By Leonard Teel

In Atlanta’s hip community around Peachtree and 10^th Streets, ministers who want to help the young people are carrying the message into the streets rather than waiting on the youths to come to church service.

In this community of flower children, drug takers, motorcycle gangs, weekend hippies, political youths, runaways, alcoholics and addicts, religion has little or nothing to do with church buildings.

If there is any religion at all, it is a blend of belief in the mind-expanding power drugs, the heart-expanding power of love and brotherhood, and a sense of community which is aroused every time the police make arrests.

Religion in the hip community varies greatly in its forms—from the slightly organized atmosphere of a Sunday service at the Twelfth Gate Coffeehouse to the ritualistic exercises of white and black magic.

“At some young age they quite believed what their parents told them,” the Rev. Bob Sprinkle, 24, explained on a recent Sunday after a service at which none of the ten worshippers could be described as “hippies.”

Rev. Sprinkle is a Methodist minister whose services at The Twelfth Gate, 36 10^th St., N.W., are perhaps the most formal in the community. The worshippers are greeted with a glass of lemonade and then sit around a long table and recite the liturgy and tell what it means to them.

In his upstairs office, Rev. Sprinkle explained the difficulties of reaching the more than 1,000 young people in the “street culture.’

“They have very different symbols systems,” the young minister said.

“They look to acid, and to sex, not to money. But they need models—the rock singer, the political activist, the guru or the person with a religious image who kinda passes it along.”

Many of the young people have rejected the churches of their parents and they must be reached through real efforts to help them, such as the free medical clinics Rev. Sprinkle offers from 8 to 10 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays at The Twelfth Gate. Eventually, he wants to help young people get jobs.

“They do sit up and take notice when they see people trying to deal with the community’s problems,” he explained. And the funny thing is that they don’t see any evidence that the churches are helping this community—nothing, he added.

Rev. Sprinkle is responsible for an area bounded by the expressway on the west, Charles Allen Drive on the east, 17^th Street on the north and Ponce de Leon Avenue on the south-an area containing about 25,000 young adults in non-family situations, including college students, country people, employed persons and the more than 1,000 in the street culture who live depending on someone else and are here today and perhaps will be in Florida tomorrow.

Rev. Sprinkle admits that he doesn’t have complete freedom in reaching the hippies at their level. While many of the young people freely denounce the established church, Rev. Sprinkle tries to work within the establishment improving its communications with the young.

Another minister with more freedom to operate is the Rev. Overton Hasrcourt (Harky) Klinefleter, 31, of the United Church of Christ who is buying a house at 529 Elmwood on the east side of Piedmont Park.

Here he attracts a few young people for Sunday evening services and from here he launches his efforts to help the street people in various ways.

“I am meeting the people where they are at, in their main crisis—arrested and in jail,” Rev. Klinefelter explained. “This has become a major occurrence in the lives of most hippies. So I’ve been going into the jails and trying to clean up the jails.’

Meanwhile, as a chaplain to the street people, Rev. Klinefelter said he is trying to support efforts to build up the society “through nonviolence…” Recently he joined the hippies in denouncing what they called police “brutality” during a rock music concert in Piedmont Park.

Klinefelter believes there should be “no distinction between the clergy and the laity” and he often wears dungarees and old clothes as he talks to young people.

“My feeling is that if you’re honest you are what you are and they’ll accept you for this—if people know that you love and care about them, you can tell them anything. Until they know this, you can’t tell them anything. I’m in there to help and the word gets around.

“In demonstrations, on the other hand, I wear the clerics (uniform) to say that religion is on the side of the movement as well as the establishment.”

A graduate of the Yale Divinity School, Rev. Klinefleter intends to stay in the hip community for “a long length of time.” The house he is buying cost $21,000. Sometimes he attracts only six or 12 persons to a Sunday gathering, sometimes 50. “We really think, seriously, where two or more are gathered in Christ’s name there the Church is.”

Working with even less restrictions than Klinefleter, is 21-year-old Tom Tuttle, who came to the hip community form Pittsburgh three months ago, decided he could help young people and became a minister in the loosely-organized Universal Life Church. In this church, a member becomes a minister by sending in the appropriate application card.

I’m talking to a lot of people about my belief in God—God is love,” explains Tuttle, whose main aim is to talk and not to convert, he stresses.

Tuttle may be closer to the problems of some of the street people because he is one of them, more so than Rev. Sprinkle or Rev. Klinefleter. Tuttle, for example, has tried some of the mind-expanding drugs such as acid. He calls it the “most powerful truth serum” and says it’s the young person’s inability to face such potent truth that causes problems in drug-taking.

“I warn them what the hang-ups are, the fact that they can flip out,” Tuttle says. “I tell them that if you’re going to take it, understand if things go wrong I’m here to try to help you.”

For Tuttle, God is a person who doesn’t punish and forgives everything. He says this is something that the young people understand and something that their parents fail to appreciate.

Where did the hip people get their religion? “They got it from their parents,’ Tuttle says. “They only thing about it —and what is hard for the parents to understand—is that the kids understand their parents’ religion more than their parents do.”

One young man who rejected his parents’ religion is Charley Stennett, 21, who dropped out of Georgia Tech after three years and lives in an old three-story house on Spring Street. He has searched for truth in the Eastern religions including Zen.

“I don’t have a religion,” Stennett explains, “It’s a sort of attitude.”

Peace, community, a responsibility for others at least in a narrow area, and a lack of concern for the things of this world-these are some of the attitudes prevalent in the hip community, as one Catholic priest sees it.

“I don’t think there is a theological movement,” the Rev. John Mulroy, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, explains. “It’s a revolution, a revolting.”

The Catholic Church itself has no ministry in the hippie community, but Father Mulroy says it works through ministers already there.

If this is a revolution, then the most extreme revolutionaries may be the young persons experimenting with black magic and the white magic that tires to control black magic.

“They won’t speak about it,” Tuttle says of the three practitioners, two boys and a girl he knows. “It’s a power thing-power to control, or protect. To admit that they have this power mean that they’re on an ego trip, to brag and then they’ve committed a ‘black’. I believe it exists very much. I’ve seen some strange things happen-levitation, astro projections of a body across the country or in another room.’

“My philosophy,” Tuttle says, “destroys both white and black magic because it doesn’t want to hurt either.”

For many youths, religion for the time being is as simple as sex or the next dose of acid or heroin, or the sound of their motorcycles roaring.

“We start with where they’re at,’ explains Rev. Klinefleter, “and work from that, rather than superimposing upon them any sort of structure. Again—the main concern has been people and not property.”

In following this line of thinking, the ministers in the hip community have begun creating a sort of “ministry in the streets” which differs from the established churches in that there are few or no buildings, seldom any offerings, no formal congregations, no strong efforts to convert sinners, and very relaxed forms of worship.

“I had to be free,” Rev. Klinefleter says, “to do whatever I considered to be God’s will—regardless of what the establishment through.”