Calvary Chapel began as a Bible study for shut-ins at a trailer park in Costa Mesa, California. The group struggled until 1965, when it hired Chuck Smith, a dynamic Bible teacher with a rousing tenor voice who pastored an independent church in Corona, some 30 miles away.
For 17 years, Smith pastored churches in the charismatic Foursquare denomination, before becoming fed up with denominational politics and bureaucratic control.
In Costa Mesa, Smith continued his signature practice of teaching through the Bible from beginning to end. Hal Fischer, a former police officer who was on the board of Calvary Chapel when it hired Smith, told CT, "We had never heard teaching like that in all our years of attending churches." The church grew, but Fischer says he could never have imagined what happened next.
Smith began ministering to hippies—a radical thing for a pastor to do at the time, says Larry Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. (Eskridge is author of a forthcoming Oxford University Press book on the Jesus movement.)
Through cutting-edge outreach, Smith and his disciples sowed seeds that in time helped transform evangelical worship and churches nationwide.
Eskridge says Calvary Chapel's influence on mainstream evangelicalism has been massive.
It was among the first proponents of contemporary worship and early on developed a seeker-sensitive church atmosphere. It influenced everything from intentional communities to Willow Creek, and it also indirectly birthed the Vineyard, which eventually formed its own association.
Fueled by the changed lives of hippie converts, Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa exploded in size. Smith's new disciples started Bible studies, which grew into churches.
"Chuck Smith was able to respond to cultural events in a very creative way," says Donald E. Miller, a University of Southern California sociologist of religion and author of Reinventing American Protestantism, a history of Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard, and Hope Chapel.
Smith's sermons traveled around the country by cassette tape; his Word for Today radio ministry broadcasted Calvary Chapel Bible teaching; and Maranatha! Music, started by Smith, recorded the hippies' Jesus-inspired folk songs.
"While Smith may not have been an innovator on a personal level, he allowed young converts around him who were extremely culturally savvy to do the innovation," says Miller.
Smith's followers, including Greg Laurie, Raul Ries, Mike Macintosh, and Skip Heitzig, started more than 50 megachurches, Bible schools around the world, camps and retreat centers, and a radio network.
Throughout Calvary Chapel's growth, Smith has remained opposed to forming a denomination. He says it promotes the power hungry instead of the spiritual.
http://calvarychapel.com/
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