Hippie minister Arthur Blessitt visited every country with his 4m cross

The long-haired American evangelist made a record 60,000km pilgrimage around the globe bearing a four-metre wooden cross.

American Baptist pastor Reverend Arthur Blessitt carries his cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan during his epic pilgrimage.

Most people have a metaphorical cross to bear, but Arthur Blessitt had a real one.

It was four metres tall and two metres across, made of wood, and over the course of half a century from 1969 the American evangelist joyfully bore it to every country in the world, preaching as he went.

He carried his cross up mountains, across deserts, through jungles and countless war and disaster zones, into Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War, and even into North Korea.

He claimed to have been arrested 24 times.

He was, he said, chased by elephants in Tanzania, confronted by baboons in Kenya and attacked by crocodiles in Zimbabwe. He narrowly escaped being injured by a bomb in Northern Ireland during the early years of the Troubles.

He was abused and embraced, shot at and pelted with stones as he talked, or sought to talk, to all those he encountered along the road.

Blessitt didn’t just meet the poor and lowly. He also spoke to political and religious leaders including George W. Bush, Pope John Paul II, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Bob Dylan, Billy Graham and Menachem Begin.

Arthur Blessitt reaches St Peter's Square in Vatican City in December 1979. Picture: Getty Images

Road warrior

“My church and congregation are out there on the road. That’s where my home is,” Blessitt would say.

“Some people see me and shout, ‘You’re a nut!’. I say ‘That’s all right. At least I’m screwed on the right bolt’.”

In Zanzibar in June 2008 he completed his goal of carrying his cross to every nation, large inhabited island group and territory in the world – more than 320 in total.

A few years after that he entered Guinness World Records for the longest round-the-world ongoing pilgrimage – 64,751km and counting.

Once, on Mount Sinai in 1977, he had thought of stopping. But, he said, he prayed and Jesus told him: “I’ve called you to the common man, with peasants of the world, to sweat, walk in the rain, smell exhaust fumes, sleep on the road. Go! I want you to go all the way.”

Roving pilgrim Arthur Blessitt makes his way Down Under along the Midland Highway.

Humble beginnings

He was raised in Louisiana, where his father managed a cotton farm.

As Blessitt told it, he “accepted Christ” at a revivalist meeting when he was seven, and was called to preach at the age of 15.

He was ordained as a 20-year-old student at a Mississippi Bible college, and became an itinerant preacher in the mountain states of the western US before arriving in Los Angeles at the height of the counterculture movement in 1967.

Along the way he married Sherry Simmons, a nurse, just three weeks after their first date. They would go on to have two daughters, Gina and Joy, and four sons – Joel, Joshua, Joseph and Jerusalem (who were all given the first name Arthur).

Reverend Blessitt carrying his cross and Bible at Mascot in September 1976.

His Place on Sunset Strip

In LA, Blessitt opened a Christian refuge called His Place next to a bar on Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

He began preaching in clubs and bars, and ministering to hippies, drug addicts, the homeless and runaways. Long-haired and sandalled, he spoke in the argot of the time.

“You don’t have to drop pills to get loaded,” the “Minister of Sunset Strip” would proclaim. “Jes’ drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Christ is the ultimate, eternal trip.”

Blessitt made his original wooden cross to hang on the wall of His Place, but he would take it out on short walks around Hollywood.

Jesus then told him, he claimed, to carry his message to “the highways, roadsides, where the people are”.

On Christmas Day 1969, he set out to walk across the country to Washington DC – a journey that took six months – and after that he just kept going.

He said he “heard the voice of Jesus calling him to walk to every nation”.

Preaching the word in Amsterdam in July 1983.

Cross roads

That first cross weighed 50kg, but he later built himself a lighter one that weighed just 20kg and could be dismantled so he could take it on planes.

To its base he attached a small wheel, so he could put the cross over his shoulder and pull it quite comfortably. A stickler for statistics, he reckoned the tyres on the wheel lasted 3000km on average, and his boots 750km before they needed resoling.

Over the subsequent decades he walked through what are, or were, some of the world’s most dangerous countries: Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon and Cuba.

He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan with his cross. He also took it to Moscow for five days shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He then traversed the formidable Darien Gap jungle between Colombia and Panama before crossing Africa from west to east – a journey that took almost two years.

He was allowed into North Korea in 2008, but only for a symbolic walk on the street outside his hotel.

Those walks “put me in touch with people in all their hurts, pain, struggles, dreams, wars, happiness, hunger, greed, generosity, hate and love”, he said. “Sometimes I feel the cross is the lightest weight I bear.”

Political run

In 1976 Blessitt mounted a quixotic bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, stumping the snowy roads of New Hampshire and winning all of 800 votes in that state’s first-in-the-nation primary.

He divorced his wife in 1990 and married his second, Denise Irja Brown, later that year.

Brown accompanied Blessitt on his trips, usually driving ahead of him in a vehicle. As he walked, he handed out stickers proclaiming “Smile! Jesus loves you”.

He slept wherever he found shelter, and financed his travels through donations and selling books, CDs, stickers, T-shirts and playing cards on his official website.

Blessitt and his wife settled in Denver, Colorado, but he continued his “cross walks” well into his old age, sometimes live-streaming them.

He announced his own death with a message on his website he had presumably written in advance.

“I, Arthur Blessitt, have completed my walk and mission on Earth,” it read. “These feet that have walked so far on roads of dirt and tar will now be walking on the streets of gold.”

THE TIMES