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The Pastor Who Downscaled

It is a safe thing to trust Him to fulfill the desires which He creates.

Amy Carmichael

Chuck Smith was thirty-eight in the mid-1960s. That made him old. He was a comfortable-looking, unremarkable guy with a big smile and bushy eyebrows. Back when he was in high school in Southern California he’d been a promising athlete and an excellent student; he was offered a full football scholarship to the Naval Academy. He’d thought about going to medical school. He was gifted with his hands; he knew how to fix things.

But though he had promising paths open to him, Chuck Smith was a man who wanted, foremost, to do what he believed God was calling him to do. He’d grown up listening to his mother read the Bible; he sensed that God wanted him to be a pastor. So he went to a small Bible college and learned the Scriptures forward and backward. He might not accomplish great things in a worldly sense, he thought, but he just wanted God to use him.

Little did Chuck Smith know God would in fact use him in a small cultural explosion called the Jesus Revolution.

Early on, Chuck had found that being a pastor was frustrating. There were years of slow growth, if any, in the little Foursquare Bible churches he led in Corona, California. His denomination wanted him to be successful. Chuck wanted to be successful. For a dynamic superachiever, it was hard. Regardless of all the well-constructed sermons he preached and all the zippy contests and membership drives he started, his churches just weren’t growing.

Then one day, while he was preaching, Chuck looked out over his congregation . . . and he suddenly realized he knew everybody sitting in the pews. And there was not one single unbelieving person there. It hit him: the church wasn’t growing because no one in the congregation was bringing friends or neighbors or coworkers or random acquaintances with them on Sundays. They were all just talking to themselves, over and over.

Chuck switched from preaching on random, catchy topics to teaching through big sections of the Bible, pouring the Word of God from the pulpit. He started in the Gospel of John, unfolding the Jesus story as John had laid it out in the first century. He and his wife, Kay, started holding Bible studies in their home. Dozens of people showed up, hungry to hear the Bible laid out in clear, applicable ways.

The Bible study people flooded the church. Chuck’s congregation soon doubled in size.

Chuck had heard somewhere that preaching through the book of Romans would transform any church. So he began to preach verse by verse on Romans, the apostle Paul’s great declaration of the gospel. The first thing Chuck discovered was that the book of Romans transformed him.

“I really discovered grace,” he said later. “I had been trying to serve God by works. I had been trying so hard to do everything right and obligate God to bless me. But of course you can’t earn blessings. Then I began to recognize the goodness and blessings of what God has already done.”

God’s grace changed Chuck Smith . . . and it changed his church. People were excited enough about the gospel to actually invite their friends to come to church to hear it.

Then, while the church in Corona was growing and the future looked bright, Chuck Smith sensed God calling him to do something that was as counterintuitive as his earlier decision to go into the pastorate rather than become a doctor or a football star. A dwindling little church called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, invited Chuck to come on board. When Chuck told Kay that he was actually considering this downscale move, she thought he was joking.

But God was up to something.

Chuck, Kay, and their four kids moved to Costa Mesa in December 1965. The church had peeling paint, squeaky floors, and a less-than-professional mural painted on the side wall of the dingy baptistery. Its thirty members had pretty low expectations. But over the months, Chuck carefully made some changes in those expectations.1

He brought order to charismatic expressions in public meetings. The church had a few individuals who tended to burst forth in unintelligible, uninterpreted utterances on Sunday mornings, which would have confused visitors, except any visitors had already been scared away. Chuck laid out guidelines that would limit such things to that which was understandable and in order. He changed the church’s habit of begging and lecturing regarding members’ giving practices. He created a more welcoming atmosphere in terms of plain old handshaking friendliness. He created a robust appreciation of the great hymns of the faith and the importance of music in worship.

But most centrally, Chuck focused on preaching the Word of God clearly and passionately. Week by week, as he exposited its clear and whole gospel of grace, the church started to grow. As they had done in Corona, Chuck and Kay hosted Bible studies in their home. Within eighteen months, the church had quadrupled in size. The overflowing building had been painted, cleaned, and spruced up, reflecting the new energy in the congregation.

Still, the growing church was pretty homogenous. There were nice ladies wearing pastel dresses with matching pocketbooks and nylons with sensible, low-heeled pumps, businessmen outfitted in black suits and narrow ties, and small, clean children in their Sunday best. The gathering looked pretty much like churches in suburban America had always looked: a reflection of the prevailing values of the still-conservative culture around it.

To speak generally, maybe the good people in many American churches at the time were a bit like the people Jesus Christ encountered in His own place of worship about two thousand years earlier.

Soon after Jesus started His public ministry in Israel, He went back to his hometown, Nazareth. On the Jewish Sabbath day, He went into the synagogue, just like He always did when He was home. Jesus looked like a hippie—okay, back then everyone looked like a hippie. As was the custom, Jesus stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. The synagogue people weren’t expecting anything new, just the comforting structure of the familiar: the ancient promises of the prophets, the assurance that they were the chosen people, and the confidence that God was on their side.

And then the words came rolling down like thunder:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.2

Then Jesus took it further. The good news He was announcing wasn’t just for the good people sitting in the synagogue, He said. It was for foreigners, non-Jews, and outsiders. The gospel wasn’t about life-as-usual comfort for the holy club. It was a revolution.

This did not go over well with Jesus’s first-century friends in Nazareth. They rose up in a fury, hustled Him out of their synagogue, and tried to kill Him.

It wasn’t as if Christians in mid-1960s American churchianity wanted their churches to be exclusive clubs. Believers earnestly wanted their families and friends and neighbors to come to know Jesus. But still, many churches were homogenous bastions of clean-cut social externals, not always focused on being open communities of love and good news for the poor, sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

But something was about to happen, right in 1960s America, and right in Chuck Smith’s little, but growing, church.

In the words of another Old Testament prophet, Joel, old men were dreaming dreams, young men were seeing visions, and God was about to pour out His Spirit on His servants, both men and women.3 The result would be a spiritual earthquake.

Most people know about earthquakes and their aftershocks. Foreshocks are less familiar. They’re the phenomena that herald the arrival of an actual quake (which is known, of course, as the mainshock). Some scientists believe that foreshocks are part of the earth’s process prior to nucleation. A small event triggers a larger one, then a larger one, cascading toward the big one. Other models show that foreshocks relieve the stress of the actual earthquake before it arrives.

Perhaps the mid-1960s was a time of foreshocks. The big eruptions in US culture hadn’t quite peaked yet, but the tectonic plates of social norms were shifting, and the friction was growing stronger. Even as thousands of pastors like Chuck Smith were faithfully preaching the gospel in their churches across America, the serene 1950s landscape of American faith and culture was groaning and changing. Some sort of earthquake was coming.

The first blip on the cultural seismometer involved the Beatles. No surprise there. On March 4, 1966, a British writer named Maureen Cleave interviewed John Lennon at his Tudor home outside London. Lennon’s house was outfitted with concert memorabilia, posters, black carpeting and purple wallpaper, a full-size crucifix, a gorilla costume, a large Mickey Mouse doll, a medieval suit of armor, and an extensive library. Lennon had works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley, as well as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the 1965 bestseller The Passover Plot. The last hypothesizes, among other things, that Jesus meticulously planned His life and crucifixion to reflect Old Testament prophecies. Then He orchestrated a plot to be drugged on the cross so He could be taken down before He actually died and then revived later by His friends. (This plan was foiled by the Roman soldier’s spear to His side.)

Lennon had been reflecting on religion, and in the course of Cleave’s interview, he said in passing:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.4

When the interview was published in Great Britain, there was little response. A few months later, however, a US teen magazine called Datebook quoted the comments, and there were violent reactions from mainstream America. Protests broke out; some radio stations stopped playing the Beatles’ songs. Churches and civic groups sponsored public burnings of the group’s albums. An Alabama radio station urged listeners to send their Beatles records and paraphernalia to the station to be destroyed with an industrial grade tree-grinding machine temporarily known as the “Beatle-grinder.”

These protests came at the same time as the Beatles’ US tour in August 1966. Activists with signs proclaiming “Jesus loves you, do the Beatles?” and “Beatles, go home!” showed up at press conferences. John Lennon bitterly remarked that he should have just said “television is more popular than Jesus” and he would have gotten away with it. Paul McCartney called the outcry “hysterical, low-grade American thinking,”5 and a lot of young people agreed with him.

Still, commercial concerns—as in concert and record sales—demanded that John Lennon make an apology, which he did. Sort of. But the hysteria led, in part, to the Beatles’ weary decision to quit touring. They could pursue new creative heights as a studio-only band and not have to bother with the stubborn whims of the mainstream.

Around the same time, progressive theologians weren’t too worried about whether Jesus or the Beatles were more popular. They had a different axe to grind, one that was popularized on the cover of Time magazine. In dramatic red and black graphics, the magazine called out to people from the newsstands, “Is God Dead?”

In 1966, this was a shocking public question. American civil religion had been alive and well for decades, and people who had no personal relationship with God fondly regarded Him as American as apple pie and the Fourth of July. Nonetheless, Time reported, “a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches accept the fact of God’s death and get along without him.”6

An additional 1966 development showed, for those who noticed, yet another rip in the fabric of the cultural religion that had buoyed America through the 1950s. In San Francisco, a former circus performer named Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan.

LaVey might as well have come from Central Casting. He shaved his head—this was back when no one shaved their heads and most cool people were trying to grow their hair down to their ankles—and wore a black goatee. He posed for photos with snakes, capes, and pentagrams, and lived in an all-black Victorian house with special rooms set aside for black masses.

A book called The Devil’s Party noted that “LaVey created a belief system somewhere between religion, philosophy, psychology, and carnival (or circus), freely appropriating science, mythology, fringe beliefs, and play in a potent mix.”7

During his circus days, LaVey had specialized in magic and hypnosis. He was entertaining; it’s no surprise that a sprinkling of Hollywood entertainers, like Sammy Davis Jr. and Jayne Mansfield, along with hippies and other curious counterculturalists, came to his gatherings. After Mansfield was nearly decapitated in an awful late-night car crash in 1967, some said that LaVey had cursed her.

LaVey confided to a friendly neighborhood pastor named Ed Plowman that practitioners of actual, supernatural Satanism were in fact “nut cases.” He told Ed that he was an atheist, using Satan as a symbol to help people deal with guilt-ridden consciences. Nevertheless, LaVey knew how to butter his bread. He wrote a number of books, including his Satanic Bible, was a regular on the talk show circuit in the late ’60s and ’70s, fell into financial difficulties as his dark star waned, and eventually faded from the scene.

These 1966 cultural cracks in America’s wholesome façade—Lennon’s claim, Time magazine’s question, and the temporary popularity of a guy like Anton LaVey—all pointed to something that was actually positive, at its root.

Many Americans were no longer willing to swallow conventional churchianity that was just part of a God-and-country type of mind-set. Established, easy-answer norms were cracking, and some were even crashing down. Some people, like Anton LaVey, were just cynical mutineers, of course. But many cultural revolutionaries—and the millions of young people who followed them—were sincerely searching. They longed for what was true, real, and transformational.

The question was, would their search take them on the wide, bright highway with the abrupt dead end, or to a narrower path that in fact led to a whole new life?