The Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) was a campus outreach at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. It sought to appeal to disenfranchised young people by adopting the mode of dress, methods, and language of the radical

counterculture A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Hou ...

. It was established in April 1969 and dissolved in June 1975. It was considered one of the most prominent

Jesus People The Jesus movement was an evangelical Christian movement which began on the West Coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s and primarily spread throughout North America, Europe, and Central America, before it subsided in the la ...

ministries, partly due to the influence of its underground newspaper ''Right On''.

Background

In 1967

Campus Crusade for Christ Cru (until 2011 known as Campus Crusade for Christ—informally "Campus Crusade" or simply "crusade"—or CCC) is an interdenominational Christian parachurch organization. It was founded in 1951 at the University of California, Los Angeles by ...

(CCC) President Bill Bright conceived of a strategy to reach students at UC Berkeley, considered the hotbed of campus radicalism as the launching point of the

Free Speech Movement The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Be ...

and the

Vietnam Day Committee The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) was a coalition of left-wing political groups, student groups, labour organizations, and pacifist religions in the United States of America that opposed the Vietnam War during the counterculture era. It was formed in ...

. CCC sent six hundred staff and students for a weeklong blitz. However, CCC staff members were generally dissatisfied with the result. In February 1969, Jack Sparks, a former associate professor of statistics at Penn State and current CCC staff member, visited UC Berkeley with Pat Matrisciana and Fred Dyson. From their visit they concluded that they should move to Berkeley and adopt the counterculture's methods in order to reach the students, including distributing leaflets and using signs, posters, and bullhorns. The three moved with their families and a few others to Berkeley to start their outreach in April. CCC funded the effort as a pilot program, but stayed in the background due to concerns over how its conservative donors would perceive the endeavor. Matrisciana and Dyson did not stay long, leaving Sparks as the group's unquestioned leader. The

Third World Liberation Front In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of the Black Students Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the Filipino American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE) the Filipino-American Students Organization, the Asian American ...

had established a chapter at UC Berkeley in January 1969, so Sparks's group adopted the name Christian World Liberation Front.

Characteristics and activities

In 1970 CWLF members infiltrated and disrupted the opening meeting of a regional conference of

Students for a Democratic Society Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships ...

(SDS), staging a sit-in in front of the speakers' platform and demanding an opportunity to speak. CWLF frequently reserved locations often used for student protest rallies, sometimes infuriating the leftists, including an incident in which the CWLF refused to yield the steps of

Sproul Hall Sproul Plaza (pronounced ) is one center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. It is divided into two sections: Upper Sproul and Lower Sproul. They are vertically separated by and linked by a set of stairs. History S ...

to anti-war protestors, inciting the protestors to burn the university's ROTC building. The conflict developed into "the worst riots the school had seen up until that time." Sparks and an associate wrote a street language version of the New Testament epistles called ''Letters to Street Christians'' that incorporated coarse language and illustrations in the style of underground comic books. Sparks's talks to CWLF gatherings were called "Bible raps." Sparks encouraged CWLF members to develop their own ministries. CWLF ministries included the underground newspaper ''Right On'', a "radical" free university The Crucible, a street theater troupe, Rising Son Ranch and various crash pads for young people drying out from drug use, and the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. Nationwide distribution of ''Right On'' through an informal network of churches and schools was instrumental in establishing the CWLF's reputation in the Jesus People movement. To distance itself from the dominant American culture in the minds of its target constituents, CWLF adopted an anti-establishment tone. Over time this came to include social critique and the group's language "increasingly mirrored that of the New Left." The stridency of these critiques led CCC to dissolve its covert funding of CWLF. Instead, CWLF began to receive financial support from Evangelical Concerns, a group consisting of mostly

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 ...

Baptist Baptists form a major branch of Protestantism distinguished by baptizing professing Christian believers only ( believer's baptism), and doing so by complete immersion. Baptist churches also generally subscribe to the doctrines of soul compe ...

pastors, laymen, and officials formed in 1967 to fund Jesus People outreaches to the counterculture.

Dissolution

Beginning from 1973 Sparks began to reach out to former colleagues from CCC who had left after the Berkeley blitz. These men began to look upon themselves as men imbued with apostolic authority to implement a bring the church back to its historic roots. They eventually became the core of the New Covenant Apostolic Order (NCAO). In 1975 Sparks asserted his authority with the CWLF and tried to convert it into a church along the lines of the NCAO's teaching. Opposition to this plan resulted in the dissolution of the CWLF in June 1975 and the establishment of the Berkeley Christian Coalition to take its place. Most CWLF staff members did not follow Sparks, but about half of the group's members did.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Evangelicalism in California