David at 10A Judson Lane Mill Valley

Driving back across the bridge into Marin, now with David Hoyt in the car, he and all his worldly possessions. He still had on his religious garments, and he had that look in his eye, expression on his face, and the body language of someone who had totally imbibed eastern spirituality.

The time was 1967 and the place was a Southern Baptist Seminary. Everyone on campus was Caucasian, the professors mostly spoke with southern accents, and no one looked like I did, with a mustache and slightly longer hair, and certainly no one looked liked David Hoyt. Now he would be living there among them.

Then there was my wife Bobbie, about as straight an arrow as you could get, plus my two little girls, a kindergartner and first grader – Dory and Grace. With only two small bedrooms and neighbors on each side, there was no place to hide David.

I was working part time, and Bobbie worked as a minimum wage sales clerk. We had the G.I. Bill, without which I would not have been able to afford a seminary education, but I was also pastor of Excelsior Baptist Church in Byron and making $10 a week. (It had been $20 a week but the deacons got mad at me for bringing migrant workers to church and baptizing them.) We barely survived as it was.

Bobbie and the kids were quite shocked when David and I walked into the place carrying his belongings. He ended up making our tiny front room his bedroom and we managed as best we could, but the pressure was on Bobbie. My dear, sweet daughters made the best of it and got along with David just fine.

How it all worked out is kind of blurry to me now, but I recall David coming to classes with me, and I would hear stories of his wanderings around the campus and talking to students. He spent some time with Timothy Wu who was living in the men’s dorm. Due to David’s strange appearance and presence in the admin and academic buildings, a ruling was made to the effect that students could not have non-relatives living with them. (This rule is still in force.)

My job was to disciple David and I did the best I could. All my life it seems I have been constantly busy and especially then. But we fit it all in. David and I started from scratch: who is God, what is sin, what was the Fall, and the longish story about what God did about it all. David was nothing else but intense and eager. He was a sponge and grasped complex biblical ideas quickly. After a few weeks he was ready to go with me into the city on what were now routine visits and ministry on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury. It was the “Summer of Love,” which David and three others had actually organized. As I am thinking through these things I realize David Hoyt was not only one of the first, if not the first convert in the Jesus People Movement, but he was also one of the chief evangelists for the whole hippie scene in San Francisco.

So our adventures together began. At least once a week we drove into the City, arriving as early as possible and staying as late as possible, visiting David’s old friends at the Krishna Consciousness Temple and others like the Buddhist priest, Robert Sutherland, to whom David did his best to tell about Jesus, and hippie after hippie by the hundreds. Early on we wrote up flyers, some of which I still have, and passed these out. We bought hundreds of Campus Crusades, The Four Spiritual Laws, and other materials to use in our witnessing. Some were converted, but it was only the trickle before the flood that was to come.

One other thing David and I did together: he began coming with me to Byron on Saturdays and Sundays. That story comes up next.

Some background:

This is the first in a series on my life as a flaming Pentecostal; well maybe not so much flaming as in Holy Roller, but my life in the Charismatic/Pentecostal fold. It all began, strangely enough, in Portland, Oregon with what happened down at the local Odd Fellows Hall.

Two blocks from the family home in Northeast Portland, on Deacon and Durham Street, was the Odd Fellows Hall, which was rented out by different groups. It no longer exists, and probably the huge old wooden, two-story structure burned down. When Pentecostal meetings were sweeping Portland one met there and it was wild. We kids, my brothers and I plus a kid named Topsy, would sneak in and watch. We slipped in the back doors, found seats in the back, and got our entertainment. Since that day I have never seen anything quite like it. There was actual rolling around on the floor. My dad said nothing too bad but nothing too good about it all. I don’t know that he ever went in there, but he definitely went to the North Baptist Church about a mile from the house.

My dad had not yet become a Christian, a real one I mean, and I think he attended church out of tradition, because his folks were the quiet, serious kind of Baptists.

Jumping now to 1963 and the First Baptist Church of Fairfield, California and my conversion at age 21. I will not walk us through that here, but after a period of nine months of sporadic listening to the Gospel preached by Pastor Bob Lewis, I experienced the new birth. It is still mostly a mystery to me. Pastor Bob was in his mid-thirties and was serious about discipleship. A book he gave to all of us new believers was on the Bible-based American cults. It was a small volume and discussed only five such groups: Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Christian Science, Adventists (Seventh Day), and Pentecostals.

Back then Pentecostals were rightfully included in such a book, but today that is not the case. Most people do not understand that in the early years of the 20th century Pentecostals earned the designation of “cult,” because they believed that they were the only ones really filled with the Holy Spirit and that speaking in tongues was the only sure mark of a real born-again Christian. This took them into the cultic realm.

So then, reading that book I was convinced that Pentecostals were cultic, and I gave them and their doctrines wide berth. This was my mind set all the way to 1968 and the Jesus People Movement.