Living Word Fellowship (LWF) was a millenarian

Pentecostal Pentecostalism or classical Pentecostalism is a Protestant Charismatic Christian movement

San Francisco Bay area The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...

, founded in 1970 by Bobbi Morris. It encouraged its members to "Get high on Jesus." Most of its members were young adults who had been involved in the

counterculture of the 1960s The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights mo ...

and had used

marijuana Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the cannabis plant. Native to Central or South Asia, the cannabis plant has been used as a drug for both recreational and entheogenic purposes and in various tra ...

and

psychedelic drug Psychedelics are a subclass of hallucinogenic drugs whose primary effect is to trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness (known as psychedelic experiences or "trips").Pollan, Michael (2018). ''How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science o ...

s, and about one-third of them had participated in radical political protests. In LWF, they replaced their counterculture lifestyles with a culture characterized by moral authoritarianism and Pentecostal worship practices such as

speaking in tongues Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, is a practice in which people utter words or speech-like sounds, often thought by believers to be languages unknown to the speaker. One definition used by linguists is the fluid vocalizing of sp ...

. In the 1982 book ''Getting Saved From the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change'', Steven Tipton, a sociologist of

religion Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, ...

, profiled LWF, a

Zen Buddhist Zen ( zh, t=禪, p=Chán; ja, text= 禅, translit=zen; ko, text=선, translit=Seon; vi, text=Thiền) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School (''Chánzong'' 禪宗), and ...

meditation center, and

Werner Erhard Werner Hans Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg; September 5, 1935) is an American author and lecturer known for founding est, which operated from 1971 to 1984. He has written, lectured, and taught on self-improvement. In 1977 Erhard, with the su ...

's est as representing three different styles of response to the experience of cultural change in the 1960s.Warner, R. Steven (1984) "Making Sense of the Sixties" (book review). ''American Journal of Sociology'' Vol. 89, No. 5, Mar., 1984.

References

External links

* Stephen J. Hunt (2008).
Were the Jesus People Pentecostals? A Review of the Evidence
. ''PentecoStudies'' vol. 7, no. 1, 2008, p. 1–33. Christian new religious movements Jesus movement Pentecostalism in California {{Christian-denomination-stub