Watching the film Jesus Revolution, I was struck by some things about the place and time that hadn’t hit me before.

I remember seeing news reports and photos of the mass baptisms, but pictures don’t convey the power of the event the way a video does. The sense of joy and celebration came through on the big screen in a way it could never in a photograph.

I also got the sense of “it could never happen here.”  Not that young Canadians weren’t searching for Truth in the late 1960s, though the youth subculture was much smaller here. But most of the year in Canada the weather is unconducive to outdoor baptisms, which were such a big part of the early days of the movement, attracting a lot of media attention. Ocean and sunshine in California is a lot more appealing than breaking through river ice here. I’ve been to some outdoor summer baptisms, but mostly we do them indoors in the Great White North – even in the summer.

I had more that I was going to say about the film, but instead I want to share some of the music of the period. It was all low-budget production and sounds like it. Plus finding stuff on YouTube from that era can be difficult – there weren’t any cell phone cameras back then. Or many video cameras for that matter.

Still, I’m linking to number of videos more or less from the time of Jesus Revolution. Artists from the California area, though not all of them were affiliated with Calvary Chapel. And there were a few I wanted to share that didn’t allow me to link to them.

Just a few years after the events of the film.

One of my favorite Jesus Rock pioneers.