Lonnie was also one of three major protagonists (together with Chuck Smith and Greg Laurie) in the recent religious/historical drama Jesus Revolution about the Southern California originis and beginning of the Jesus People movement. The movie faithfully and, sometimes humorously sometimes tenderly, portrays Lonnie as a the goofy, prophetic, hippie preacher who was instrumental in convincing Chuck Smith to give the hippies a chance at god and who moved his Calvary Chapel church into an era of love and inclusion that marked the beginning of the Southern California Jesus People movement. In the movie Lonnie is played compellingly by Jonathan Roumie who, based on the accounts I have read and footage I have watched of Frisbee, ably captures his trippy-hippie demeanor and his intense passion for Jesus and for "his people". And in Jesus Revolution there is no mention of the fact that Lonnie Frisby was gay and died of AIDS, not even in the final summary of his life at the end of the film. They tell us he died in 93, they don't say how. That is why it has to be said that Lonnie Frisbee was a gay man who died of AIDS in 1993.
I wanted to foreground that fact because watching Jesus Revolution was, for me, an agony of conflicting emotions, informed by what I already knew about Lonnie Frisbee. Part of my own spiritual jouney includes seven or so formative years in the Vineyard movement and the story told in this movie and Lonnie's part in it were already very much on my radar. Because of my experience with the Vineyard I have been reading through the three part co-authored autobiography of Lonnie Frisbee and
appreciated the 2005 documentary on his life. I have also managed to get several conversations with people (all within the Vineyard movement) who knew Lonnie and, as a queer Christian it has been hard not to see Lonnie and his story as a bit of a portent for other LGBTQ+ christians vis-a-vis the Vineyard.*
Going into the movie I told my wife that I was intrigued to watch it particularly because so many of the people I know have been divided in their response to the film and that the division doesn't seem to fall along any predictable lines. Some progressive Christians like it, while others very much don't; some Vineyard people who were there either for the events of the film or for the Vineyard centered version a decade later involving many of the same people and ground liked it while others didn't. I wanted to understand why.
It makes sense to me now. At its heart the surface message of the film is that Jesus is for everyone, that trying to gatekeep access to Church and to the Holy Spirit is wrong, that the Holy Spirit moves in ways we wouldn't predict among people we wouldn't predict and that loving and including the socially marginalized and alienated is central to the call of the church. While there might be a few theological quibbles (the salvation narrative in the movie is rather notably individualistic but that is accurate to the theology of Calvary Chapel) by and large that message is absolutely one that progressive and affirming Christians can get behind. At one dramatic moment about halfway through they include a powerful (if slightly on-the-nose) scene in which two out of three of Chuck Smith's stodgy "square" original attenders march out of the church in protest after Smith (magnificently played phenomenally by Kelsey Grammer) overcomes some of his own prejudices as declares that the doors to Calvary Chapel are open to any who want to enter and to all who want to leave. The third attender stands up as if to leave and then re-seats himself among the hippies. I started to weep.
But I wept at that scene for two reasons. All throught the scene, the camera keeps panning over to Lonnie, smiling at Chuck, affirming and blessing his decision. For those of you have have also been watching The Chosen it is worth noting here that Jonathan Roumie is the same actor who plays Jesus in that series and I found it almost impossible in that scene not to see Frisbee through the sort of double vision linked both to the character's role in the movie and the actor's portrayal of Jesus in a separate series. The scene feels like Jesus is blessing Chuck Smith and welcoming him deeper into God's beutiful kin-dom as Chuck chooses inclusion over comfort and "clean carpets". Under any circumstances that scene would have moved me. But it was deeper than that.
In storytelling we often encounter the mechanic of a frame narrative in which the central story is presented as a story within a larger story (the frame). In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien presents himself not as the author (though of course he is) but as the translator and compiler of The Red Book of Westmarch and other fictional material. In The Canterbury Tales the stories are are presented as travelling tales told by a diverse party who are all on pilgrimage together. You get the picture. In Jesus Revolution the strory-wthin-the-story is all about people coming together to find that God is Love and that the mission of the Church necessarily involves the inclusion of the marginalized, outcast, and alienated. But the frame of the story is heartbreaking.
Chuck Smith, and John Wimber after him, both used Lonnie as a powerful vessel of the Holy Spirit (Lonnie was, for the record, a really strange man with some bad tendencies who rubbed some good people the wrong way—he wasn't an angel) and who both then effectively wrote him out of the history of the movements they used him to start once they had rejected him. In Chuck Smith's case my understanding is that he rejected Lonnie based on some personality conflicts (which are showcased in the film) and some theological differences which the film barely nods to. John Wimber rejected and erased Lonnie Frisbee from vineyard history for being gay and for all that came with being an honest but closeted Christian gay man in the early to mid 80s. When Chuck Smith gave a eulogy at Lonnie's funeral, the most he could manage was that Lonnie had been "like Sampson", full of potential, too much of which was squandered.
The frame around the beautiful story the film tells is a different story. That frame is a story of rejection; a story of limited inclusion sold as full inclusion; a story of spiritual abuse, of hiding who you are. The story-within-the-story of Jesus Revolution is one that is all to familiar to queer Christians. Far too often we have been invited in with gospels of inclusion, radical love, deep community, and full belonging only to find that, when we inevitably failed to be "cured" of the holy queerness that was never a sin to begin with, that love, inclusion, welcome, and acceptance are inevitably revoked. Jesus Revolution is the story of boomer hippie Christians finding God's radical love and acceptance framed within an ultimate rejection of queer Christians. For Gen Xers and Millennials, that story played out during the emergent, welcoming, and missional church movements of the early-mid 2000s. The Vineyard Movement in the US didn't officially restrict the full participation of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Christians until 2014** though they had been running/sponsoring "soft" conversion therapy programs for a long while before that. The pain of rejection by those who claim to follow the God who loves and accepts queer people, who affirms us as we are, is very deep and very real. And so is the history of erasing that.
In some ways then, Jesus Revolution, when taken together with its frame, tells a deeply true and honest story. It is the story of a church who has used queer Christians so long as our queerness remained invisible, has damaged us in the process, and has ultimately worked to wall us off from any work of inclusion the Holy Spirit may perform among them—even works that the Spirit uses us to initiate. The true and honest story of how the church also shamefully tries to erase us and to hide the evidence both of its dependence on us (who sings Vicky Beeching songs anymore?) and of its rejection. Our cries outside of the church doors give lie to their acceptance of the Gospel of peace; when Chuck Smith invited the hippies in, he also shut a part of Lonnie out.
Before I went to the movie, knowing what it was about, a friend of mine asked on social media, what the story meant to different people. I said that to me, the story of Lonnie Frisbee represents a heartbreaking lost opportunity. I invited those in that conversation to imagine how things today might have been different if Chuck Smith or John Wimber had stopped to wonder what it could mean that the Holy Spirit chose to work so powerfully though a gay man while he was in a relationship with another man. To wonder why the Holy Spirit who had miraculously healed people through Lonnie and delivered them from addictions and oppression, never "healed" Lonnie of his homosexuality and had realized that God does not fix what was never broken. I asked them to think about a world where Lonnie's death of AIDS drove the Vineyard to sponsor a chaper of ACT UP in every Vineyard Church. To me this is a heartbreaking story of a lost opportunity and what might have been.
Ultimately Jesus Revolution without its historical frame is a mostly beautiful and compelling picture of what the Church is called to be; with it's frame it is a deeply troubling picture of what the church actually is: messy, harmful, healing, broken, and growing whole. I am encouraged by what is there and I hope in Christ that the Spirit will make up in Her power what the Church has not yet learned to do.
Footnotes
*For a fuller account of Lonnie's story I really recommend Matt Nightingale's piece HERE
** In its Position Paper 7: Pastoring LGBT Persons Vineyard USA prohibits the ordination of anyone in a same-sex marriage and forbids pastors from performing same-sex marriages in their capacity as Vineyard pastors. In keeping with the theme of this review, VUSA has elected to remove Position Paper 7 from its website but has not recinded it.
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