Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. . . . You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Like many brand-new believers at the time, Greg never got the memo that continuing to use drugs was probably not a good idea. A few days after his conversion, he was wondering if anything spiritual had really happened to him. He went with some friends to a canyon to smoke dope. It was like a hundred other times; he would think great thoughts and realize later that they were nothing. But life as usual, dull as it was, seemed like it might be preferable to the strange new world of being a Jesus person.
But then a strange thing happened. For no apparent reason, the pot had no appeal. It seemed pitiful, like a cheap substitute for something he really wanted. He didn’t need it anymore.
Greg pitched his pipe, and his dope, as far as he could into the woods.
It wasn’t as if a preacher had jumped out from behind a tree and confronted Greg about the perils of reefer madness. It was that same low-key but sure nudge that he had felt at Harbor High School. Something was different about him now.
A day or two after that, he went to his first church service. He hadn’t been to any church except with his grandparents when he was young. He had dim memories of long hymns, longer sermons, and lots of old people in sparsely filled pews.
When he got to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, the parking lot was full of cars. Most of them had bumper stickers with cheerful messages like “Have a nice eternity!” and “Things go better with Christ!” Inside, the sanctuary was as packed as the parking lot. Most of the people had big, fat Bibles; they were teenagers and hippies and businessmen and moms and kids and everybody in between. They filled the seats, the aisles, and the extra chairs that had been set up.
An older guy came up the aisle toward Greg. He was an usher, but Greg didn’t know what a church usher even was.
“Welcome, brother!” the man said. “I can find a seat for you.” He took Greg all the way up to the front, where he could squeeze in on the first row.
Not good, Greg thought. No way to escape.
The music was like he’d heard at the little Bible study on his high school campus. Simple, but strong and pure, and everyone was singing their hearts out. People were putting their arms around each other, hugging, and some had tears in their eyes. The guy and the girl on either side of him put their arms around his shoulders, called him “brother,” and welcomed him in.
Greg had never seen anything like it. He’d come from a home where his mother had never, ever sincerely told him that she loved him. She never hugged or embraced him in any way. He’d protected himself for as long as he could remember with a shell of cynicism. He never hugged anyone. And he could smell fakers, users, and liars in a moment.
But here, there was nothing but a huge tide of love from all these people who accepted him, and each other, sincerely. It was real. It was terrifying. It felt absolutely wonderful.
But all good things must come to an end. Eventually the beautiful worship music was over, and then a bald guy with a big smile came out with a Bible.
Oh no, thought Greg. Here comes the adult.
For him, adults were the people he got in trouble with in the principal’s office, or the staff at his military school when he was young, or the flashy men who hung around his mom in bars. Adults were not to be trusted.
Chuck Smith sat down on a stool and began to talk. He was energetic but not theatrical. He spoke in an easy baritone voice in clear, understandable terms, not confusing religious language. He made sense. He seemed like a doctor, or maybe an airplane pilot or a favorite uncle: someone who was in charge, someone you could trust. And when he talked about Jesus, Greg felt more and more intrigued. This was what he wanted. This was what he’d been looking for without even knowing it. He wanted to learn and really understand about Jesus. He had a feeling that everything else would fall into place after that.
After that first worship service, Greg began to get the hang of his strange and wonderful new life. He couldn’t wait to go to church, and fortunately for him, there were services there four nights a week. On other nights there were Bible studies or opportunities to get together with new friends and go out to tell people about Jesus.
He didn’t want to dabble with the dark side anymore. Drugs, sex, foul language, cutting other people down . . . it was actually a relief to let go of the things that now had no appeal. Growing up as he had, he had seen enough of “the world” for a lifetime. When church kids would cuss at school in order to seem cool around non-Christians, or experiment with drugs or alcohol, he wanted to hit them upside the head. That stuff is absolutely dead, he’d think. Why are they even messing around with it?
It’s worth noting that Greg would think the same thing almost fifty years later, wondering why some contemporary pastors, perhaps in an effort to appear culturally relevant, would brag about knocking back shots with celebrities, or cuss while giving a sermon, or engage in behaviors that, if not dangerous to them, might well cause others to stray. Greg wasn’t puritanical about alcohol or cussing; he just felt like they didn’t do a whole lot to honor God, and their negative effects far outweighed any potentially positive justifications.
Seventeen-year-old Greg felt a great sense of acceptance and unity at Calvary Chapel. He didn’t realize then that it had not come naturally to many of the longtime attendees of the church. When hippies and long-haired kids had first arrived, the older people hadn’t felt a natural sense of acceptance, and Chuck Smith had to shepherd them from their cultural preferences to biblical thinking. “The ‘straight society,’” Chuck said later, meaning “those from traditional backgrounds, simply found these excited young believers too far outside the norm to be welcomed with open arms and hearts.”1
Chuck’s traditional churchgoers expected conformity, respectability, cleanliness, and decency. They saw kids wearing everything from Native American tribal headgear to hippie accessories that clearly had come from a folk planet in outer space. The adults felt threatened. They worried that their own squeaky-clean Sunday school kids would fall under the influence of the counterculturists. Some equated differences in style with character deficiencies, and concluded the hippies were therefore freeloaders who needed to change their clothes and change their attitudes.
As is usually the case in churches, the dissension came from just a few individuals who fanned the flames. One such man’s attitude changed after a Saturday when a group was working together to rehab the old school building on Calvary’s property. To his surprise, the hippies worked hard, sweating in the summer sun as they pulled old tiles off the roof. By the end of the day, some of them had blistered, bleeding hands, but they just kept on working, singing choruses and joking together.
The church member realized that, yes, someone needed to change. Him. Something hard in his heart melted, and from that evening onward, he became one of the most ardent defenders of the hippie Christians.
Another skeptic, a well-known surgeon in the area, did not hide his disdain very well when he found himself sharing a packed pew with hippies one Sunday morning. He spent the opening hymns alternately checking his watch and staring in derision at the long-haired young man next to him. He could not wait for the church service to be over. Then it was time for the congregation to stand and read a Bible passage out loud. The surgeon did not have a Bible with him. The shaggy hippie nudged him and handed the surgeon his worn, well-read Bible. The surgeon gingerly took the Bible like it was full of infectious disease.
But then he saw that the pages were marked with handwritten notes and color highlighters. There was underlining everywhere, and exclamation points. This Bible was well-loved . . . and the surgeon felt the conviction of the Holy Spirit as he thought of his own hygienic but unmarked Bible at home on the bookshelf. I’m the one who is wrong, he thought. I am sorry!
As those crucial early weeks of cultural collision continued, the Holy Spirit worked on the church people’s hearts, and so did Chuck Smith. He called a meeting. “I don’t want it said that we preach an easy Christian experience at Calvary Chapel,” he told his flock,
but neither do I want to see us fall into the mistakes made by [churches] 30 years ago. They unintentionally drove out and therefore lost an entire generation of young people with their philosophies: no movies, no dancing, no smoking, etc. Their brand of gospel yielded disastrous results. We won’t make this mistake at Calvary. We will instead trust God and place the emphasis on the work being accomplished in individuals by the Holy Spirit. This approach is both exciting and natural if the Spirit is given the opportunity to direct change in people. We need to avoid demanding conformance to a Western Christian lifestyle of short hair, clean-shaven, appropriate dress. The change will occur from the inside out.2
Chuck Smith’s understanding of cultural Christianity was the key to Calvary Chapel’s Jesus Revolution. Today’s version of cultural Christianity is different. The things that shocked nice, churchgoing Christians in 1970 now seem tame. But the point is the same. Whether church members flinch at outer appearances like long hair or hippie dress or tattoos or any form of clothing, they need to take care to discern their own inner habits of the heart that might be less overt and more conventionally acceptable. The pursuit of money. Career success. Prestige or popularity. Passions like prejudice, drugs, food, drink . . . today, as in 1970, idols come in all forms, and they must fall before God Himself. If Christianity takes on the subtle values of the culture around it and adopts these as forms of faith, then there is no Jesus Revolution. Just religion. And religion cannot change or liberate any human soul. It just imposes a new form of slavery.