent a year at some Appalachian ministry training school. When John introduced me as a Jew who was “born-again,” the preacher and his wife began shouting “Praise the Lord” and some sort of gibberish I could not understand. They explained to me that they were “speaking in tongues,” and without stopping to catch their breath, or to let me thaw out, asked me if I had been “baptized by the Holy Ghost.”
I explained that I had been baptized in water at a beach in California that last summer. They told me that I needed the Holy Ghost to baptize me with the fire! It was cold out, but that seemed a bit extreme to me! This uneducated preacher had confused the New Testament teaching of the Holy Spirit of God’s baptism of believers and a future baptism of fire for unbelievers. Of course, since he believed that the King James Version of the Bible from 1611 alone was the inerrant Word of God, his misunderstanding of the King’s English was matched only by his butchering of the English language in general!
They were insistent that I had to speak in tongues, and since I really didn’t want to go outside again in this weather, I agreed to let them “lay hands on” me and pray for me to “receive the baptism.” The preacher and his wife had me kneel on before the altar of their church. Then they placed their hands on my head and began babbling in some sort of guttural syllables. They told me:
Just let the Holy Ghost take control of your tongue. Just keep saying “thank you Jesus” over and over and the Holy Ghost will take over.
This went on for about ten minutes. Their hands were getting heavy on my head. Their bad breath was about to cause me to pass out. And with all the shouting and the proximity of the sweating preacher and his wife, I was getting uncomfortably warm. I imitated some of the syllables I had heard them uttering: “shondai, yisto, brocha blasto” plus a little French, Spanish and Yiddish. When they heard this they started jumping up and down and shouting.
That’s it! That’s it! You got the Baptism . . . you got the Baptism!
While they were celebrating, I got my coat and got out of there, hitchhiking back to campus.
Later that day, I went to the student union to meet John’s Jesus freak friend, Chris. I assumed that this was the same Chris the Hippie that I knew. Instead of a blonde, blue-eyed Chris, this Chris had long black curly hair. This Chris was of Hispanic background. But, he was a Jesus freak and he had come from California. He had come to Madison with the intention of witnessing in the hippie community. That was my new mission as well. We became friends immediately.
Chris the Hippie II and I set off to find Chris the Hippie I. To keep this from being more confusing that it already is, we will refer to Chris the Hippie I (of Dave and Chris fame from the previous summer), Chris “H” which was the initial of his last name. We will call Chris the Hippie II, Chris “A” for his last name. As Chris “A” and I went searching for Chris “H”, we ran into Barry, my ZBT and tripping buddy who had originally travelled with Chris H, Dave and me to Santa Cruz.
You may remember that Barry had skedaddled when we got to the Jesus commune in Scott’s Valley. Well, Chris A and I cornered him on the sidewalk in front of the student union and pretty much forced him to accept Jesus as savior. He prayed to receive Christ half-heartedly and we carted him off with us to find Chris H. Looking back on it now, what Chris A and I did to Barry was similar to what the Appalachian preacher had just done to me. It is no wonder that Barry was a non-committal convert and would get us into difficulty in a few days.
Anyway, with Barry in tow, we wandered over to the Mifflin Street Coop to look for Chris H who we heard was in the area. We also wanted to pick up some of the Coop’s “Guerrilla Cookies.” The recipe of oats, raisins, black strap molasses, etc. was said to be everything you need to survive as a “guerrilla in the revolution.” Of course, very few of us took the revolutionary talk very seriously anymore. But, that was Hippie marketing and the cookies were really good. I pretty much lived on a diet of these cookies, yogurt and rice in those days.
At the coop, I enquired about Chris H. It turned out that he had just been there a few minutes before delivering loaves of bread for sale that he baked. The address of his “bakery” was just a two blocks away in a rental house. As we knocked on the door, we could smell the aroma of fresh bread baking. We found Chris inside tending several kitchen ovens.
I introduced the Chris the Hippie H to Chris the Hippie A. Now, counting the reluctant Barry, there were four of us.
Departing from our meeting with Chris H, we ran into Howie, a New York Jew who had come to Madison for school, but had abandoned studies for the hippie lifestyle. We had become close friends just prior to my trip to Santa Cruz. I “shared my testimony” with Howie and he immediately professed his faith in Jesus.
Within the course of 24 hours, there were five of us. Chris H mentioned that the bakers were going to move to another building to allow for greater bread production. We could rent the “bakery” house and turn it into our own Jesus commune! By the end of the week, the five of us took up residence, joined by some other Christians that Chris and Chris had met. One of them, Priscilla, was a walking biblical concordance. By that I mean, that she could instantly recall and quote verbatim any verse in the Bible.
Suddenly, we had almost a dozen Jesus freaks living together in this little house right smack in the middle of the hippie culture of Madison. We started to hold Bible studies on Wednesday evenings, but our most important activity was witnessing to the hippie community. In order to formalize this, we decided to put a sign out on our front porch to let everyone know who we were. Chris fashioned a sign out of wood that we hung from the awning of the front porch. The sign had one word.
Christians
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