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Prophetic Template
It has become fashionable for more recent generations of Christians to rubbish the 1960s. It requires neither intelligence nor much effort to stereotype others...and to caricature all those who were in their youth at that time, as having been a bunch of dope-smoking, left-wing, sexual profligates.
But in fact the 60s was a decade when the whole Church all over the world was graced with an extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit...and subsequent revival and reformation. (It is usually remembered as the Charismatic Renewal Movement.) At the same time, during the 1967 Middle East Six-Day War, a re-unified Jerusalem was restored to Jewish guardianship and jurisdiction (1), and an indigenous, Jewish Church began to be born in The Land.
So, from every possible point-of-view, it was an exceptionally prophetic time, which now begs the great question: Did we "see our signs"? (Ps 74.9) Or are we much like our faith-forefathers and well able to "interpret the appearance of the earth and sky", but wilfully ignorant about how "to interpret the present time". (Lk 12.56)
One usually overlooked aspect of the "revolutionary" 60s was a hunger for community, which was felt by both religious and secular young people. Churches impacted by the Charismatic Renewal Movement - and its restoration of the Holy Spirit and His Gifts to their rightful, Biblical place (2) - sought to create opportunities for Believers to live outside the traditional, nuclear-family. Sincere attempts were made to create a life together, which resembled in some respects traditional religious and monastic communities.
At the same time, secular young men and women tried to form "communes" (urban and rural), moved by an almost inarticulate yearning and drive for a way of living, other than the one they had inherited or had thrust on them by conservative convention.(3)
I believe that this universal stirring was from God, and a most powerful and necessary reiteration of what had already been prophesied to us concerning the Last Days by the Confessing Church in Germany during the Third Reich.
In the 1930s, after Hitler had successfully taken control of Germany's "throne", he set about the subversion of its "altar". This was entirely to be expected because the Fuhrer (while not antichrist himself) was a very powerful manifestation and expression of that spirit, which always "opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship". (2 Th 2.4) The Nazis made sure that in the 1933 German Evangelical Federation's election of key leaders, their "men" (Nazi Party members and devotees) won!
