Cathy’s Story

Based on interviews conducted on March 8 and March 10, 2020, in Santa Barbara, California:

I was living in Florida, raised in Florida. When I was 15-1/2 years old, I was a little hippie chick wanting to go in that direction. I saw myself living in a hippie commune some day. My Dad would ask me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I would say, “I wanna be a hippie!” I’m not going to tell too many details about that. 

I was going to a rock concert to meet a friend there. I got there and found her talking to a “Jesus Freak.” Back in those days, during the Jesus Movement, there were these new “Jesus Freaks” out on the streets, talking to people about the Lord. My friend and the guy were talking about Jesus and seemed really happy. It was exciting and I thought, “This is interesting.” So, he said, “We’re gonna go out on the seawall and talk and pray, do you wanna go with us, or do you want to go in to the concert?”

I thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll go out and talk with you guys.” (the best decision I have made – ever!). So, I went out there and they were talking about Jesus, and he gave her his cross. He asked if I wanted to pray to ask Jesus into my life or something like that. I couldn’t pray out loud, no way I could pray out loud, so I prayed silently. I looked back over the field and it was like a row of mirrors that represented all of my past sins. I pictured that and thought “Wow, I never thought of God forgiving ALL of my sins at once, but You can, because You’re God!” So, I said, “Forgive me for all my sins and, Jesus, I want You to come into my heart and give me the love and the joy that this guy has.”

We got up from where we were sitting and my friend asked me, “Are you gonna stop doing drugs?” I wavered in my answer, saying, “Well….” She said, “Jesus is so much of a better trip than that!” So I said “Okay, yeah.” As soon as I said that, I felt like the skies were full of God, and the lawn was practically moving, and everything was beautiful. I felt this connection between us like a rod, a connection, where before I felt like an outsider but now I felt like we were coming back in force together, and this joy just filled me up and I could not stop smiling. My face hurt from smiling. 

So, a few months from that point, I went to a Foursquare church, and a lot of bare-footed, tattered-jeaned people started showing up in their church, and these old people just openly welcomed us: “Come on in honey, ohh…” They were so sweet, and they welcomed us in, so I went there for a while. There was good teaching there. We were going to a type of young people’s group there, and someone from the group, a friend of ours, started not going to church. We were asking what he and his wife were doing and someone said, “Well, he might start something.” So John Bradley called me and said, “We’re going to start this group, and it’s outside of the ‘religious system.’ We’re gonna meet together.” He asked, “Would you like to meet with us? We’re gonna meet in homes and just be like back in the beginning days of the church, with each other, with Jesus.” So I said, “Yeah!” 

So I went, and immediately I felt free, like, “Wow, this is awesome!” There was just a small group of us, around twelve. I don’t know if we ate together that day or not. I just started going there forever. I didn’t turn back; I mean, I just loved it. I felt like, “Wow, there’s not really such a thing as Sunday school and denominations, it’s just us and our Creator!” That was so freeing! It was really cool. Over time it progressed and grew bigger. We started meeting in this little house on the beach. By that time there were about forty of us. We sometimes had the Lord’s Supper. We had bread and grape juice probably. At the end of our meetings, we would cook and eat together. During our meetings, it was all about waiting to see what the Holy Spirit had for us to do. There was no schedule, we didn’t know what was gonna happen. We had three or four musicians. We made up our own songs. Someone would say, “I feel like the Lord wants me to share this, I feel led to share a new song God gave me, etc.” It was peacefully rich in the room. Occasionally we washed each other’s feet. John Bradley would stand up and teach us from the Bible.

It was super, really awesome. Some of the parents started coming. My mom started coming. Then John reached a point, after a year or two (he was only 24 years old) when he said, “I’ve reached a point now that I can’t really teach you anymore. I don’t have very much.” He told us, “There is a man who is doing the same thing that we are. They have a group out in California and I’m gonna go and sit under this man and learn from him. I am inviting whoever wants to come with me to come with me.” And I KNEW that I was supposed to go, and 24 of us came out. My mom was worried and was calling people asking, “What is going on with this? Is it a cult?” She was trying to figure out this stuff. Someone wrote us a letter saying that this a false prophet, and I had this little fear at first; but I said, “NO, I know I am supposed to go!” I said to myself, “Even if an angel tells me not to go, I am going!” 

Move to Santa Barbara

So in August 1975, I said goodbye to my parents and got in the caravan with six cars all traveling out together. We arrived at State Street house, and everyone was out on the lawn greeting us and singing, and it was amazing! They were all standing out there and holding hands and singing. We were like, “Whoa, there are so many people!” Everyone looked so different because we didn’t know them yet, and there were so many different-looking faces. 

They drove us out to the Green Fraternity, were we lived – just for two weeks. Then we moved into the different houses. I lived in a little kitchen on the front bottom floor of State Street house. I lived with Ruth Blewitt and a couple of other girls. It was dynamic, very alive. It was cool. It was kind of an interesting time because I was 19, and I was just going out of my family home. So I had a leaving-for-college type feeling, like, “Oh, I can make my own curfews and I can do whatever I want. This is my life.” So we would go out at 1 o’clock in the morning, skip-running around the city, jumping on things and silly stuff. 

One thing I really remember, in the beginning of our arrival and moving in, was a meeting that they had at the Yellow House (now the Simpson House Inn), where we (the Florida People) were invited and told, “Okay, it’s your meeting tonight. Have your meeting how you have it in Florida.” And so we were all quiet because we were waiting for the Holy Spirit to tell us what we should do. There was a long pause where we were quiet – which was normal for us – and they thought, “Well, I guess they’re not going to say anything.” So they all started singing, and I just groaned inside, thinking, “We WERE having our meeting! We hadn’t gotten to it yet!” I figured, “Well, I guess we are not having meetings like that anymore.” It was different here but still really cool.

Church Life

People would come home from work, and others would greet them shouting, “Praise the Lord, brother! Hallelujah! Glory to God!” It was very dynamic, all the time in and about Jesus, being the house of God together. It was an exciting time. I lived at State Street for a while. I moved to Valerio House with the Melniks, and that was really very special. Josh was only about four. He had his Bert and Ernie slippers on. There was Patience, but no Jed yet. 

Any kind of nationality would be at our table, any kind of food – but mostly salad and baked potatoes with Ranch dressing, which was good. Patty used to make awesome pea soup and puff pastries and other good meals. It was really fun living with a family. I was in the room with Ruby. Then there was a room with the guys. Lenny and I used to go on long walks and see the owls in the neighborhood.

I loved living in Valerio house with the Melnik family and the Fickeisens, Ruby, Lenny, and others that came and went. It was an old house. We ate dinners together, shared cooking, shared doing the dishes. Everyone shared everything and we even shared our paychecks. We just lived “in common,” as we called it. We turned in our paychecks and if you needed anything, you asked the money brother, and they would give you money to go get ice cream or See’s candy or whatever you wanted it for. Everyone shared their cars, so if there was a car, you just used it. That sort of thing. 

People would stop and sit in the hallway at night and talk and pray together. Or you’d get up early in the morning and pray together, just two people. It was always intimate. The whole thing was intimate. Always. Our hearts were wide open, and because of our age – I’m so glad we were all that age, because we were more prone to being open and being wild and being all out there with our passion and our heart for each other and stuff like that. I think if it had started now, it would be different. I think because of our ages, everything was impressionable. The meetings were other worldly sometimes, where you just felt like you were touching heaven and you were in a little version of heaven, and everything disappeared, and I felt we were all one in this experience together. 

I felt once like this big power was running through us all, like a big golden rod connecting us all. Being amazed by God’s love for me sometimes, I’d say, “You have to stop because I don’t think I can take it!”

I counted once that I moved about 26 times since my move from Florida. Gene would jumble it up and say, “Okay, we’re all moving and changing places.” I lived in a bedroom once with five other girls. We’d always have projects going on like repainting houses, etc.

People ask me about being in that group – “What was it about?” I say, “It was kind of like a Christian commune in a way, but not a cult. Gene was on track. He came from a Baptist background and he was on track with the Bible. He was not into heresy or weird stuff – he was not off track. I really appreciate that a lot. But it just went deeper into the Christian experience.

Times of praying with people in the mornings, that was okay but it was hard for me. I’d fall asleep at 6:00 in the morning. But other times of praying were pretty special. 

We marched down the street – we had a banner, “Change Kingdoms,” and we had signs saying “Come join our candidate.” That was neat. That was back in the day when you could just freely express Jesus on the street, full force, and people had respect for that. That was pretty special, marching together. And marching to baptisms. We walked down the street and went down this slope going to the beach. I had already been baptized and didn’t get baptized there. I had been saved since I was 15 and a half. I remember standing there thinking, “Even if I wasn’t singing or proclaiming, really active in this group – which I was – and I was just trailing along – I’m still part of it.” God saw me as part of it. I remember that feeling of, “This is something important and I’m part of it, even if I’m just present.”

I moved out to IV again, Sueno House and different places. So I got to know a lot of people very closely. We were having many meetings – every night sometimes – and my friend and I would kind of be troublemakers because we were getting in hysterics sometimes in the middle of meetings. They would tell us not to sit together. That was Diane. We were best friends. 

We all used to march around the outside of the house, whichever house we were at – at Valerio we would have a big circle out there in a big yard. We’d say, “Let’s get up and go sing this while marching around the whole house.” We’d do all these crazy, wild things, whatever someone just figured we should do – we’d all go do it.

Gene was a really good teacher. I remember so many of the things he taught. Besides the much deeper things he said, I remember little things like, “If you learn how to clean your house really well, if you see all these little details, maybe you would see that person who is having a hard time in the group, maybe you would notice something like that.” Or just little things. Being ready to be used by God – “You might be 70 by the time God starts to use you.” Little things like that. And I remember the bigger things too. 

He talked pretty slowly, and for long amounts of time, and sometimes he repeated things. I’d think, “Come on! You said that!” But I liked him a lot. I took every word he said literally almost, as in, “You should never cut your hair, Kate (he called me).” I thought, “Okay, maybe I should never cut my hair.” Good thing he wasn’t a cult leader, because he had so much influence on me. I just thought he was the man of God of the hour right now, in my life.

Weltblick

I remember when Weltblick happened and all the people came over from Europe. I made good friends with some, and I went up to Canada to Taché House, and a new friend, Lise Rochette, was there. She showed me around and brought me to her parents’ house. She came down here with some other people from Quebec, and I got to know some of the people from the different countries. I went traveling to the Grand Canyon with a couple of people. That was special, just getting to know the different people from the different places. I remember sitting on the step outside Sueno House talking to a Dutch guy. It was really freezing out, but back then when you’re young, you never put a coat on, you never put shoes on. We were sitting out there talking, and he was teaching me some Dutch, which sounded a lot like English and I thought it was pretty neat. 

I had learned some French in high school. All of a sudden I got an invitation to go to Belgium and live with the Snekviks. So I prayed about it, and said, “Yeah, I think that’s good.” I went over there and lived there for about nine months. That was after Amy Snekvik had died. Andrew was about eight; Ingrid was only four or something like that. I lived in that house with a Belgian girl, an Italian guy who spoke French, a Belgian guy, and the Snekviks and their kids. There I learned my French – how to speak – and to clean houses, and that was a super neat experience over there, just reaching out to people, going out to the square, and they were preaching the gospel in French and singing songs. The Dutch people came down to join us, and they were singing with their guitars. I got to witness to some guys, a couple of Belgian people in their stores, and tell them in my really small beginnings of French about Jesus and the joy. That was exciting, being in Europe and doing all this. And many small groups of people from Isla Vista had all gone to different countries. Most of them were teachers, and they were reaching out to people, to become Christians but also to experience what we were experiencing here – people who were already Christians, bringing them in to experience church life. That’s how I took it. 

Talking about living in Europe, the experience over there was pretty amazing, that all those people – the “oldies,” they called them – happened to be teachers, and that they all fit into those different countries teaching in American schools, and then they could start reaching out to people around there. In Belgium, we were teaching English to draw people in, then we’d tell them about the Lord. We had these Chinese students who didn’t even know about Adam and Eve – the Bible – at all! It was so amazing to teach them about what the Bible says. We were teaching them English, and we’d throw in something about the Bible. That was neat, doing that. We visited amongst each other – we went to Switzerland and Germany, visiting the different households of people. They’d have meetings at their houses and we’d join in with that or have outreaches in their cities or something like that. That was special.

After the Church

I’ll skip on to 1981, when Gene announced, “It’s over. That’s it. It’s becoming a ritual” or whatever he said. “I’m not going to drive this into the ground and turn it into some church that just keeps on going. It has to be from the Lord, and it’s not happening. That’s it. So go live your lives, raise your children, get your careers, do whatever you’re doing but we’re breaking up, and that’s all. However, I’m bringing some people to Maine. If you want to go to Maine you can join us there. Or there’s a good church up in Sacramento with Don Morsey.”

So I had a big decision of what to do. In my heart I wanted to go to Maine, but Sacramento was closer and it seemed really like a neat place to go, too. So I was deciding between Sacramento and Maine, and decided finally to go with my heart. I wanted to go to Maine. I went to Maine and lived in Portland, for two years, and that was kind of special. It wasn’t as special as back in the early days when I first arrived in Santa Barbara. But it was good, and we met together, and Gene spoke to us. Then all of a sudden he said again, “This is not happening. We’re disbanding. You’re free to do whatever you want to do.” And when he said that, that stopped the feeling in me that “I’m supposed to be here for sure, from God.” It was like, “You’re free.” And I thought, “Well. It’s nine months of winter here in Maine, and I like it back in California better, and I think I’m just going to go back to California.” 

I liked hearing everybody’s interviews. I’m starting to remember all this stuff that I had forgotten – like how you would walk into someone’s living room. You’d just kind of cruise on through and sit down. It was like one continuous house of people. How close everyone felt to each other, like everyone’s your best friend, ever. Everyone. Like your best friend type of feeling.

At the end of our church experience, it was kind of a little bit where you think that you’re like “The Thing.” We are it, and all the other Christians aren’t – maybe they’re not even saved, I’m not sure. So proud. Thinking you’re elite, and no one else knows this secret of this awesome thing, and we have it. So I had that feeling for most of the time, but not really hating other Christians; I just didn’t think about them. That was my whole world, right there in the church, living together and all that. That was my world. I missed all the TV shows for 10 years; I don’t know what they were. I hardly listened to the radio. We were just all about Jesus.

It was about Jesus; it was not about the church being the top thing. It was about Jesus in us, and we were experiencing being His church with Him there, His presence. That was the most important thing.

So after Maine, I came back here and started meeting with Calvary Chapel. At first, I went to some of their meetings, and I had this feeling like, “Oh, we knew it all, we were the thing.” I came walking into their Bible study the first night, and I was looking around almost with pride in my heart, thinking, “This is going to be boring.” And the Lord said inside (I don’t hear him talking to me all the time, but I felt clear that he was saying), “These are my people. This is the body of Christ.” And I was like, “Oh, sorry!” I realized we were not the elite, the only ones on earth. That was the feeling we sometimes had, that we have the answer, we’re living the life! This is how Christians should be, and everyone else is just kind of half Christians. That’s not true. There are all these other things on the earth that are happening: Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Greg Laurie, Compassion International, so many things are happening on the earth that are done by the body of Christ, and these are real believers, and there are real, deep Christians out there, and we are all part of the body of Christ. We just happened to have had a really special experience, but we’re no higher. That’s what I took away from it.

So I came back here and just kept on meeting with different churches – Vineyard and Calvary Chapel mainly. But we had a reunion 10 years ago of the Isla Vista church, which was the 40^th reunion, and about 110 people came. And when we were in that room, something wonderful happened again. In the room, I felt like I went back in time. Not that I want to live in the past, act the same, have the same songs – at all. But something inside went back and I thought, “This is what I’ve been missing.” 

Reunion – 2009

Some important things happened at the reunion that sparked that emotion in me. One was praying for Andrew Snekvik, when everyone was in the middle boldly praying for him. That really was intensely wonderful. And when Touby or one of the Hmong guys said, “Let’s sing that song ‘This one and that one are found in him ’” I just melted. It made me cry. And during the Lord’s Supper, we were going around and if we had anything we wanted to say to someone first or something, we were doing that. I made peace with someone after years of there being a weird thing between us. We didn’t even speak. We just said, “Yeah, I know.” And then we hugged each other. That was it. 

Everyone was a lot older looking, but it was a really neat experience. I wish we would have done it this last summer, because it was 50 years. But it didn’t happen. Maybe we’ll do a 51^st or something. So yes, there’s something that happened back then. I lived with the church from 1975 to 1985, so it was only 10 years, but it was just awesome. Thank you, God.