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Back from Sin. One of the earliest efforts was a store-front ministry called the Living Room. It was the joint creation of three Bay Area evangelical ministers, John MacDonald of First Baptist Church in Mill Valley, John Streater of First Baptist in San Francisco, and Edward Plowman of Park Presidio Baptist Church in the city. To communicate with the hip settlers in Haight-Ashbury, the three hired Ted Wise, now 33, a burly Sausalito sailmaker and former drug user who had been converted through MacDonald. Before long, Wise decided that "to bring them back from sin," he first had to change the environment of his converts. So he and his wife, together with four other couples, opened a Christian commune in nearby Novato called the House of Acts.
Others followed rapidly. Kent Philpott and a few fellow seminarians at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary opened their own houses, Soul Inn and Berachah House, and those, in turn, produced other spinoffs. Success in the Bay Area prompted attempts elsewhere: Dave Palma, 20, founder of the House of Pergamos there, is now trying to introduce the idea to New York City. There are now, by conservative estimate, more than 200 communes in California, and still others in the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, Detroit and other cities.
In Berkeley, a former Penn State statistics professor, Jack Sparks, 40, launched one of the more colorful new groups, the Christian World Liberation Front. When derisive radicals dubbed them "Jesus Freaks," the Berkeley group adopted the epithet as its own, and now shares it with the movement. The Front publishes perhaps the best of the new underground Christian newspapers, Right On. In psychedelic typography, the paper urges its readers to foreswear promiscuity, drugs and alcohol.
Visions and Demons. Such prohibitions rarely extend to other aspects of the youth culture, which often lends itself remarkably well to the fundamentalist lifestyle. Jesus has always been prominent in hippie mythology, and the ideal of the shared life draws much of its inspiration from the Bible. Edward Plowman also observes that "in the drug scene, many kids develop a spiritual awareness that the alcohol culture, for example, doesn't have. They believe in a spiritual reality. They've seen visions and demons. Thus a conservative Christianity, which hasn't mythed away God and angels, appeals to them." Moreover, notes Plowman, street Christianity shares the conviction of early Christians that Doomsday is around the corner. "They see the world coming to a condition of hopelessness that only God can straighten out."
Though most street Christians share such a fundamentalist streak, no two houses or communes are exactly alike. On Sunset Strip, for instance, Evangelist Tony Alamo, a onetime record promoter, preaches hellfire and damnation to anyone who refuses to live by the Gospel. He and his wife Susan guard their flocks rigidly at Christian Foundation, their church and commune.