The gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
A well-known adaptation of a 1902 quote by journalist Finley Peter Dunne
As Calvary Chapel continued to grow, the congregation bought a property in Santa Ana and built a grand new building on it. They had been thinking big: it could hold three hundred people. It was also decorated in the latest design trends the early 1970s had to offer: avocado-green shag carpeting and burnt-orange cushions on the pews. There were even new wooden cup holders on the back of each pew to accommodate everyone’s little plastic communion cups.
On the first Sunday in their brand-new building, the church was packed. Kids were sitting in every available scrap of floor space. Chuck Smith assumed that things would level off as the novelty of the new facility wore off.
But the next Sunday, there were even more people. More and more hippies were coming to faith, and they were pouring into Calvary Chapel. There were a lot of other new people too—judges, police officers, parents, school administrators, and others who’d been drawn in by the news that formerly troubled young people were being transformed by God, and it was happening in this church. Many of the visitors ended up staying themselves.
It was wonderful.
Still, there were problems in paradise.
The church deacons were worried: there were so many barefoot hippies attending church, and the oil from their feet was going to damage and soil the new carpeting. And shag, while popular for many reasons that are still unknown, was notoriously impossible to deep clean. To add insult to injury, the barefoot kids were hooking their toes into the communion cup racks on non-communion mornings.
The following Sunday, Pastor Chuck got to church a little earlier than usual. He was surprised to see a large sign in front of the church entrance.
“NO BARE FEET ALLOWED!” It was signed by the church board members.
Chuck nearly passed out on the front steps of his own church. He ripped down the sign. He rushed inside and eventually found the sign committee.
“Do you mean to say,” he burst out to them, “because we have this beautiful new carpet, we’ve got to say to kids that they can’t come into our church because they have bare feet?
“Let’s rip up the carpet, then!” Chuck went on. “Let’s just have concrete floors! Are we going to say to kids that they can’t come in here because they have dirty clothes, and they might mess up our nice, new upholstered pews? Then let’s just get wooden benches! Let’s never, ever, turn a person away from church!
“Think about it!” Chuck concluded. “We—the older, established Christians—are on trial. We quote Scriptures like 1 John 4:7 [about loving one another] and James 2 [about not showing favoritism for those dressed well over those who are shabby], but the actions we took today stamp a question mark across our faith. In times like this, we need to search ourselves for the motivations that are controlling and guiding our actions!”1
There were no more signs banning bare feet or anything else. The church doubled in size. The leadership decided to hold two, and then three, separate services. People sat on the patio outside.
So Chuck and his team found a huge circus tent, which was probably appropriate, and pitched it on their corner of Greenville Street and Sunflower Avenue in Santa Ana. Late on Saturday evening, before their first tent Sunday, workers were putting up the lights and lining up sixteen hundred folding chairs. Chuck said to one of his colleagues, “Well, how long do you suppose it will take the Lord to fill this tent?”
His friend laughed and looked at his watch. “We’ll know in about ten more hours, brother!”
And ten hours later, on Sunday morning, they stood and watched the people stream in. The first of their services was at 8:00 a.m. Standing room only. The same thing happened at the next service. All kinds of people, whether newly converted hippies or folks who’d been in church all their lives, were excited about what God was doing through His Word at Calvary Chapel.
They would meet there for two years while they built an even bigger permanent building to hold their multiplying flock. During that period, the architect had to enlarge the plans three separate times so the completed new building could accommodate its church. The people.
On Sunday mornings, the church was full of conservative adults wearing their Sunday best like they had for decades. Still, kids with long hair, shorts, and sandals flooded the place. They’d sit for an hour with their Bibles opened as Pastor Chuck, Kenn Gulliksen, Don McClure, Tom Stipe, or one of the other pastors would teach a detailed study of a section of Scripture.
On Sunday evenings, Pastor Chuck wore more casual clothes—though he didn’t try to be a hipster—and the music was fresh. So fresh, in fact, that a lot of it had just been written, like Love Song’s “Little Country Church,” which was hot off the griddle when the band played it one Sunday evening, singing about how people weren’t “as stuffy as they were before.” Instead, they just wanted to praise the Lord, work for revival, and come together, people with “long hair, short hair, some coats and ties . . . lookin’ past the hair and straight into the eyes.”2
The lyrics captured Calvary Chapel at the time. It was a body of believers made up of old people and young people, new Christians and people who’d been following Jesus for a while. It surely was not perfect, but the people loved and accepted each other. They loved Jesus, were eternally grateful to Him, and wanted to consume His Word. In mainstream culture in those chaotic days, people might be divided by labels: hippie or straight, cool kid or loser, rich or poor, black or white. But in the church, those divisions fell away.