Now that I’m getting back to writing, having published my new book (Ready or Not: The Tribulation, the Rapture, and the Second Coming of Christ) a few days ago, I decided to look back at my first book – Berkeley Journal: Jesus and the Street People, a First-hand Report. I was a street missionary in Berkeley, CA (some call it Berserkeley) one summer between my second and third years of seminary, aged 23-24, and had been a Christian for only about two years when I took on this assignment. What an incredible impact this summer mission experience had on my subsequent life and ministry.
Having been raised and educated in small southern towns in Virginia (Bedford), West Virginia (Bluefield), and North Carolina (Davidson), being in Berkeley for me was in some ways like being on another planet. I knew it was going to be an incredible mission experience, so I decided to write a journal of my summer experiences. When I got back to seminary in the Fall, I decided to try and get my journal published. I paid another student 25 cents a page to type it (I had never learned to type), then asked the campus librarian what the biggest and best publisher in the country was. She said, “Harper and Row.”
So, here’s what I did – I kid you not: I put my manuscript in a shoe box and sent it to Harper and Row, and they took it! Blew my mind! I had to do some work on it, and Cheri typed the final manuscript. (We had just gotten back from our honeymoon when we found out they were going to publish it.) Anyway, I hope you don’t mind my reminiscing a bit. If you’ve read this far, I thank you. I received some good reviews on the book, and Young Life magazine (or Campus Life, I forget) did a condensed book section of my book in their magazine. It was also published in England.
A couple of weeks ago, out of curiosity I searched on Amazon for a used copy and found one, accompanied by a very encouraging review. Here’s the review, posted on Amazon, written about four decades after I wrote the book:
(Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2013 by Thomas J:“Really Great!!! (5 stars) “Although it is pretty short at just 109 pages, this is definitely one of the better Jesus People Movement books from the period, and I’m really glad I ran across it. The author was in his early-to-mid twenties when he wrote it, and it has a certain amount of youthful awkwardness and stridency to it, as one might expect of a journal (especially one written during the tail-end of the Berkeley “Hippie” period of the early 70s.) Still, the book is remarkable for just how well-written and how un-self-important the author portrays himself.
“Compared to Blessitt, Pederson, Chuck Smith etc (nothing wrong with them per se, but they were definitely self-promoters, to varying degrees), Ford is practically egoless, ha ha. Okay, maybe that’s not fair to the other guys mentioned. Still, this book is the genuine article, and Ford is, IMO, a fine Christian. In it, groups such as the Children of God and the Christian World Liberation Front are mentioned by Ford merely in passing. The real meat of the book is when we meet specific individuals: Alabama, Mark, Sam, Smith, Blue, Cheyenne et al. These real people are discussed, and made even more real, by Ford’s writing: Ford makes us care about them. We even learn of the Satanist “Mal”, who was described so well by Ford that I realized he was actually “Sal”, who appears in the short “Jesus People Film” of 1972 (look for it on YouTube.) At any rate, I highly recommend this book: buy it and see what you think.”