Some Notes On The Great Southern California Mass Baptism of 2023
(ANALYSIS) May 28 this year happened to be both Pentecost — the third biggest holiday of the Christian year — and the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.
Earlier this year, a film had come out, called “The Jesus Revolution,” documenting the story of the rise of the Jesus movement in Orange County, California, around 1970.
It covered in some detail the experiences of Chuck Smith, Greg Laurie and Lonnie Frisbee in this time. The actual Jesus movement gave rise to two large denominations (though it took a long time before they would admit they were denominations), Calvary Chapels and The Vineyard.
(I myself was converted in 1973, but through the more clean-cut wing of the Jesus movement at Lake Avenue 4C Church in Pasadena, the West Coast sister to Boston’s famous Park Street Church.)
Anyhow, since the film had come out, and it was 50 years later, someone decided that they ought to do a mass baptism at Pirates Cove, the same place a lot of the baptisms had taken place 50 years before.
Pirates Cove is the part of the Corona del Mar Beach that faces the Newport Harbor entrance channel rather than the open ocean. It is separated from the rest of the beach by sandstone rocks that erode into sand quite easily and can be very slippery!
Californians flocked to Pirate’s Cove in Corona Del Mar, Calif., Memorial Day weekend in 2023 for a mass baptism, inspired partly by the Jesus Revolution film and history. Photos by Howard Ahmanson Jr.
I arrived just before 3 p.m., when the event was supposed to start, and the sandstone was already pretty crowded. People in red T-shirts were the staff, and they were all over, often helping people trying to get up and down the slippery sandstone.
A line of people in blue T-shirts formed out in the water; these were the pastors and others authorized to do the baptizing. I saw big numbers on cards from a distance; this was to assign people to their baptizer, a scene reminding me of the lane for a supermarket checkout.
At about 3:30 p.m., an invocation was given by someone identified as Pastor Mark. He may have been Mark Francey, pastor of Oceans in the Irvine Spectrum district, currently one of the largest churches in the county. (That statistic changes somewhat over a 50-year period.)
Volunteers help people up and down the rocks.
In his introductory remarks, he claimed that no less than 226 churches attended this event. I saw several hats with the words “West Coast Life” on them; I inquired and was told that it was a church in Temecula. I looked it up and found it is in Murrieta, a twin city of Temecula. And those towns are not on the coast! Indeed, they are an hour and a half away, on the other side of the Saddleback or Santa Ana Mountains that give Saddleback Church its name (though I’m not sure whether anyone from Saddleback Church was there).
I saw people wading out to the blue line; then they would have a few words with one of the people in the blue line; if you were lucky, you would see the actual dunking. And then the persons waded back in a very good mood. (I was too far away to get good photos on my phone.)
I decided that I was not going to try to get through the crowds and the slippery slopes to go all the way down to the baptism scene. So I propped my feet on some outcrops to either stand up or lean against the hill; but I was right next to the red-shirt people and ended up offering my hand also to some of the people trying to get down the slope; there were quite a few middle-aged and older people as well as young ones; this was not a youth event.
After 5 p.m., the wind started to come up a bit stronger; the sun had not been shining anyhow. (May and June are a season of very little sunshine on the Southern California coast, but little rain also, so it is considered a safe time for outdoor events.)
Around 6:20 p.m., I excused myself, saying I needed to go home and go to dinner, but my friend who was in the row of blue shirts told me later that they didn’t run out of baptismal candidates till almost 7:30 p.m.!
Attendees came from many churches.
The great baptism was not just intended as an anniversary. Between the Asbury University revival earlier this year and this, some are hoping for a revival on the scale of that of the early 1970s!
“We are overdue,” they say.
And the Jesus movement of the 1970s, in both its waves, turned a noticeable remnant of my notorious generation, the baby boomers, to Christ. Not all, but a remnant. And the revival did not lift up the American culture as a whole. It happened more or less alongside all the other trends of 1970s culture.
I do hope that these events turn out to be a sign of some kind of revival in our time among the Z and Alpha generations (those under 26 now). At the very least, I would like to see the Christian nationalists and the “woke” Christians repent and come to the Jesus of the Bible and of the Christian faith.
In fact, there was only one American flag in the crowd at the baptism, and there was no mention of “saving America” (they probably had their eyes on saving Orange and Riverside Counties, a big enough challenge) and if the church could only repent of its political gospels of wokeism and Trumpism, that would be a revival indeed!
Howard Ahmanson Jr. is a California-based philanthropist and writer. He is a donor and board member ex officio of The Media Project, the parent nonprofit of ReligionUnplugged.com. In this post, he explains how housing, urbanism and the YIMBY movement became an important issue for him. Howard has been blogging since 2001, writing on land use and other economic, religious and political issues shaping culture.