MS. JODY CARTER (Charismatic): I grew up a Methodist, and I thought they were all nuts. I mean, what are all these people doing? They are singing and they are dancing and they are waving flags around.

MS. JUDY DORSY (Charismatic): I had never been exposed to anyone at church that acted the way these people were out there, and I came home and I said, "These people are crazy."

PROFESSOR MARGARET POLOMA (Charismatic): Here I was with the Ph.D., getting sucked into this movement that seems too, not rational. But I began to see the world differently.

LUCKY SEVERSON: So many say they were skeptics until they were "filled with the spirit." Now they are "praising the Lord" in churches all over the country. At last count, there were over 20 million Charismatics in the U.S. Many converts are immigrants, especially Hispanics, and an increasing number are from white-collar, professional neighborhoods, traditionally populated by more orthodox Christian churches. There are still skeptics and critics, of course, but even they cannot deny the pull and the attraction of the Charismatic movement.

REVEREND ROBERT LIICHOW: There is just a whole different emphasis and I think that explains the growth of the Charismatic movement. We are this generation that seems far more experiential in our makeup.

PASTOR CHARLES SCHMITT (Immanuel's Church, Maryland): Why don't we pray for you?

SEVERSON: This is Pastor Charles Schmitt of the Immanuel['s] Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has 3,200 believers from 65 countries. Pastor Schmitt came for a conservative Dutch Reform background, until he "found the spirit" and held his first Charismatic service in his living room.

PASTOR SCHMITT: Why are people searching so, almost frantically now? Well, people are looking for reality, they're looking for life. They're looking for something other than just stagnation. And I don't mean to impugn any other group, but sometimes the longer a church is around the more formalistic it becomes, and the more irrelevant it becomes.

SEVERSON: Margaret Poloma is a sociology professor at the University of Akron, a Catholic turned Charismatic.

PROFESSOR POLOMA: Growing up Catholic, I certainly heard about healing, but I never saw any. I certainly heard about experiencing God, but that was left for the saints. And what this movement is saying is that everybody can have these experiences.

SEVERSON: This is a Charismatic healing mass at St. Veronica's Catholic Church in Hopewell, New Jersey. There are as many as half a million Catholics attending Charismatic services in Catholic churches nationwide. This is Father Brendan Williams.

FATHER BRENDAN WILLIAMS (St. Veronica's Catholic Church): Primarily, a Catholic Charismatic is somebody who has come alive in their faith.

SEVERSON: And it's not only Catholics -- there are Charismatic Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, 'most every Protestant denomination.

FATHER WILLIAMS: It can be expressed emotionally, but it is something deep in the spirit that brings about a sense of calm, a sense of peace, and that takes away that tension, anxiety, worry.

SEVERSON: Forty years ago, outsiders might have called them Holy Rollers, or Pentecostals. Today the terms "Pentecostal" and "Charismatic" are usually interchangeable, with Charismatics leading the way, and being led by preachers who are not always schooled in theology. Reverend Robert Liichow says one of the reasons he left the Charismatic movement was because too many pastors have little or no theological education. Reverend Liichow has become a vocal critic of his former religion, and established his own Web site to, in his view, set the record straight.

REVEREND LIICHOW: We learned in seminary that many of the things that we used to believe were not biblically sound. So we have begun to take a very close look at what many of the national and international Charismatic ministers are teaching as biblical truth.

SEVERSON: Many new disciples say it's not so much the theology that attracts them to the movement but what they call "the gifts of the Holy Spirit." Nothing is more important to Charismatics than the experience of "being born again," or "filled with the spirit," and it doesn't always take place during baptism. It can come anytime, and for Charismatics it is the "key" to the kingdom of heaven.
This young woman is being "slain by the spirit" -- a ritual that usually occurs at the end of a service. Even for the onlooker, it's a mesmerizing experience. For the believers, one, they say, that can change their lives. Others who have experienced "slaying" are skeptical.