The Times They Are A-Changin’ is the title of one of Bob Dylan’s best-known songs, which was written in 1964. Four years later, the youth uprising that was to change the Western world in a fundamental way broke out. Leftism (a mortal sin for the ideologies of the ‘Christian right’), rebellion against the system, violence, but also flower power pacifism, drug abuse (including powerful hallucinogens), excessive or deviant sexuality, nonconformist appearance (jeans, boys with long hair) and the other things that characterised this movement scared the ecclesiastical establishment. The young people who met Christ in the wake of this movement (the so-called ‘Jesus people’) were most often rejected, like a foreign body, by traditional churches.

Where Was the Church When the Youth Exploded, wondered pastor Stuart Briscoe a few years later, in a book unjustly forgotten. Each of these excesses, Briscoe argued, was a cry of despair, but the chur...