Calvary Chapel founder Chuck Smith dies

LOS ANGELES -- In his church office, pastor Chuck Smith kept a crown made of thorns and a jar full of candy. The thorns were from the Holy Land. The candy was for his grandkids. The image suggested his special appeal as a preacher: a harsh, old-school Christianity delivered with grandfatherly sweetness.

Smith, the founder of the Jesus People and the Calvary Chapel movement, and one of the most influential figures in modern American Christianity, died Thursday morning at his home in Newport Beach, Calif., after a two-year battle with lung cancer, church officials said. He was 86.

"He was definitely a pioneer," said Donald E. Miller, a professor of religion at the University of Southern California. "He had a transformative impact on Protestantism." The Calvary Chapel phenomenon, which now includes more than 1,000 churches nationwide and hundreds more overseas, began with the 25-member church Smith founded in 1965 on a lot in Costa Mesa, Calif.

He was a biblical literalist who believed staunchly in hell, Armageddon and the sinfulness of homosexuality. But from the pulpit, and in person, he emanated a disarming warmth. His church became famous as a sanctuary for a generation of counterculture refugees. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and a big, benevolent smile.

He didn't care how worshippers dressed or how long they wore their facial hair. He welcomed hippies, dropouts and the drug-damaged. He allowed guitars to accompany worship songs. He became Papa Chuck to the thousands he baptized below the ocean cliffs of Corona del Mar.

"It was really a new style of worship," Miller said. "It incorporated a generation of young people who otherwise would not have darkened the door of a church. Part of his genius was he was theologically conservative but simultaneously culturally avant-garde." Smith's movement contributed to the ascent of the modern megachurch, and he was a mentor to generations of younger evangelists, including Greg Laurie of the Harvest Christian Fellowship.

Friends said Smith had never planned to preside over more than one church and did not even bother to keep track of how many Calvary Chapels had sprung up across the country.

At the pulpit, he went through the Bible verse by verse, page by page, from Genesis to Revelation. He taught it cover to cover 10 or 15 times. Sometimes he took three years to do it, sometimes nine. When he died, he was at Chapter 4 of Romans.

"He was the first minister I ever saw who I thought wasn't putting on an act," said Dave Rolph, a longtime friend and fellow Calvary Chapel pastor. "Chuck showed you can do ministry and be a real person. There was no acting, there was no performance. He was a regular guy."

Smith repeatedly predicted the end of the world, and his zeal for the notion seemed undiminished when it failed to materialize. "Every year I believe this could be the year," he would say. "We're one year closer than we were."