Why Jesus Revolution Matters to Young Adults

Last month, I went to theaters for the first time in a good long while to see the movie Jesus Revolution.

It was more than worth the price of admission. This movie is beautiful. It is unapologetically Christian, but they focused on telling a good story first.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Jesus Revolution tells the story of the Jesus Movement in the 1960’s. It’s the story of Pastor Chuck Smith who (albeit reluctantly) invited a hippie into a church that was more focused on keeping themselves safe and unspotted. And that invitation sprouted something big. Revival spread through thousands of teens and young adults, including a lonely boy named Greg.

Whether or not you’re a Christian, I think Jesus Revolution is an important movie, especially for my generation.

Jesus Revolution shows just how much young people matter.

The majority of the Jesus Movement was made up of teens and young adults, because the majority of hippies were teens and young adults.

(While I'll be writing mainly to young people, don't tune out if you come from another generation, because this applies to you too. Age is just a number.)

They looked at their world and saw something truly wrong and broken, but they also looked beyond it to the world that they thought they could make. They’d been silenced and overlooked enough. Enough was enough. They were going to do something about it.

But they’d seen enough fighting and lecturing to know they wanted nothing to do with it. So they set out to find the thing they’d been deprived of for so long—love.

I believe that each generation sees things that the others don’t. I believe young people in particular have a unique perspective and gift to see the broken things others may have become comfortable with. To see creative ways to solve those problems. To see what could be.

We’re not so different from the hippies of the sixties. We’ve seen some truly hard and horrible things, sometimes things that others want to deny we’ve seen. And we won’t allow ourselves to be silenced. We have the heart and the fire and the energy that forces us into action. We can’t sit still. We have to do something.

But many of us are done fighting. We’ve seen enough fighting. We’re war-weary, even though we’re young and most people say we have nothing to be weary from. We want to embrace love, but all the things we think are love fall through.

The hippies made some pretty big mistakes in how they tried to pursue peace and love. Very little of what they did would ever be advisable.

But they tried. They were willing to take that risk.

That’s another special thing young people have. We have the energy and the willpower and the courage to try something wildly different, completely out of the blue.

So when someone came along and truly loved them, they could fit all the puzzle pieces together. They found that the love they’d been searching for was found in Jesus. And since they’d found what they were looking for, they couldn’t keep silent.

The Jesus Movement spread because teens kept coming into churches and bringing friends and sharing Christ whenever they could. Because young adults kept coming forward to be baptized. Because teens kept proposing solutions to problems they saw in the church. Because young adults were willing to lead.

God worked crazy mightily because a group of young people wouldn’t stay silent.

The world today largely dismisses young people. You have nothing of importance to say. You’re stupid. You had best sit down, shut up, and let someone else take care of it. Gen Z is treated as a fun joke in TV and film, because what’s funnier than a caricature that only cares about making TikToks and protesting for a cause they don’t even really know what it’s for?

But we’re not a joke. God crafted each one of us uniquely, with a special way of seeing the world, something important to say, and a fire deep inside.

And when young people, especially Christian young people, realize that, incredible things can happen.

We can fight all we want. We can speak all we want. We can try over and over again. But none of it matters unless we work alongside Christ. He guides us all different directions—one to write books, another to a job in their hometown, another to a career in science.

You and Jesus are the two ingredients that might start a fire wherever you are.

It’s believed that about 100,000 people were involved in the Jesus Movement. That’s just the ones who were actively involved, not all the people who were impacted or touched by it.

That is the power of our generation. And it’s just waiting for us to realize it.

We have something that could change the world for the better. We have the most important thing there could ever be, a very real God who loves every one of us. We can’t stay silent. We can’t sit still.

If we stand up and speak, there will be another Jesus Revolution. And another and another on into eternity.

That's not just true for young people, but for every generation living and breathing on this earth right now.