Guest Writer: Brian Hogan
Life with Me at the Helm
In early June 1980, I was about to graduate from High School, and I was living a triple life. I was one person with my mom at home, at least putting on a fraying facade of a good Methodist boy. At school I was an honor student, editor of the school Poetry publication, singing in choir, and soon-to-be freshman at Cal Poly University at San Luis Obispo.
My friends at school, in the words of Frodo Baggins, “looked foul and felt fair”. They were in a glam rock band called Mary Poppinz and were drug and alcohol free, though most of our peers assumed otherwise. My neighborhood friends were a completely different story. We lived to get drunk and were miserable when our plans to buy or swipe booze fell through. Looking back, part of the need for inebriation was to dull the guilt of our compulsive sexual activities. All of us seemed to swing wildly between poles of teen lust and extreme guilt, especially me, since my Sunday School encoding was still in place, and because my two other worlds would have never accepted the one I crawled out my bedroom window to indulge in several nights a week.
The End of my Rope
The strain of living with a constant cycle of violating my own principles, asking God to forgive me and bargaining with promises to behave, violating those promises — sometimes within hours, caused me to come to a place of almost complete breakdown. I had been fighting off increasingly powerful thoughts of ending my own life. I had just attended the funeral of a teen coworker and friend who’d hung himself in this closet and knew of a couple others from school, so these peer examples played into my thinking. The path seemed to be driving me further from any hope of heaven than even suicide would accomplish.
At about my lowest point I went to find Don, my friend from school. I really liked Don because he was kind and didn’t play tricks and practical jokes like the rest of us. He had the coolest job in the group as well. He worked at Straw Hat Pizza and we used to all go to hang out while he closed up. We’d make funny pizzas in the shape of guitars we admired and other shapes I don’t care to put into print. Then five or six of us would all crash at Don’s house and eat our pizza while watching movies (they had an early VCR), and fall asleep sprawled all over his parents’ living room floor and furniture. The thing that always amazed me was that his folks were cool with this.
Friend’s Mom in Spiritual Crisis
So, on this fateful day, I arrived at Don’s house to find no one at home except his mom, Harriet, and she was in tears. I really liked her, so I pressed to find out what was wrong. She told me God had moved them to invest a lot of their money into renting the Glendale (California) Civic Auditorium and bringing in the famous hippie evangelist who’d launched the Jesus Revolution and Calvary Chapel Movement a decade earlier: Lonnie Frisbee (Lonnie would later launch the Vineyard Movement which would also touch my life. In fact, he was meeting with John Wimber this very week and gave a famous Mother’s Day message at Wimber’s church within a day or two of this Glendale meeting). She told me the first meeting the previous week had been almost empty and Harriet was feeling they had misheard God and made a huge mistake. I instantly needed to make Don’s mom feel better, so I impetuously volunteered all of my friends to attend that evening’s meeting. I told her Don was driving and she needed to tell him to pick us up when he returned and I set out immediately on my Honda Express moped to gather Matt, Mark, Greg, Cori, and anyone else from our group I could find.
Off to See the Hippie Evangelist
None of them wanted to go. I guilted them into it by reminding them how much we owed Don’s mom. We managed to show up in time to go into the auditorium as a group of six. Only Greg and I had any church background, and none had any real relationship with God. Attendance had picked up and there were probably 150 people there. A Christian bluegrass band, Crystal River, opened. I walked in to the first real worship experience of my life. Something happened to me as I sang, I guess I really opened up to God. I began to feel real hope for the first time in months.
Lonnie Frisbee’s Call
Lonnie Frisbee got up and preached. I can’t remember anything from the message, except it was exciting and I knew I wanted in. When he finished, Lonnie called any who wanted to live this life to come forward and confirm it by taking communion. I had taken Communion many times growing up in the Methodist Church, but tonight was different. This was a commitment and I went forward glowing with anticipation. All of my friends except Greg, my best friend, kept their seats. I got in line and looking ahead I could see Lonnie wordlessly giving each person a wafer as they reached the front. Someone else was distributing little juice cups. When I got to him, Lonnie stared intently into my eyes and did something he hadn’t done with anyone else. He reached up holding my wafer and laid it on my forehead. He simply said, “I’m praying for your need.”
Holy Spirit Surge
Immediately I felt struck by lightning. A surge went throughout my body from head down to the floor. Barely able to keep standing; I staggered away feeling sure everything had suddenly changed and God had somehow entered me. When I got back to my seat, an older guy came running down from the back of the auditorium and grabbed my arm. This stranger blurted, “I just saw the Holy Spirit enter you like a lightning bolt!” I hugged him and blurted, “You saw it and I felt it. It must have happened!”
Not Alone in this Experience
Over three decades later I got around to reading Lonnie Frisbee’s autobiography “Not by Might, Nor by Power” and came across the story of how Lonnie’s mother had crept into the back of a large meeting he was doing and had a very similar experience:
“. . . she got an electrifying power that dropped down through the top of her head like white heat. It went through her whole body, and lifted her out of her chair, and — that power brought her forward.
She said, “I don’t remember even one foot touching the ground.”
My mother received Jesus that night . . . “
Immediate Fruit and Counter-Attack
Over the following week I led all of my friends into God’s family. We started a simple house church which we called Bible Study. Our plan was to return for all the remaining Lonnie Frisbee meetings as well. The day before the next meeting at the Civic Auditorium, I was riding my moped down a steep hill in La Crescenta, our foothill suburb of Glendale, California. I tried to brake for a red light on a section of road that was covered with sand and gravel. My moped went into a careening upright slide that took me into the curb and launched me through the air. My body was stopped in its progress toward a vacant lot by a rough creosote-soaked telephone pole. As I slithered to the ground, I felt terrible pain in my left foot as well as impact trauma and scrapes and splinters all over the front of my body and hands. A guy who saw the crash from across the road came running. He stood over me and asked if I was alright. I was trying to stand up and said, “I think I have broken my foot.” He pulled my moped out of the road and said he was going to call an ambulance. As he headed back across to his home, I shouted, “No, we can’t afford that. My mom’s a nurse. Call her.” and gave him our number.
My Mom and the Holy Spirit
My mom arrived on the scene and helping me into our car within 15 minutes. My foot had already begun to swell and I had weeping sores in many places and my hands were abraded and painful. But when she made the turn toward Verdugo Hills Hospital Emergency Room, I told her to head home. An argument ensued because she had already determined I had a broken foot. The only way I was able to get her to delay taking me to the ER was to promise I would comply the next night if nothing happened at the Lonnie Frisbee meeting. She didn’t believe God healed outside of medical intervention, but her suddenly transformed son was so convinced that she weighed the options and figured a day’s wait would do no lasting harm.
I spent the next 26 hours laying on a couch with ice packs and aspirin as my foot swelled to melon-size. Matt pulled up at 6:00 to pick me up for the Lonnie Frisbee meeting. My friends had to support me as I painfully hopped down to his car, and again as I hopped to the auditorium and down to our seats. The place was even fuller than the week before. The meeting followed the same pattern as before. Worship that took me into the throne room of the Father — a message by Lonnie I loved but can’t remember now — a Communion line down in front I had to hop down to on one foot. This time we went down together as a group.
A God Who Heals!
When my turn came and I faced Lonnie, he repeated exactly his action and words of the week before. “I’m praying for your need.” Immediately I felt current in my left foot and the pain — which had been throbbing from all the hopping — stopped at once. Without a word, I turned and walked normally back to my seat. My friend Mark had been in front of me at the communion line and demanded, “Why does he only talk to you?” I turned to him in amazement and said, “I have no idea, but my foot was just healed!” Mark then proceeded to stomp my foot to prove it wasn’t. (See what I meant about Don being the nice one?) It didn’t hurt at all. In fact, as I took inventory, my left foot felt better than any other part of me — with the exception of my heart and newborn spirit.
Planting a Church Without Knowing What We Were Doing
In the days that followed my friends and I grew wildly in our faith, especially during our weekly ad-hoc fellowship at “Bible Study”. I talked the local Methodist minister into giving me the keys for the church’s youth group room. We gathered there on a night when they weren’t using the room. We’d spin Christian vinyl on their stereo, discuss the lyrics, and look up associated verses in the Bible. Everyone shared what God was doing in their life and with their various spiritual gifts. It was a wonderful and blessed time.
Off to University
When the summer ended, I moved up to San Luis Obispo to start college. I felt bad leaving my little church but was excited to plug in to whatever life Jesus had for me on campus. My second week in town I tried out a church called San Luis Obispo Vineyard Christian Fellowship. By wild coincidence the pastor, Jack Little and I shared a hometown and had both graduated from Crescenta Valley High School. While plunging into every activity the church had to offer; three of us were also praying for those in our on-campus dormitory. I’d only found two Believers in the entire dorm, and they roomed together. We prayed in their dorm room several times a week for my roommate and others. My roomie, Steve, was hostile to me and I figured to the gospel as well. However, after the lights went out, he began to ask me questions about Jesus. He played soccer with Bruce, one of my prayer partners and was too intimidated by hero worship to question Bruce about the things he shared on the field. I thought Steve was just winding me up with his questions, and I resisted answering them at first. But when I finally explained what the gospel meant and what it would take to be saved, Steve knelt beside his bed and asked me to come over to pray with him. I was amazed!
Campus Revival
Within a couple of days Steve led Joe, his best friend, to Jesus and both joined our little group. We started a Bible study in our dorm room. This took off rapidly as many others began to come to faith. We were baptizing students at Avila Beach, and the Bible study began to overflow into the hallway. Within a month there were three Bible studies — one each floor — all of them spilling out of the rooms they were held in. This continued and spread across campus. We were in the middle of a full-fledged Revival. Jack, the pastor of the Vineyard, came to my Bible study unannounced. I was so intimidated. The next Sunday he talked about it from the pulpit and said that it was an authentic move of God like what he had experienced when he had come to faith a decade before in the Jesus Revolution.
The Vineyard Christian Fellowship
I had no idea but Lonnie Frisbee had already begun The Vineyard Movement down at John Wimber’s Calvary Church in Yorba Linda. His first meeting with Wimber had occurred the very week that I had been saved at his meeting in Glendale.
Within a few months there would be a meeting in Morro Bay California where John Wimber would invite our church and a number of other Calvary Chapels to join with this new Vineyard Movement (Vineyard was one of several named employed by Calvary Chapel churches pre-1980, ours being one of them). Lonnie Frisbee came up and shared with us at that time. It was exciting to see him again — the guy God used to bring me into His Kingdom. Many lives were impacted by the campus revival that year.
Missionary Call Sparks a Movement in Mongolia!
My own life went onward along the course Jesus was laying. I received a call to missionary service sitting on my dorm bed in my sophomore year. Two years later I was engaged to be married to Louise, a fellow disciple at Vineyard. We tied the knot one week after we both graduated from Cal Poly in June 1984. The two of us went on to explore how to get involved in missions. We worked with juvenile delinquents in Las Vegas and California’s Central Coast, became missionaries to the Navajo Tribe in Arizona, and eventually found our way to a church planting team in unreached Outer Mongolia.
Louise and Brian Hogan, Wedding, June 14th, 1984
The rest of that story can be found in my book There’s a Sheep in my Bathtub, ©2007, 2017.
By Brian Hogan, Disciple Making Mentors
A portion of the account above were adapted from the book
“An A to Z of Near Death Experiences” ©2015 by Brian Hogan
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