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COSTA MESA, Calif. — Chuck Smith had already been a pastor for years when he and his wife, Kay, began to notice the colorfully clad beatniks mingling along the streets of Orange County. The pastor, who bucked denominational trends to found Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, was sure of one thing: these peace-loving kids were too far gone to invest much energy.
“My first impression was ‘Dirty hippies, why don’t you get a job?” he said, reminiscing behind a large oak desk. “Kay’s (impression) was ‘Poor kids, they are lost and they need Jesus.’ I knew that was so, but I didn’t think they were reachable.”
Those were the post-“Leave it to Beaver’ days of free-flowing love, booze and drugs among a young generation that had little tolerance for authority and the establishment. Smith was content focusing on those whose priorities were the reverse. Then he met one of his daughter’s college friends. The clean-cut young man carried a Bible and loved the Lord. His focus was centered on the drugged-out youth that Smith believed were untouchable. Smith remembers being impressed with the man’s effectiveness in preaching the gospel.
He was even more impressed when the young collegian whipped out his driver’s license, which boasted long hair and a beard. The college student, Smith discovered, was a former regular at Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco district that was ground zero for the hippie movement.
“To see him now clean-cut and in college, it was the realization of ‘Hey, the Lord reached this kid’ and to see what he was to able to do caused us to realize they were reachable,” the pastor said in a wide-ranging interview about his book and life’s work in the ministry. “All we had to do was listen to them and show them a better way.”
Marked by grace
That picture of grace underscores much of Smith’s six-decade ministry of the gospel. The willingness of the Smiths to minister to a segment of the population that was as popular as the biblical Samaritans propelled phenomenal growth—numerically and spiritually—for his Orange County congregation.
The Smiths’ work with the hippies is just one of the highlights in a new biography by Smith and his son, Chuck Jr., called “Memoir of Grace.”
Forty years after the emergence of what would become the Jesus Movement, Smith—now at age 82—admits it was his work with hippies that ranked among the most gratifying times of ministry.
“They were searching, searching for love, they were searching for peace,” he said. “These were the two big issues of the hippie movement. It was a quest for love and peace. Thus the gospel we had was an easy fit. It’s just to let them know that God is love and that (with) the peace of God, there is no real peace outside of God,”
Smith, dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt that complemented a bright pink orchid plant anchored at the end of his desk, said the disillusionment brought on by a series of events, including violence at an infamous New York music festival, rendered many of the impressionable young hearts soft.
“This whole façade of peace brother and love brother collapsed,” he said, adding that the incidents at Woodstock created a “great disillusionment for the kids who felt that they had discovered the peace and the love. We were fortunately there to pick up the pieces and to show them that the true love and the true peace came through God and God sending his son Jesus.”
His own disillusionment
Smith was no stranger to disillusionment himself. Raised in a strong Pentecostal home and church, the young pastor-in-training earned a reputation for being a renegade as he questioned some of the teachings of his childhood church. His intense love of the Word propelled him to question spiritual gifting practices within the church. He felt the sometimes-free-wheeling emphasis on the emotional elements of the Pentecostal services was usurping the importance of the Scriptures, sometimes relegated, he believed, to second-thought status. More than 10 years into ministry, while studying Romans, Smith said he got his first taste of the liberating concept of grace.
“I grew up in legalism, so the message of grace really resonated in my own heart,” he said. “It really spoke to me in a very powerful way. We need to know the grace of God because I don’t think that any of us live up to the potential and to what God would have us to be. We have all come short of the glory of God and thus, until I really understand the grace of God, I’m going to be in condemnation.”
As Smith grew in grace and wisdom, the Lord blessed his ministry as the congregation outgrew numerous facilities. As they waited for their current church home on South Fairview to be completed in the early ’70s, the congregation met in a large circus-style tent that sat 2,000. They outgrew the temporary shelter in short order, eventually adding several services. By the time their mission-style sanctuary, featuring the tile and block accents that were popular during its 1973 construction, the church immediately added a second service. A third service soon followed.
Smith said they started a radio ministry to help ease some of the demand for space at the church. It didn’t quell the demand for seats. In the years since, the sanctuary was renovated three times to accommodate the growth. For a time the church considered building a 5,300-seat auditorium, but Smith said they opted for a warmer, more intimate setting. Instead, Smith sent some of his well-equipped leaders off to other neighborhoods to start congregations in various communities.
Today, Calvary Chapel has 1,500 fellowship congregations across the United States and even more abroad.
Labeled a rebel
While grace is the common thread that links each chapter of his memoir, it’s also clear from his writings that even as a young pastor, Smith was not afraid to challenge traditional thinking. Frequently labeled a rebel, Smith was often years ahead of his peers and many of his denominational leaders. He admits, with a chuckle, that he’s stubborn.
That realization helped forge his own ministry philosophy early on as he decided to leave the comfort of denominational security by launching a church more in line with his personal views on the gifts of the spirit, evangelism and expository Bible teaching. The local congregation, he argued, was better equipped at knowing how best to respond to the people it was serving. Financially supporting another layer of church government and its requisite paperwork diluted the essential resources of the local body, he reasoned.
So, as he sent young pastors off to establish their own local bodies, Smith nixed the traditional denominational format to create loosely affiliated church bodies he calls fellowships.
“I didn’t want control; I didn’t want responsibility,” the surf-loving pastor said. “I want to teach responsibility and teach them to recognize that I can’t be looking over their shoulder. I can’t monitor them. They need to know that God is looking over their shoulder. And God is monitoring their lives and ministries.
“I’ll fellowship with you as long as you are walking in fellowship. Then, in the moment you want to walk in another direction, you are free to go. We’re not going to try to hold on to you.”
Standing apart
Smith also departed denominational company with his view on personal evangelism, a distinctly different view than the Pentecostal approach of wrangling sinners into church to expose them to get-’em-saved revivals. By teaching people the Word in an expository style, Smith reasoned, believers would bring their own lives in line with the Scriptures without guilt-ridden, grace-squelched browbeating from the pulpit. So he began teaching Romans from the pulpit, verse by verse.
“At the end of that first year, we had more people saved, more people baptized than any year in my ministry and so I began to realize that this being pastor-teacher, the effect of it was even greater than through evangelism.
“Trying to be something that God didn’t make you is very frustrating. When I came to the realization that God had gifted me and called me as a pastor-teacher, then I was comfortable. I was fitting the niche.”
Even so, Smith readily uses his book to share a variety of failures that emerged doing his ministry as a way to show added dimension to his discovery of grace.
“The Lord humbled me through the many years of failure and taught me that my best efforts produced almost zero as far as success, but it brought me to the place where God then began to give success. There was no way that I could even imagine it had anything to do with me.
“The wonderful thing is that in mentoring young men today for the ministry, I’m able to help them to avert such a long process that it took me. I see that as a real plus. I think if I had not gone through it, I would not have the experience. I could not have guided them from the pitfalls I fell into.”
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