In December 1965 a man in his late thirties took over a small church in Costa Mesa, California. It had twenty-five people in it.
By the time he died it had spawned over a thousand churches around the world.
Seventeen years of ordinary work
Charles Ward Smith was born on 25 June 1927 in Ventura, California. He went through LIFE Bible College and was ordained with the Foursquare Gospel church.
Then he pastored. Small churches, one after another, for seventeen years. Nothing anyone would have written down.
Eventually he left his denomination altogether, took a church plant in Corona, and in December 1965 moved to that little chapel in Costa Mesa with its twenty-five members.
He was thirty-eight years old and, by every measure anyone uses, nothing much had happened.
The decision that changed it
What happened next was not a strategy. In the late sixties, young people started turning up — barefoot, unwashed, off the streets and out of the drug scene, with nothing about them that fitted a Sunday morning congregation.
Plenty of churches made it clear they were not welcome. Some put notices up about bare feet on the carpet.
Chuck Smith let them in. When somebody complained about the carpet, the story goes that he said he would rip the carpet out before he would turn a young person away from Jesus.
In March 1968 he brought an eighteen-year-old evangelist named Lonnie Frisbee into his own home, and out of that came a Christian house where those young people could live while they got their lives sorted out.
Thousands were converted. It became known as the Jesus Movement.
Teaching straight through the Bible
His method was almost dull, and that was the point. He taught verse by verse, straight through a book of the Bible from the first chapter to the last, and then started the next book.
No skipping the hard parts. No picking a topic and hunting for verses to prop it up. Just the text, in order, explained plainly.
That is why Calvary Chapel spread. Anybody could do it. You did not need to be clever or charismatic — you needed a Bible and the discipline to keep going.
Why we point people to him
Because of who he opened the door to. He took in people the respectable churches had written off, and he did not ask them to clean themselves up first.
Our own people know what it is to walk into a building and feel the room change. He is worth honouring for that alone.
And because of the seventeen years. Nothing happened for a very long time, and he kept turning up anyway. Then it all happened at once, and it was never really him doing it.
He died of lung cancer on 3 October 2013, aged 86.
“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” — 1 Corinthians 1:27
Sources: Calvary Chapel; Wikipedia; GotQuestions.org.
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