Revolution for Jesus
In the mid 1960s, David began traveling with his wife and children, carrying out evangelistic outreach. In early 1968, at the invitation of his elderly mother, David and his family journeyed to Huntington Beach, California, a seaside town that had become a gathering place for thousands of hippies. It was here that he found his life's calling, and the movement now known as the Family International had its birth.
"I'm here to start a revolution! I'm here to turn the System upside-down and do what Jesus did"
Inspired by this new mission, David and three of his teen children began ministering to the youth in a small Christian coffee house, the Light Club. Within a few months, the coffee house was full every night, hundreds of young people had become Christians and stopped taking drugs, and about 50 had decided to live and work full time with "Uncle Dave" and his family. He later recounted:
We followed the hippies down into their gutters and their dives and their dope-dens and their hard-rock hells and we invited them--not to come to church, not to sit in fancy pews--but just to come to Jesus, and He would solve all their problems, answer all their questions, satisfy all their longings and hungers, and give them something wonderful to live for--the truth of His marvelous Love! [1]
David's new ministry to the hippies marked not only the beginning of the movement that eventually became known as the Family, but also his rupture with mainstream Christian denominations.
David recognized that his newly saved hippie congregation wanted the uncompromising and unvarnished truth of the Gospel, and in a talk given in September 1968 at the Light Club, he explained to his audience that Jesus was a true revolutionary, and that the Bible advocated nothing short of a complete spiritual revolution as the answer to society's problems.
The only answer is this: the Love of God, the Love of Christ, non-violence, mercy, the Spirit of Jesus Christ. That's the only thing that will ever do it, the only thing that will ever bring real revolution. Communism, Marxism, Leninism, socialism, any other kind of "ism" might be able to overcome the world with guns and bullets and propaganda of the mind, but only God can change hearts. Only this Truth here [the Bible] can bring freedom. [2]