09/09/2026
It started with $300, six weeks, and one professor's question over a seminary cafeteria breakfast: "There ought to be a Christian alternative to Woodstock."
In March 1970, Dr. Bob Lyon asked that question to a group of Asbury Theological Seminary students. They had almost no budget, no big-name artists (contemporary Christian music barely existed yet), and six weeks to pull something together. They printed flyers on brown paper using the school newspaper's press, booked mostly local folk musicians, and picked a name off the fish symbol early Christians once used to secretly identify each other — Ichthus. Some business owners in town were nervous enough about drugs and hippies that they held meetings about it behind closed doors.
On May 9-10, 1970, about 350 people showed up to a campground in Wilmore, Kentucky. Afterward, celebrating at Dr. Lyon's house, somebody asked, "Why don't we do this again next year?" Nobody had planned on that question mattering. It became the whole thing.
What began as three modest goals — see if they could pull it off, see how many people would come, and try not to get run out of town — grew into what's often called the longest-running Christian music festival in America, drawing tens of thousands of people to that same Kentucky field for four decades.
Did you ever make the trip to Ichthus — or a festival just like it? What's the one moment from a weekend like that you still carry with you?
