There are certain subjects I have avoided here on Becoming Orthodox like the medieval villagers avoided the plague cart.

Not because the subjects are unimportant, but because there are some matters that cannot be approached in 1,200 words without immediately summoning a small army of corrective emails.

• If one writes briefly about church history, someone informs him he forgot the Montanists.
• If one mentions worship music, another appears to explain that David used harps.
• If one raises even the mildest question about modern Christianity, yet another fellow arrives carrying seventeen Bible verses and the emotional intensity of a man defending the Alamo.

So over time I have learned to speak in a sort of historical shorthand. One has to. Essays are not doctoral dissertations, and Substack readers, mercifully, do not wish to spend fourteen hours wandering through footnotes like medieval monks in a library cellar.

Yet prompted by one of my dearest readers, I thought I might finally touch upon a moment in twentieth century Christian history that quietly reshaped the worship life of the Western world.

I have lectured on this topic at academic conferences, though this is my first attempt to address it here on Becoming Orthodox. So buckle in.

The year was 1967.

And if one were to ask the average Roman Catholic, Evangelical, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, or non-denominational Christian what was historically significant about 1967 in regards to Christian worship, most would likely stare blankly before returning to their latte.

Yet I would argue that few years altered the worship culture of Western Christianity more dramatically than 1967.

The story begins, oddly enough, not with Baptists in Texas or Pentecostals in California, but with Roman Catholic college students in Pittsburgh.

At Duquesne University, a small group of students had been reading The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson. Inspired by the Pentecostal spirituality of the book, these students began gathering for prayer meetings where several participants reportedly began “speaking in tongues.”

Now to modern Christians this may not sound especially revolutionary. But historically speaking, it was astonishing.

For nearly nineteen hundred years, the public phenomenon of ecstatic speech, prophecy, and utterances believed by some to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit had almost universally been treated with suspicion by both the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.

This is something many modern Christians simply do not realize.

Throughout church history, whenever fringe sects emerged claiming new prophetic revelations, ecstatic experiences, or supernatural utterances, the historic churches usually responded not with enthusiasm, but with caution. Often it was very severe caution to say the least.

• The second century Montanists were condemned.
• Radical Anabaptist groups during the Reformation were denounced.
• The Shakers, with their trembling worship and prophetic utterances, were viewed by not only by Roman Catholics as schismatics, but nearly all the Protestant Anglicans and Presbyterians viewed them as eccentrics at best and heretics at worst.

Even after the Protestant Reformation, the mainstream Protestant world remained remarkably traditional in its understanding of worship.

Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Reformed Christians may have argued fiercely over sacraments and predestination, but they all broadly shared the assumption that Sunday worship should be orderly, restrained, and historically rooted.

Then came the nineteenth century Holiness movements.

And then over time, out of Methodism and the Nazarene movement emerged revivalist traditions that increasingly emphasized emotional religious experiences. Camp meetings, altar calls, ecstatic prayer, and emotional conversion narratives became central features of American Evangelicalism.

And eventually, on New Year’s Day in 1901, a woman named Agnes Ozman reportedly spoke in tongues at a Bible school in Topeka under the leadership of Charles Fox Parham.

Modern Pentecostalism was born.

Now Pentecostalism grew rapidly. One cannot deny that. It spread across poor communities, storefront churches, tent revivals, and eventually the global South. But for much of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism still existed largely outside what most Protestants and Roman Catholics considered “historic Christianity.”

A Presbyterian in 1940 did not suddenly begin waving his hands during worship because of Pentecostalism.

A Roman Catholic parish in 1950 did not replace Gregorian chant with folk guitars because of Azusa Street.

Pentecostalism remained, in the eyes of many traditional Christians, something slightly outside the respectable boundaries.

But 1967 changed everything.

And strangely enough, the group that would ultimately normalize charismatic spirituality across Protestant America was the Roman Catholic Church.

There is a deep irony here.

Even now in 2026, many Evangelicals still speak about Roman Catholicism with suspicion or disdain. Yet without the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a Roman Catholic College, much of modern Evangelical worship culture likely would not exist in its present form.

The students from Pittsburgh carried these prayer meetings back home with them. Soon gatherings sprang up at U of M in Ann Arbor, at Michigan State University in Lansing, and at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

From those college towns, the movement spread outward into the Midwest, and eventually across the USA, and then overseas throughout Europe.

At first these were not church services in the formal sense. They were usually evening prayer meetings. Young Roman Catholics gathered together in homes, dormitories, and fellowship halls to pray, sing folk-style worship songs with guitars, and to speak in tongues.

And like nearly every religious movement in history, the personalities soon became as important as the theology.

The most charismatic people naturally drifted toward leadership. Young men and women with confidence, magnetism, and a desire to guide others slowly became the unofficial authorities of these gatherings. The emotional atmosphere of the 1960s hippie movement merged with religious fervor, and before long guitars, spontaneous prayer, raised hands, and emotional worship became the defining aesthetic.

Then something even more significant happened.

Protestant college students started attending.

Presbyterians. Lutherans. Episcopalians. Baptists. Evangelicals.

And eventually the Protestants began outnumbering the Catholics.

In places like Ann Arbor, some Roman Catholic priests tolerated speaking in tongues during Sunday Mass, but in most Roman Catholic parishes the sentiment from the priests was usually “Do that at your prayer meetings, not in church.”

So influential was the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that the Pope over in Italy ended up blessing the movement and saying it was of the Holy Spirit.

It was once the movement spread beyond explicitly Catholic settings, many of the distinctly Catholic elements quietly faded away.

Prayers to the saints disappeared. Marian devotion faded into the background and sacramental language softened.

What remained was a spirituality centered on emotional worship, ecstatic experience, spontaneous prayer, and contemporary music.

And once detached from specifically Catholic theology, the movement exploded across Protestant America.

By the 1970s the floodgates were fully open.

Chuck Smith embraced the Catholic Charismatic Renewal within Calvary Chapel in California, but of course he dropped the first word in the title, ‘Catholic’, as did other Protestant Evangelicals and they began simply referring it it as the “Charismatic Renewal”. More or less erasing from history the fact that it’s origin was with the Roman Catholics in the Midwest.

Figures like Pat Robertson, Derek Prince, Kathryn Kuhlman, Bob Mumford, and Ern Baxter attached themselves to the movement in various ways.

And in 1977, roughly 50,000 men and women gathered at Arrowhead Stadium for a massive charismatic renewal conference bringing together Roman Catholics, Protestants, Pentecostals, and Evangelicals.

Speakers included Roman Catholic priests, Lutheran clergy, Pentecostal pastors, and even Maria von Trapp, whose family story had inspired The Sound of Music.

It is difficult to overstate how revolutionary this was.

For centuries Western Christianity had been fiercely divided. Catholics and Protestants argued over authority, sacraments, salvation, saints, ecclesiology, and virtually every theological subject imaginable.

Yet suddenly enormous numbers of Christians discovered a new commonality through charismatic worship.

Not through the Eucharist.

Not through apostolic succession.

Not through councils or creeds.

But through shared emotional religious experience.

And this experience transformed Sunday worship itself.

Prior to the charismatic renewal, most Protestant and Catholic services across the Western world would have looked broadly recognizable to Christians from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Hymns accompanied by piano or organ. Formal liturgy or structured preaching. Choirs wearing robes. A sense of reverence and continuity.

Then almost overnight came guitars, drum kits, keyboards, amplified sound systems, praise choruses, and eventually full rock-band aesthetics.

The culture of the 1960s entered the sanctuary.

And it never left.

Today, the largest Evangelical churches in America often resemble concert venues more than historic churches. Worship is built around lighting systems, sound stages, emotional crescendos, and carefully engineered musical experiences. Entire industries emerged around Contemporary Christian Music. Hillsong Church and modern worship brands reshaped the soundscape of global Protestantism.

Even traditionally conservative Protestant churches like Anglicanism, Lutheranism and Presbyterianism gradually absorbed these patterns.

Now one commonly finds mainline churches offering an “8:30 traditional service” and an “11:00 contemporary service.” Which usually means one service imitates the late nineteenth century, while the other imitates soft rock radio

.And this is where many young adults begin asking uncomfortable questions.

Because eventually someone notices something strange.

If this style of worship is truly the restoration of ancient Christianity, why did it not exist for most of Christian history?

Why do the early Church Fathers not describe worship bands, spontaneous tongues, or emotionally driven praise sessions?

Why does a Christian from 1850 recognize the structure of Orthodox liturgy more easily than the structure of modern Evangelical worship?

The deeper many people dig into church history, the more they discover that much of what modern Christians consider “normal worship” is actually astonishingly recent. Even the use of instruments in Christian worship was frowned upon by the early church.

The earliest Christians inherited a form of worship shaped by the synagogue traditions of the ancient Jewish world, where instruments were absent and prayer was centered instead upon chanting, psalmody, and the human voice.

For much of Christian history, worship was understood not as a concert or emotional performance, but as something solemn, reverent, and sacrificial.

This realization has become one of the quiet forces drawing young adults toward Orthodoxy.

Not because Orthodox Christians are better people. Lord knows we are not.

And not because Orthodoxy possesses perfect parish life. It does not.

But because many young people are starving for historical continuity.

Some young adults are exhausted by churches reinventing themselves every twenty years. Exhausted by celebrity pastors, stage lighting, branding strategies, and worship trends that seem borrowed more from entertainment culture than from the ancient Church.

And eventually many begin to suspect that depth is not found in endless novelty.

The charismatic renewal undoubtedly produced sincere believers. I do not question that. Many people involved in it genuinely loved Christ and desired spiritual renewal.

But sincerity and historical rootedness are not always the same thing.

One can be deeply sincere and still disconnected from the historic worship of the Church.

And this, I think, is what many young inquirers are slowly realizing.

The charismatic world often feels emotionally intense, but historically shallow. It is a spirituality born less from the first millennium of Christianity and more from the peculiar religious atmosphere of late twentieth century America.

In the Orthodox Church, by contrast, one encounters something stubbornly older.

Older than televangelism.

Older than revivalism.

Older than the worship industry.

One steps into liturgy that Christians would still recognize centuries ago. Hymns shaped by martyrs and monks. Prayers refined through suffering, repentance, and time.

Not perfect people.

But an ancient Church.

And perhaps in an age exhausted by constant reinvention, ancient Christianity suddenly feels less like a relic and more like a home.

~ Kenneth

Furthermore…..

I had hoped to post a video this morning, but I am still running a couple of days behind. As they say down here in the South: “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” I should have a new video posted by Wednesday.

To each of my readers: thank you. Over the past several months, we have been deeply involved in a major project that exists directly because of the support we have received from all of you here at Becoming Orthodox, a project born from our desire to give something back to those who have been such a blessing to our lives.

Whether you are a paid subscriber or a free subscriber, whether you share these essays with friends and family, leave a “like,” or simply take the time to read what I write, every small act of encouragement is noticed and deeply appreciated