History of Calvary Chapel
(Excerpts taken from Harvest by Chuck Smith)
"Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord." (Zechariah 4:6)
As I describe to you the explosion of church growth that happened in the Calvary Chapel movement, I speak as a spectator. If there is any credit to be given, it belongs to God alone. If you understand this perspective, then when I describe to you my difficult years, my desert years, you will know why I stand in awe at what God has done. And you will celebrate with me the awesome symmetry of God's design. It leaves us all stunned and amazed.
Those pictures in Look, Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines of our massive Calvary Chapel baptisms in the Pacific Ocean resemble a human harvest field. Literally thousands of people can be seen crowding the shores waiting to be baptized.
It has been estimated that in a two-year period in the mid '70s, Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa had performed well over eight thousand baptisms. During that same period, we were instrumental in 20,000 conversions to the Christian faith. Our decadal growth rate had been calculated by church growth experts to be near the ten thousand percent level.
Perhaps more staggering still is that when we first came to Calvary Chapel church in Costa Mesa in 1965, we had twenty-five people our first Sunday morning.
A Most Unlikely Prophecy
During the era when I was still a member of a denominational church, a group of us would meet for prayer together. One of us would sit in the chair and the group would lay hands on him and pray. As I was sitting in the chair with the group praying for me, there came a word of prophecy in which the Lord said that He was changing my name. The new name He was giving me meant "Shepherd," because He was going to make me the shepherd of many flocks and the church would not be large enough to hold all of the people who would be flocking to hear the Word of God.
Then there was another prophecy that followed some years later. The discouraged group down at Calvary Chapel had met to determine whether to call me to minister or to disband. As they were praying, a word of prophecy came to them that I was going to come, that I would seek to remodel the church immediately, that I would be remodeling the platform area especially, that the church was going to be crowded to where it could not contain all of the people. The congregation would then have to move to the bluff overlooking the bay, and would eventually develop a national radio ministry, and become known around the world. A more unlikely prophecy could not have been uttered to sixteen discouraged people ready to quit and throw in the towel.
Through these experiences I have learned that God is working out a foreordained, prearranged plan. He is directing every turn and facet of my life, if I will only look to Him for guidance.
As Far As the Eye Can See
In the wilderness of Galilee, where the plains meet the mountains folding in upon them, there is a beautiful but brief phenomenon. For just a few days every year, beginning one early spring morning, you can look out on what had been a plain, and see a meadow covered with a canopy of wildflowers extending as far as the eye can see - poppies, lilacs, buttercups, all radiating color and dancing in the wind. It literally happens overnight.
One morning Kay and I looked out into the California streets and on the beaches, and we beheld another radiantly colorful sight: human forms, extending as far as the eye could see. The countercultural revolution of the '60s had begun, and the new citizens were the hippies, "heads," and trippers. Their colorful outfits belied the deeper problem that they represented. God was trying to tell us something, as we looked out on that field. We faced the problem of a gap of culture and thought that stood between our generations. I was brought up in old-world piety compared to the fast-track rebellion of the hippies. How could my wife and I cross this gulf?
The Lord clearly impressed on our hearts, Reach out in love. Now we knew that love could never be contrived with a group as sensitive and perceptive as that one. So, to quote my wife, we saturated the air with prayers. She organized late-night prayer groups and morning prayer groups. It seemed that Kay and her friends were praying all the time. Meanwhile I prayed with elders and some church members. Before too long, we both felt a quiet change in the air, an excitement just beneath the surface.
Kay and I could feel growing inside our hearts, almost independent of our own efforts, a growing burden of love and concern from God for these young people. With love would come the necessary understanding. Then we would be equipped to minister to the real needs of these estranged youths. Could this be what God had been preparing us for all these years? Were we looking at fields rich with harvest, dislocated souls ripe for almost anything from Buddha to Christ, and only waiting for the chance to commit their lives? The cultural shift had happened quickly between our generation and theirs, like the wildflowers suddenly appearing on the Galilean plains. How could we penetrate it?
Kay and I would often drive to a coffee shop in Huntington Beach and park our car. We would sit and look at those kids and pray for them. Where others seemed to be repulsed by these dirty, long-haired "freaks," we could only see the great emptiness of their hearts that caused them to turn to drugs for the answers to life that we knew only Jesus could supply. But how to reach them?
Then one day it happened. We met several youths who were hippies, yet they had a different glow on their faces. They were Christians, converted in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district through a communal ministry called “The House of Acts”. They were perfect representatives of their generation, having been to all the "Human Be-Ins" in Golden Gate Park, Grateful Dead Concerts, "acid tests," Merry Pranksters events, Whole Earth Festivals, and communal experiments. They had done it all. Then one day they saw the bottom of the elevator shaft within their own souls. They glimpsed the ultimate emptiness of their pursuit, and finally called upon Christ to be the center and Lord of their lives.
We invited a couple of these youths to move into our home with us in Newport Beach. They soon moved some of their friends in as well, and it became sort of a communal house for a while. Our four kids accepted them and we began to understand their disillusionment with the church and the adult world that they called the Straight Society. They had lost all faith in any values that had preceded their generation. They took it upon themselves to find newer and higher spiritual truths and begin a revolution.
As the numbers of new believers grew, we realized that we had to find a place for these converted hippies to live. For we could not send them back to the hippie communes, knowing that they were not yet strong enough to resist the temptations of free sex and drugs that abounded there.
We started establishing Christian communal houses to hold them. The initial house elders came from the group that Kay and I had put up for a while. Their own zeal was contagious as they shared the rich truths of their newfound faith. By their zealous sharing about Jesus to those on the beaches, in the parks, and on the streets, they filled the area with the reality and truth of Christ.
Overcoming Barriers of Prejudice
Ironically, the only resistance we encountered to this move of God came from the church itself, those from our midst who had grown up with church backgrounds, those from the "Straight Society." This sudden infusion of rebellious youths met predictable opposition.
Our challenge was to overcome what most churches had not, namely their insistence on respectability, conformity, and a judgmental attitude toward anything that departed from the norm. Many of our members rallied to the challenge, feeding off the zeal of the hippie converts. But there were still some who resisted and disdained these newest members of our church who showed up with long hair, bells on the hems of their jeans, bare feet, and who otherwise looked like wildflowers in their great diffusion of dress inspired by American Indian or Asian tribal styles. It was wildly creative. But it was also threatening, especially to those with young children who did not want them emulating the hippies.
I told (some members):
"I don't want it ever said that we preach an easy kind of Christian experience at Calvary Chapel. But I also do not want to make the same mistake that the Holiness Church made thirty years ago. Without knowing it, they drove out and lost a whole generation of young people with a negative no-movie, no-dance, no-smoke gospel. Let us at Calvary not be guilty of this same mistake. Instead, let us trust God and emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit within individual lives. It is exciting and much more real and natural to allow the Spirit to dictate change. Let us never be guilty of forcing our Western Christian subculture of clean-shaven, short-hair styles or dress on anyone. We want change to come from inside out. We simply declare that drugs, striving to become a millionaire, or making sports your whole life is not where true fulfillment or ultimate meaning lies. Because the end of all these goals is emptiness and disappointment."
Perhaps this involves interesting symbolism, but I think that the last barrier to go in our church was the "bare feet" barrier. When we got beyond that, we were home free. The pivotal incident centered on a wide expanse of brand-new carpet that we had just put in. Those who had been inwardly protesting the hippies finally found a target upon which to vent their discontent. Dirty feet soil carpets, and these carpets cost a lot of money. Besides, who wants to see dirt marks on a brand-new carpet? They took it upon themselves, early one Sunday morning, to hang up a sign reading, No bare feet allowed.
For some reason I happened to reach the church earlier than usual, and was in time to takedown the sign. It was sad to see division over things this trivial. It was also sad to see what really lay behind the outward demarcations of division: a “we / they” polarity instead of love. This time, I was the one to call the board meeting.
I spoke from my heart to the board:
"In a sense it is we older established Christians who are on trial before the young people. We are the ones who told them about James 2 and I John 4:7. The kind of action we displayed today puts a question mark across our faith. When things like this happen we have to ask ourselves who or what it is that controls and guides our motives.
"If because of our plush carpeting we have to close the door to one young person who has bare feet, then I'm personally in favor of ripping out all the carpeting and having concrete floors.
"If because of dirty jeans we have to say to one young person, 'I am sorry, you can't come into church tonight, your jeans are too dirty,' then I am in favor of getting rid of the upholstered pews. Let's get benches or steel chairs or something we can wash off. But let's not ever, ever, close the door to anyone because of dress or the way he looks."
Calvary Chapel jumped over that last hurdle. We were ready to move ahead.
Harvest Field after Harvest Field
Before too long, I was sending people out to plant other Calvary Chapels in other parts of California as well as across the country. Many of the people we sent out were youth extracted from the very counterculture that our "no bare feet" barrier would have prohibited. What a tragedy that would have been if we had closed the doors on them! I am sure that the flow of God's grace would have gone from a gush to a trickle if we had been that shallow.
If after all my years of struggle in God's crucible, I had not learned the lesson of following God's desires instead of man's traditional ideas, and to offer Christ's love instead of respectability and conformity, I like the salt would have been worthy of being cast upon the road to be trodden under foot. For I believe in God's eyes that I as a servant would have lost my "saltiness."
Instead, I saw the Calvary Chapel explosion of grace rise beyond my wildest dreams. Costa Mesa planted numerous Calvary Chapels, many of which have attendance that numbers in the thousands. The great work of God's design that I see here is that He has chosen as His ministers men who at one time were absolutely hopeless by society's standards.
God has opened the floodgates and shown us harvest field after harvest field. We have learned that if we do not erect any barriers, and if we surrender our lives to Christ's purpose, there seems to be almost no limit to His grace. I watch this, and I stand back amazed. A day does not pass that I do not rejoice in my heart and thank God from the very bottom of my heart. It makes every moment of my desert years worth it, and I can say with the apostle Paul, "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." I have been very fortunate to see some of these fruits in my own lifetime, especially when much greater men such as Abraham believed far greater promises and yet saw almost no sign of their fulfillment during their time on the earth.
Now I can see, looking back, that all of these moments in the wilderness of my life that had seemed so hopeless, when I felt hard pressed against the rock of despair, were worth every moment of blind struggle. God was teaching me and preparing me for His harvest by His own timetable and logistics, not mine! I could never have seen it in a million years when I was at that church of seventeen wondering whether or not God wanted me to stay in the ministry, I am thankful that His ways are not our ways, nor are His thoughts our thoughts. He can do far more through us than we would ever allow ourselves to dream.
| 
