Early ‘father’ of the Jesus Movement passes to his reward

By Mark Ellis –

Stephen (Steve O’Shea) Heefner, a successful disc jockey in the San Francisco Bay Area, who lived communally with several other Christian couples, and was a seminal influence in the Jesus Movement, passed to his reward March 21^st due to age-related complications. He was 87.

Steve and his wife Sandi, and three other couples with their children, set aside their careers, sold their belongings, and moved into a large ranch house in Novato, California nicknamed the Big House at the height of the Sixties.

Many credit their house as the birthplace of the Jesus Movement. “We were the first one I had heard of, of real families with small children and careers, dropping everything to become an evangelical arm,” Sandi Heefner told God Reports.

Evangelist Lonnie Frisbee crashed on their living room floor during the formative months of his early Christian life and grew under their influence, before he joined Pastor Chuck Smith and rode the wave of the Spirit in Southern California.

“They gave up everything, sold everything and moved in together,” Connie Frisbee told God Reports. “Many people think this is where the explosion happened. I find this story about these four couples as big as the story about Lonnie, because these people were in their twenties and had jobs. They had lives that were already moving in a direction.”

Steve was born January 8th, 1938, in Des Moines, Iowa, the third of four children. He studied journalism at the University of Iowa and then Drake University.

While at Drake, he began his career in radio and met his wife. They were married 64 years. Steve began his career with KIOA, the first Rock and Roll station in Iowa. While working at WOKY, Milwaukee, his professional name changed to Steve O’Shea, which he kept the rest of his career.

His radio career spanned over three decades as he moved his family coast to coast, working his way from small to major markets. They landed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965. “We moved a lot, every year, because of radio, to get to a bigger market,” Steve told God Reports in 2018.

They settled in Sausalito and began reaching out to make friends. Sandi went to a Newcomer’s Club put on by the city and met Liz Wise, who appeared “exotic.”

Sandi, a nominal Roman Catholic, planned a dinner party with Liz and her husband Ted, a former agnostic who had recently become a Christian. Sandy also invited Jim and Judy Doop, grade school friends from the East Bay. The three couples hit it off in a spectacular fashion.

Once they got to know each other, Ted and Liz invited friends from Berkeley, Danny and Sandy Sands, into their group.

Ted Wise had recently been tripping on LSD, trying to figure out what to do with his life, when he met Jesus Christ and was born again. Some credit Ted as being the first convert of the Jesus Movement.

“Ted began to talk about putting something together that would further Jesus Christ into ordinary lives,” Sandi recalls. “We started discussing this thing and decided we would have potlucks together.”

Then the idea progressed to finding a house where they could live together – including the seven young children between them.

Sandi was initially wary about communal living, but God gave her a sign in the night sky on a camping trip that confirmed she was supposed to be part of their experimental community.

They decided to live like the Book of Acts, and some referred to their commune as the House of Acts.

People in the neighborhood began to notice. “The word got out in Novato that there was a hippie community so we attracted all the teenagers from Novato,” Sandi says. “So every day after school there would be a bunch of kids sitting in our living room wanting to know what was happening. There was magic in the air. We witnessed to them about Jesus. On Friday nights the house was jammed with teens, the Lord brought the crowd. Many souls were harvested.”

As the four couples and their children settled into the Big House in 1967, an unusual social phenomenon was taking place that summer in San Francisco. Thousands of young people in hippie attire were converging on the city’s Haight Ashbury district.

“We started taking donuts on a Friday night into San Francisco because so many kids were coming into town,” Steve said in 2018. It turned into street conversations, with the couples witnessing for Christ.

The need was so great, they decided to set up a mission in the city that became known as

The Living Room. “The Living Room was a little storefront,” Connie Frisbee recalls. “It was one block down off Haight on Page in what is called the Panhandle.” Several churches in the area provided support to help them get started.

The four women in the Big House made a huge batch of soup using a baby bottle sterilizer and the men carried it into the city in the morning and it was given away for free. “People would come in and chat and have soup. One day Charles Manson came through and that was rattling. He was just a weird kid that came to lunch.”

“You never knew when you woke up that morning where God was going to send you to minister that day,” Sandi says. Sometimes they would go to Market Street or Golden Gate Park to spread the Gospel. They would go out wherever God was leading them for the day, in twos or threes.

When the men returned to the house from their daily outreach in the city, they always had extra guests with them. The guests could stay for several days. “Every night there was a meal laid out of homemade breads and chicken enchiladas and vegetables. We brought as many people to the house as we could and witness to them,” Connie Frisbee recounts. Much of the food was donated by local stores.

“We would sit around in the evening and read the Bible, play conga drums, beat on books or maracas and worship the Lord that way. We would talk about our day with the Holy Spirit. Had God given anybody any insights? Did they read something in the Bible they didn’t understand? We would discuss and come to a better understanding of it.

“There wasn’t a set pattern. It wasn’t like every Sunday we do this. It wasn’t like that. It was really moving in the Spirit. We saw so many miracles and so many coincidences. We just knew God was doing stuff in our lives all the time.”

With four couples, seven children, plus additional guests, there were usually 20 mouths to feed every night. “We had these extra kids coming and had no income at the time. We were living on the graciousness of our Father.”

“Some of the men would get painting jobs,” Connie Frisbee recalls. “One was a cigarette salesman. Ted Wise was a sail maker. Steve Heefner was a disc jockey but lost his job because he told people he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior.”

Steve and another one of the men made $20 a week sweeping a church. “We could count on $20 a week for food,” Sandi notes. “We had a communal moneybox on the wall in the kitchen. If you got any money you put it in, and if you needed any you took it out. All four families lived on that little box. For a year and a half we never knew how we were going to be fed that day and God never missed a meal.”

The couples had surprisingly little conflict. “We were so busy evangelizing there was no time for minor skirmishes,” Sandi says.

Lonnie Frisbee arrives

Steve met Lonnie Frisbee in Haight Ashbury walking down the street. At the time, Lonnie was attending the San Francisco School of Art. “Lonnie was a spectacular character. He was an out front, open witness at that time, known on the street,” Steve said.

Lonnie was also a new believer that needed some help sorting out his theology. “They saw him telling people about Jesus on the streets, but he had flying saucers mixed in with the presentation of Jesus,” Connie Frisbee recalls. “They ministered to Lonnie and he saw the ability to be in service all the time so he moved in with them.

Lonnie began sleeping in a sleeping bag on the living room floor of the Big House. “Lonnie was very L.A. and a showbiz kid,” Sandi says. “He was ‘out there’ even for us. He did spectacular things — miracles.

“Lonnie would be driving down the road and tell somebody, ‘turn at this corner, stop at the next stop.’ There would be somebody standing on the corner that he knew when he was a child. Lonnie would jump out, and the person would get saved right there on the corner.

“It happened over and over and over again.”

Lonnie brought Connie into the Big House and she eventually became his wife. She immediately started helping with the children, the laundry, and the cooking. “She was fabulous,” Sandi recalls. “I’ve never seen hunger for the Word like Connie.”

Steve and Sandi went away one summer for an intensive Bible study on a farm in Ohio under the direction of Victor Paul Wierwille, the originator of The Way International.

When they returned from Ohio and Connie learned about their study of the Word, she began to follow Sandi around. “Every morning before I got out of bed she was dressed and sitting at the door of my bedroom with a paper and pencil ready for me to teach her. She followed me all day long, day after day. This went on day after day. She was waiting for me to get up and teach her. I never saw anybody with that kind of hunger for the Word.”

“As Connie and Lonnie hung around they ended up courting and marrying,” Steve added.

When the living room of the House of Acts filled up with young people, shoulder-to-shoulder, they asked a Lutheran church nearby if they could use one of their large meeting rooms. “They allowed us access to their church every Friday night. So we had hundreds of kids come in and many got saved there,” Sandi says.

After living in the Big House for 18 months, Steve and Sandi began to seek God about leaving. They were the first couple to depart. Looking back, they recognized they were at the forefront of the Jesus movement – the first to catch the wave. “We had to be among the first. I didn’t realize as a Catholic there was such a thing as revivals. I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t recognize it when we were living it. But years later I looked back and realized we were at the cusp of a revolution and revival.”

“We had no idea what we were doing. All we know is that we loved the Lord. Every time we got up in the morning we had no idea what he had in store for us that day.”

The other couples stayed in the house for a while, then went back to their own lives again. “We continued to minister and cooperate with each other,” Sandi says. Their home fellowships never stopped meeting until the Covid pandemic.

“We never stopped ministering and continued Bible Studies in our home. I think the country is ready for another revival. I’m hoping I get to see it. I would love to see it come back to the United States.

Steve received notice in his ministry and radio career. While working at WCSB FM in

Manhattan in 1971, his ministry was featured in the May 14th issue of Life Magazine.

He received the 1978 Award for Broadcast Excellence, winning #1 Air Personality Morning Show in Medium Market from Billboard.