Don Lattin, Religion News Service, Apr 17, 2013
Bob Gersztyn owned a fine collection of 300 rock ‘n’ roll albums in 1971, the year he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. Among them were some choice 1960s vinyl from Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Mothers of Invention.
But all of a sudden, this was the devil’s music.
“I destroyed some of them with a hammer and took the rest to a used record store,” he recalled with a laugh. “I think I kept 10 classical music albums that I decided were not anti-Christian.”
Gersztyn retained his love of rock ‘n’ roll, but limited his listening to Christian rock, a genre that was just getting going in the era of the hippie-inspired “Jesus freaks” and the hit Broadway musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
He joined a Four Square Gospel Church in Los Angeles, enrolled in Bible college, and became a Pentecostal preacher. He also started emceeing and booking concerts for such Christian artists as Keith Green to 2nd Chapter of Acts.
Today, at age 65, Gersztyn’s religious fervor has mellowed; he rarely attends church and calls himself “an allegorical Christian.” But he has put together his love of pop music and photography to publish an illustrated, two-volume work titled “Jesus Rocks the World—The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music.”
The book, totaling some 600 pages, traces the history of Jesus music from Negro spirituals, gospel, and blues to its modern-day roots in Southern California with the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard church movements in the 1970s.
Gersztyn, who grew up in a Catholic family in suburban Detroit, decided Jesus was the answer when he heard a radio account of how guitarist Jeremy Spencer had suddenly quit Fleetwood Mac during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. It was soon learned that Spencer ran off with an evangelical Christian sect called the Children of God.
Gersztyn, his mind altered by an estimated 100 LSD trips in the 1960s, convinced his girlfriend to head out to Southern California with him to join the Children of God.
“I was smoking pot one day when Jesus appeared to me in a vision,” he recalled. “He told me he was the source of all love, then said, ‘Come follow me.’”
Gersztyn, who wound up joining the Four Square Church rather than the Children of God, became part of an army of young people who went off seeking spiritual bliss after drug-induced mystical experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of them found a home among the counterculture “Jesus movement,” also known as “the Jesus people.”
Today, the music born out of that movement has grown into a huge industry. Estimates of its annual revenue range from $500 million to $2 billion—depending on who does the calculating and what bands are included as “contemporary Christian.”
0 Comments:
Post a Comment