Coming up later this summer, WORLD is doing a retrospective on the summer of 1968, a season of gritty political turmoil that, interestingly, was also a season of spiritual revival. My part of the package is a look at the Calvary Chapel movement in Southern California that summer, and its place in the larger “Jesus Movement” of the era. Last week, as part of my research, I visited the Mother Ship — Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, and senior pastor Chuck Smith, Sr.

For me, the visit was also personal. You see, I consider Pastor Chuck my “spiritual grandfather,” to coin a term I once heard someone else coin. For our interview, we settled into flower-cushioned rattan patio chairs in the tiny enclosed lanai attached to Pastor Chuck’s office. Very California — as was Pastor Chuck, who as a young pastor, took midday surfing breaks, but now settles for dressing in aloha shirts and chinos.

The first thing you notice about Chuck Smith is his resonant baritone voice. The second thing, if you were to meet him today, is that at age 81, his face is remarkably unlined, save for the laugh crinkles around his eyes. Having read many testimonies of hippies who came to faith through his ministry in the late 60’s and early 70’s, that seems fitting: Universally, those new Christians — many of whom were not allowed in other churches because of their dirty bare feet and, um, natural, odor — testified that they were drawn by the simple joy that seemed to emanate from Pastor Chuck.

Forty years later, I can say that I am a beneficiary of Pastor Chuck’s joy and a spiritual descendant of his ministry, one that began with a struggling congregation of 25. It is a ministry that bloomed — then exploded — through his insistence on introducing young people to a God of grace, and on practical, line-by-line exposition of the Scriptures in an era when canned topical sermons were more common. There are now about 1,000 Calvary Chapel affiliates in the U.S. alone — all of them independent of the Mother Ship — along with thousands more overseas (At last count, 1,000 in India. Gospel for Asia claims 20,000 house churches.)

Since I knew my spiritual lineage back through Pastor Chuck, I got curious about going back farther

“How did you get saved?” I asked him, thinking that maybe my spiritual great-grandfather was somebody like Billy Graham….

Pastor Chuck told me an interesting story: Just before he was born in 1927, his older sister almost died. His  mother, a devout Christian, prayed to God to spare her daughter’s life, vowing in Hannah-like fashion to dedicate her children to Him in return. Chuck’s sister survived. And from the time Chuck could talk, his mother had him memorizing Bible verses. She never told him about her promise to the Lord until she lay on her deathbed. At the time, Pastor Chuck was still pastoring a good-sized church with the Foursquare Gospel denomination. But, dissatisfied with the denomination’s business-driven (instead of Spirit-driven) model of building membership, he left, eventually accepting a call to pastor a struggling congregation of 25 in Newport Beach, Calif. Within the next few years, the Calvary Chapel movement was born,  becoming the largest and most lasting — and arguably the most orthodox — legacy of the Jesus Movement.

I find it fascinating that I can trace my spiritual heritage from that movement back to a young mother in the 1920’s pleading for her child’s life. I can trace it through her son, and beyond to another pastor named Mike McIntosh, who for several years before he came to the Lord, suffered an LSD-induced delusion that someone had blown off half his head with a gun. Mike got saved in the early 70’s at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa and ultimately became pastor of Horizon Christian Fellowship, a church that started in a San Diego living room and now has ministries all over the globe. I first heard the gospel at Horizon in 1991 and several weeks later gave my heart to Christ at Maranatha Chapel, another Calvary Chapel church in San Diego.

These are the miracles of God, to use through the centuries ordinary and sometimes desperate people to unleash great rivers of revival. I am thankful that one of them washed over me.