Requested by Ann Witkower – written February 2020, Revised June 2025
I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the oldest of five girls, and I was practically raised in a Southern Baptist church. We went to church a minimum of three times a week, and we were very involved there. When I was ten years old, I was at a youth revival that was held at our church, and the visiting youth pastor spoke and gave an invitation to come forward to receive Christ. I vividly remember that it was as if God had tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You belong to me.” So I stood up and walked forward to say I was a Christian, which is what we did in our church. From the time I was ten until I was eighteen I knew I was a Christian, and I lived like a Christian, and yet I knew there was something missing. As is usual in the Baptist church our pastor would give the invitation each Sunday morning inviting anyone who wanted to become a Christian to walk forward. He would also invite anyone was already a Christian but wanted to rededicate his or her life to come forward. I would sometimes go forward. I was still searching.
When I was eighteen, I went away to college in Oxford, Mississippi to the University of Mississippi, affectionally know as Ole Miss. My freshman year, Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru) started on our campus, and Jon Braun, the National Field Director and a gifted speaker, came and spoke to get it started. A bunch of us students who were already Christians got together, and Jon explained, basically, what was written in a Crusade booklet we used to call the “Bird Book”, which was a pamphlet about the Holy Spirit. I remember clearly that Jon said that most people in this meeting think that being a Christian means to take the things you most want to do and to stop doing them and to take the things you least want to do and to start doing them. Jon said that being a Christian actually isn’t that at all, but that it is a relationship with a Person, Jesus Christ, who lives inside of you. That’s the first time I had heard of a personal gospel of God living in me, and I prayed the prayer to surrender the throne of my life to the Lord Jesus for Him to reign there. Everything in my life changed from that point on. I really knew Him as a Person, and He and His purposes became foremost in my life.
I was in college from 1966 through 1970. I was at Ole Miss for my freshman year, and then at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis), where I had transferred for my sophomore year to help start Crusade. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year after I transferred to Memphis another young woman and I raised money by going to Memphis businesses to rent a big bus to take a large group of students out to Arrowhead Springs in California which was the headquarters of Campus Crusade. That is how we started Crusade on our campus. We had some Crusade leaders come to our Memphis campus to speak. Jon Braun came and did his Love, Sex and Marriage Conference, and Pete Gillquist, one of the leaders, came also. (Pete actually moved to Memphis after he left Crusade to be with our group, and we sometimes had meetings in his home.) During those years I was at Memphis State many of the major national leaders left Crusade to form their own movement, and our Memphis group left with them, as did many Crusade groups around the country. Several of us women lived together in a house near campus that became the hub of our Christian campus life. We used to take trips to go hear various ex-Crusade leaders speak on Body Life, which was what they were calling this move out of organized religion into something more organic. Those were amazingly rich and blessed years, with many students coming alive to Christ.
In January of 1969 a man named Gene Edwards spoke at one of those ex-Crusade conferences at UCLA. The cassette tape recording of that message became known nationwide as “The UCLA Message” among seeking people like us. Almost as soon as the message was spoken two young men came to visit our group in Memphis and brought that tape to us, and we listened to it. Hearing the UCLA Message on tape within weeks of it having been spoken in California was a life-changing event for me and certainly one of the major reasons that caused me ultimately to move to Isla Vista, California, a year and a half later. That message gave me a view of the centrality of Christ that has never left me to this day.
Our Memphis group used to go on car trips around the South and Midwest to hear ex-Crusade speakers. In the summer of 1969, some of our Memphis group took a trip to Mansfield, Ohio, to hear the leading ex-Crusade leaders speak. While we were there, we also heard Gene Edwards speak. He surely was quite different in look and in speaking style from any of the others. Their messages were on the Love of God (as I remember them), and they were really good. But then this person (Gene Edwards) got up looking like a Southern tent evangelist (which he had been!) and spoke of eternal things that were amazing. His messages were unlike anyone else’s at that gathering. He was a compelling figure. Gene had brought a young man named Lance Thollander with him, a student from UCSB in Isla Vista. Christie (Thollander) and Christine (Steele), who were single at that time, drove across country in a little Volkswagen from Los Angeles to be there, so we met them also.
Our Memphis group continued to thrive and grow during the following year. In June of 1970, at the end of my senior year, I helped organize a little caravan to go out to Isla Vista, California to a Gene Edwards’ conference they were having. Thirteen of us, including my three younger sisters, made the car trip. When we got to the conference in June 1970, we saw that the Bank of America in Isla Vista had recently been burned by rioters. It was a wild and crazy place! I’ll never forget the first meeting I walked into where people were just standing up reading Psalms, singing, worshiping and praising the Lord, just like regular people, but full of God. I had gone all around the South and Midwest to conferences looking for “Body Life,” and when I walked into that meeting, I saw it, and my heart leapt for joy. It was the first I had seen the Church in Isla Vista, and it was the first time I had seen in a living display all the things that I had been hearing about and longing for during the past four years in college, and it was wonderfully beautiful to me. It was unscripted, non-religious, real, and free, and I had never seen anything like it, and it captured my heart. During that week I began to feel an inward pull to remain in Isla Vista. I went through a tremendous inner struggle about what it would mean to stay. I had not come to Isla Vista thinking even remotely that I would remain there. I felt like the Lord showed me that if I stayed it would cost me pretty much everything. I did not make the decision lightly. At the end of that week when our little caravan departed, to the confusion and heartbreak of my parents and the abandonment of my fellow Memphis Christians, I chose to remain behind in Isla Vista. It was a difficult and lonely choice, but I felt like I had found what my heart had been searching for, and I didn’t want to lose it. So they all went home to Memphis, and I remained……. until the end of the Church in Isla Vista in 1981.
The first two or three years I lived in Isla Vista from 1970 to 1973 were wonderful years for me. I remember so clearly all the marches in the streets, singing as we walked, the baptisms in the ocean, the meetings that were just full of joy. The worship in the church in Isla Vista was amazing, and if I close my eyes even now I can see those faces from long ago, and hear the absolutely fresh, alive, bold singing. I can hear different brothers and sisters coming into the meeting room shouting the Lord’s praise in a real, free and non-religious way. I can hear people spontaneously standing up and reading a psalm or sharing something from the Scriptures or from their lives to lift up the name of Jesus. I can see and hear us marching down the streets with banners or going down for a baptism singing and praising and shouting all the way. To this day I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, and I’m so thankful that I got to experience it for so many years.
One of my most vivid memories early on is the night Lance Thollander gave a message for the first time. The “brothers,” as we called them, had not yet begun to give messages. There were a lot of Ex-Crusade leaders in the meeting that night who had come to live in Isla Vista. Lance’s ultimate message, which was passionately delivered, was that all week as he prayed to know what to speak on by going to God the Father to ask Him, what the Father kept doing was to point Lance back to His Son Jesus Christ. Lance said he finally got the message and realized that that would always be the Father‘s message. He will always point us to His Son. The men in that room, who were well known around the country in Crusade, appeared astonished at Lance and his message, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I totally believed in what we were doing, and I believed that our purpose was something God had given us. The teachings that most resonated with me and have stayed with me all my life were the early teachings that Gene gave on the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ. The messages he gave showing Christ in the Old Testament and outside of time and space were life-altering for me and have never left me. These are the messages about God’s Eternal Purpose, and they guide my life to this day. The teachings on the early church were wonderful and made the New Testament come alive.
I loved church life. From 1970 to 1978 I was single in the church, and I didn’t own very many things. So for me to live in so many different houses with so many different, wonderful people was, for the most part, a joy. I remember at one point having three pairs of pants and three shirts and being perfectly happy. I had many, many different roommates, and that wasn’t always easy, but as a single person I loved how we lived. I lived in many different apartments with a variety of women. In each of those places we had jobs and supported ourselves. Then in 1973 came the years of living in common, when we all put our earnings together. We tried so many ways to make things work, and it was a group effort. Sometimes it was fun, and sometimes it was hard, but those were amazing years. I would say one of the most memorable things for me was just the joy of life together in Christ.
I also remember with awe and amazement the years when we brought so many Vietnamese and Hmong over after the fall of Vietnam in April of 1975 and adopted them into our life. I’m so thankful for that experience in the life of the Church and in my life.
In August of 1976, as a single woman, I went to Europe for two years with the “older” original Isla Vistans. I travelled a lot around Europe, and I lived with a variety of people there and also on my own. When I came back to Isla Vista in May of 1978, I moved into Sueno House in Isla Vista with Maryse and Claire-Lise from Europe along with various other singles for the summer of 1978. What a summer that was when we all came home from Europe and Asia and brought with us many we had met abroad. I expected to return to Europe, but instead I married Ken Jones in December of 1978! Apart from my decision to follow Jesus, marrying Ken Jones is the best decision I ever made. Ken and I lived in Isla Vista as part of the church until it ended in 1981 when we moved to San Francisco for Ken’s new job. Our five years in the San Francisco Bay area were for the most part rich and wonderful. Our son was born there. We were part of a church that met in a school and was an encouraging place to be. We made many Christian friends there, but we ultimately decided that our life was meant to be more fully part of God’s work. We decided to move to Winona Lake, Indiana, for Ken to attend Grace Theological Seminary with Larry Crabb to get a Masters in Biblical Counseling. Again, in Indiana, we were part of a wonderful church there for the year we were there. At the end of that year, as we had intended, we moved to Portland, Maine, to join Gene Edwards and several other ex-Isla Vista couples in establishing a church. That church did not survive past the year we arrived, but we stayed in Portland and made it our home. Starting in 1989 we were part of an established, traditional church for over twenty years, and we loved being there. Like a lot of New England, Portland has often been identified among the least churched cities in America, and that certainly seemed the case when we moved here. There were not many churches at all. It has since been “discovered,” and many church plants have been done here. During our twenty years in that church we had two different older pastors, one after the other, and they taught us so much about who God is and how to love people. Those years were very rich. Our daughter was born in Portland, and we raised our two children in that church and served there with the gifts God has given us. Starting in 2005 for around fourteen years we opened our home every Monday night (it was called Monday Nights at the Joneses!) to young people. I made dinner, and the young people would eat together and hang out. Then we would sing and share, and Ken would teach. Sometimes former Isla Vista folks would visit and share, both in our home and in the retreats we would have. Many young people have passed through our home, and we still have relationships with many of them. What a privilege those years were. We stopped in 2018 when I received a blood cancer diagnosis and couldn’t keep up hostessing and cooking. (A young couple in our church from Monday Nights picked up the mantle and is still hosting an abbreviated version). Since early 2011 we have been part of a smaller non-denominational church plant.
I loved the church in Isla Vista from the moment I saw it, and I loved it until the day it ended. (And I still love it.) The Lord loves His church, and He died for her. How can I not love what He loves? The Lord poured out His Spirit in those years in Isla Vista in a mighty way, and all over this country He did the same. We didn’t cause it or discover it. His Spirit was flowing like a mighty river, and we were invited to jump in and drink. My experience in Isla Vista is definitely one that goes from the mountain tops to the deepest depths, with times of extreme joy and also sorrow and brokenness. I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had not gone to Isla Vista. For me, having that church experience all those years was life altering and for the most part wonderful. The relationships that I have today with the people that I met and lived with and loved and still love today are the richest in my life. As I said, the centrality of Jesus Christ and God‘s Eternal Purpose and the glory of the Church and life in the Spirit are things that still are at the forefront of what I believe today, and ultimately, I am very thankful for those experiences. I’ve tried to sort them out, refine them in my own mind and heart and learn from them so that I can provide wise counsel to young Christians today and to others who are seeking to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, pour out your Spirit again on this land in a mighty way!