Hippie Voices to God’s Heart
Calvary Chapel Encounters God
- Preaching & Worship
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
Here is a phenomenological inquiry into the fruitful ministry of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa's Sunday Morning Worship Service. The purpose was to uncover and explicate the quintessential elements of worship leading from the life experiences of those worship leaders who shared the platform with Pastor Chuck Smith, known as the father of the Jesus Movement. The book examines Calvary Chapel's inauspicious beginnings in a senior citizen trailer park recreation center as it explores key elements of Kay and Chuck Smith's ministry. The church and the couple combined in 1965. By 1968, the church and the Smiths became a spiritual home replete with a spiritual mama and papa, ministering to hippies seeking everlasting love and eternal peace. The fruitfulness of Calvary Chapel's ministry is its ability to reproduce maturing Christians that reproduce maturing Christians. This replication occurred thousands of times as the movement blossomed and spread to new churches and new ministries across the United States and globally. The phenomenon spawned a megachurch movement and birthed the modern Christian worship music industry. The hippies were alternately loathed and loved in their era. Perhaps the hippies' most enduring and endearing contributions to twenty-first-century culture are traced to the Jesus movement.
Endorsements (4)
“This phenomenological approach looks at the people and sentiments at the forefront of the early Calvary Chapel movement, giving us insight into how doxology and community can work together to shape a disciple-making movement. As such, it is a significant contribution to the conversation on how to view cultural dimensions of modern worship leadership, large ministry contexts, and church movements. I certainly recommend it for our worship training programs.”
“Much has been written recently about the incarnation of contemporary worship music. David Ream provides the most comprehensive examination yet of the origins of this form of church music at its epicenter in Southern California. The innovations that were permitted and encouraged by Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel in the second half of the twentieth century established the fountainhead of what the broader evangelical church practices today. This book takes us back to those earliest formative days in the words of the participants. This is how the story begins!”
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