It began among young people the church had written off. Hippies, runaways and drug users on the California coast started turning to Christ in numbers no one planned for. Pastors like Chuck Smith opened church doors to barefoot converts, and baptisms were held in the Pacific with hundreds wading in at a time.
Coffee houses, communal houses and street papers spread the message, and a new kind of worship music grew out of it — simple songs written on guitars that eventually reshaped how much of the church sings. Time magazine put the movement on its cover in 1971.
Its legacy is large and mixed: whole denominations and church-planting movements grew from it, along with contemporary worship, while some of its leaders fell hard. What it proved is difficult to argue with — that a generation dismissed as unreachable was not unreachable at all.