LSD, Frisbee & Samson

I’ve been researching the Jesus Freak movement* and there’s another name that will always surface that no one really seems to want to talk about…the Hippy Evangelist-Lonnie Frisbee, yet he’s impossible to ignore. Google or Wiki him. By all accounts, he very well may have baptized over 8,000 people within a 2 year period and those who knew him typically used the word “anointed” when referring to him.

Many overlook him because he’s embarrassing...

For one, he was a nudist vegetarian and a hippy in every sense of the word who was “born-again” in the California desert during an LSD trip in which he said Jesus appeared to him. Yes, you read it right. But first, what would have been the typical response had Jesus and Pentecost occurred in the 1960s? Think about it for just a moment. First lets ponder Paul…a murderer of Christians, read that again, a murderer who said he’d seen the risen Lord on the road to Damascus and was now pro-Jesus.

But, there’s still an elephant in the room, actually it’s a brontosaurus. Frisbee died from AIDS in 93. Homosexuality was an on-again/off-again struggle (he attributed to child abuse).

The mystery is how can a person be so used of God? What I’m really trying to say is…how can God use someone so mightily who struggled with homosexuality and even succumbed to it on occasion? I mean, as far as I know I’m trying to live for God, doing all the right things; ive been in ministry for 15 years now and I’m pretty sure I haven’t led even a thousand people to the Lord, in fact, youth camp speaking included, probably less than 500. Isn’t God risking His reputation by using such an unstable young man?

But God has done this before hasn’t He? In spite of his moral failures Samson was indeed anointed; albeit these moral failures eventually caught up to him. Nonetheless, you know where I’m going with this now don’t you…sinless perfection, education, and pedigree are not qualifiers for who God chooses to use. Occasionally He seems to enjoy, smile even, at using the most unlikely of people. He was, Himself, after all, born in a stinking manger who’s earthly father was a carpenter. “Nothing good comes out of Galilee?” (Jn. 7:52) Oh, but it does.

*see post “Keith Green…I wonder why?”