PITTSBURGH — The yellow suspension cables of the Roberto Clemente Bridge cut across the sky like guitar strings, and beneath them, on a bank of the Allegheny, a small crowd was gathering one summer evening a few years back. 

A young man descended into the river fully clothed. Then a woman. Then another man. On the shore, hands were raised. Some people were crying. Some were laughing. Music played in the background. A pastor lowered them one by one, beneath the surface of one of the three rivers that define the shape of the city.

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It looked spontaneous. Almost accidental. In a way, it was both.

It was the beginning of something that has now grown large enough that, on the last Sunday of August this year, more than a thousand people came to Point State Park to worship. Even more to get deeply baptized. Baptisms in the river went on for more than two hours.

Even onlookers along the bridge, or those enjoying a day of boating or fishing in the river, looked on with respect and amazement. 

It is a movement that has grown, from that first baptism a few years ago to now spilling onto the University of Pittsburgh’s football field, into the Petersen Events Center, and into the beds of pickup trucks parked at revival services that draw thousands of young people. 

In its own quiet way, it is part of a broader story about how a generation of Americans is finding its way back to God. Yet it is a story that many of the country’s biggest surveys and cultural gatekeepers are still struggling to see.

The pastor at the center of it is Jason Howard, who leads a nondenominational church called The Sanctuary in the city’s Strip District.

Howard said that the first river baptism was a bit of an improvisation.

“A number of years ago, we were renting a venue for church on Sundays, before we had our own building,” Howard said. “The venue wasn’t available for a particular Sunday, so we had church outside at the Point as a last resort. People felt so compelled by worshipping in the center of the city that we kept being asked to do it in following years.”

On one of those outdoor Sundays, his phone rang on the drive down to the Point.

“A couple who had recently accepted Jesus and started coming to church called me while I was on the way to the Point for that evening’s service and told me that they needed to be baptized because they wanted to solidify the change that had happened in their life,” Howard said. “I told them to come to the Point that evening and we’d find a way to do it.”

Someone had arrived at the service by boat. Howard asked to borrow it, motored out into the current, and pulled the couple into the river with him. What was supposed to be one baptism, or maybe two, became........

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