SID: Mario Murillo was raised in a non-Christian home and, at 15, a friend of his challenges him to go to his church.
Why in the world did you even go?
MARIO: Especially when you consider the high school I went to was ripped by racial violence, we were torn in half, and half the time we never even had lunches on campus because of the violence, and so he knew that I was wanting to be a Marxist and I was making hateful comments about the church and, one day, he came up to me, “Friend,” and he said, “I dare you to go to church. You’re saying all these things. You have nothing to back it up. Go to church,” and that’s how it happened.
SID: What happened at church?
MARIO: I walked in and, first of all, I predicted to him there’ll be a scattering of elderly people near the front, no youth there, and I’ll walk in and that’s how it’ll look like, and that is exactly what it looked like, except for one notable exception, which was a teen from Teen Challenge in New York…
SID: Just happened to be there.
MARIO: … happened to be giving a presentation, and they… I heard someone say that they were a lifelong heroin addict. They were delivered by the power of God and baptized in the Spirit. That was all science fiction in my neighborhood, and then, all of a sudden, I heard a voice say, “I want you to preach the gospel.” Here’s the problem with that. I’d never heard the word gospel in my life.
SID: My goodness.
MARIO: I was hearing a word that I had to ask somebody about afterwards, and then what happened is the… My legs wanted to get saved, but the upper body did it, so this–
SID: I’m just visualizing, that took–
MARIO: Yeah, so I’m grabbing the top of the pew, keeping my legs at bay, holding and anchoring them to the back, and finally the Lord won, and I was dramatically converted and, within the next two weeks, I had won 14 of my classmates in high school to Christ.
SID: You didn’t even know what gospel meant. During the Jesus Movement, you’re out at Berkeley and you’re working real hard, and you’re a leader of a student outreach, but things got too tough and you wanted out. All of a sudden, you get a phone call.
MARIO: Yeah. See, our ministry won thousands of students at Berkeley. That was a shock. This university didn’t expect it. We didn’t expect it. It never happened before. We had converts from the… who were atheists, Jews from the Boalt School of Law. We had radical Islamic and radicals, Black Panthers, people from cults all saved. Ten years after that, for 10 years, we saw the glory of God, It vacated, it all, so, suddenly, it was like all of the presence, everything left, and it made me so angry that I told God I’d quit. I even wrote a note saying, a resignation letter that said, “I quit.”
SID: To God?
MARIO: It said, “Dear God, I quit,” signed Mario Murillo, and the Lord said, “Before you quit, go upstairs and pray,” so I said, “Okay, I’m not going to do that because I know how you work. If I go up there and pray, you’re going to give me a fresh mandate, and then I’m going to be a prisoner of hope again in my hometown in San Francisco,” so I go upstairs and I pray, and the Lord says, “I am going to pour out my spirit on San Francisco, California, and the whole world will look and wonder and be astounded.” I got so mad when I heard that that I threw furniture across the room. I said–
SID: You really did that?
MARIO: I did that. I bounced it off the wall, and I’m sitting there and I’m going, “That is the most outrageously cruel promise that any human being has ever been given,” and I said, “I will not carry this, not for a nanosecond unless you confirm it now,” and when the word now came out of my mouth, the phone started ringing, so I didn’t answer the phone because I knew Jesus was on the phone, see, and I’m going, “You don’t have to do that,” and I was half right because the individual on the phone was Jewish, and when I picked it up, it was… The voice said, “Is this Mario Murillo?”
I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’m Bob Dylan,” and I knew Bob’s voice. I mean, I knew his voice. He has a voice like nobody else, and I thought it was my assistant who did impersonations, so I said, “Alan, this is not a good time,” and Bob goes, “I don’t know who Alan is, but this is Bob Dylan, and I’ve just been saved, and the reason I’m calling you is because you stood at Melodyland in 1974 and publicly stated that I was going to be born again, and now here I am,” and he said, “I need a man of God who’s a wild man to pray at my concert because my fans are going to go nuts when they find out I’m a Christian.”
We talked for a while. He gave me two backstage passes. He told me where the concert was, and we were about to hang up and he said, “By the way, did God tell you he was going to pour out his spirit on San Francisco?” and I’m like… I can’t even breathe. That ended up where we miraculously rented the 16,000-seat Cow Palace Arena that had not been filled for a Christian event since 1958, and the Lord gave us 14,000 people in that arena, and 2,000 souls met the Lord. It was amazing.
SID: 2,000 met the Lord. God told Mario to study the American youth. Then he was visited by the devil, and the devil said, “I will kill them.” Back in a moment.
