Jesus Movement

The Jesus movement was an Evangelical Christian movement beginning on the West Coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s and spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America, before subsiding by the late 1980s. Members of the movement were called Jesus people, or Jesus freaks.

Its predecessor, the Charismatic Movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both of these movements were calling the church back to a closer Biblical picture of Christianity in which the gifts of the Spirit would be restored to the Church.

The Jesus movement left a legacy of various denominations and other Christian organizations, and influenced both the development of the contemporary Christian right and the Christian left. Jesus music, which grew out of the movement helped influence and create various musical subgenres under the late 20th and early 21st century contemporary Christian music such as Jesus Culture and Hillsong in America and the UK. This also led to new instruments such as the guitar and drums to be included throughout churches all over the world in addition to the traditional pianos and organs. Music in other parts of the world were also greatly influenced by the Jesus Movement, such as Central America and the UK. In Central America, Pentecostal churches under the Charismatic Movement began to compose spiritual music called "coros" (fast paced hymns) which is normally accompanied by dancing in the Spirit.

The terms Jesus movement and Jesus people were coined by Duane Pederson in his writings for the Hollywood Free Paper. In an interview by Sean Dietrich on August 19, 2006, Pederson said that he did not coin the word "Jesus people" but gave credit to a magazine/television interviewer who asked him if he was part of the "Jesus people" and thereafter credited Duane as the phrase's founder. The term Jesus freak was originally a pejorative label imposed on the group by non-Christian hippies, but members of the Jesus movement reclaimed the phrase as a positive self-identifier. The Jesus movement was partly a reaction against the counterculture from which it originated.

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