FIFTEEN months ago, Richard Ostling, our New York-based religion reporter, was in San Francisco covering a meeting of Catholic bishops. While waiting out the closed-door sessions, Ostling took the opportunity to have a close look at Berkeley's colony of "Jesus Freaks." Our first major article on the movement appeared soon afterward. Continued exposure to the new genre convinced Ostling that there was much more to be said. Hence this week's cover story on the Jesus revolution.
Ostling found the contrast with covering more conventional religion stories profound "The movement," he says, "is amorphous, evasive, going on everywhere and nowhere." To sample it, he visited young evangelists and their followings in Michigan, Indiana and upstate New York. Ostling brings wide experience to his beat. He has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and another in religion from George Washington University. Before joining TIME in 1969, he was on the staff of Christianity Today for four years.
The material gathered by Ostling and other correspondents went to Mayo Mohs, who has written our religion section for the past 2½ years. Mohs had his first personal encounter with hip street evangelists while looking at the movement in Los Angeles. "A fresh-faced teen-ager in a pullover and corduroys came up to me on Hollywood Boulevard and talked about Jesus nonstop," he recalls. "When she finally finished, her friends congratulated her on a 'terrific witness.' It was the easiest interview I ever had." L.A. Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand was covering a religious service at Imperial Beach when he declined the pastor's invitation to declare his own religious beliefs. "He generously let me sit in the back clutching my notebook," says Hillenbrand, "while the congregation called the Holy Spirit down on me to guide my thoughts and my fingers as I wrote."
In Manhattan, Reporter-Researcher Margaret Boeth interviewed " reborn evoked in Greenwich Village — an assignment that evoked memories of her girlhood in Cleveland, Miss. "I haven't seen this kind of hard-rock fundamentalism," she says, "since I used to sit on a ditch bank and watch the traveling, trembling preacher whip up a crowd." When Boeth interviewed Evangelist Arthur Blessitt in New York, she learned that they were from the same part of Mississippi and that Blessitt had once led a congregation in her home town.