Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, California, and founder of the Calvary Chapel movement now consisting of over 1,600 churches world wide, died yesterday of complications related to lung cancer. He was 86. Known to most people as simply Pastor Chuck, he was an old school preacher with a grandfatherly warmth.

He always wore a broad smile which you could hear on his regular radio show which consisted of thousands of his sermons preached during a ministry that spanned over 60 years. Each sermon takes apart some passage of scripture (he taught from the whole Bible) in his homey, folksy style. Always warm and personal, he became a voice people could trust, especially young people. In the late sixties, he opened the doors of his church to a hippie generation and did not judge their long hair, bare feet and drug-crazed demeanor. The rest is history.

In the mid-sixties, I was invited to play my guitar and sing at a small church in Costa Mesa. I remember it as a white clapboard building on a corner looking every bit like the “Little Country Church” that Love Song went on to sing about. Besides their morning service, I sang and talked to a small youth group of about 15 kids during their Sunday School hour. I remember them all seated in a big circle of chairs and Chuck Smith, pastor of the church and youth leader, was seated with them. Later that morning, I was invited for Sunday dinner at the pastor’s home and I remember Chuck saying, as he dished out mashed potatoes on his plate, that he believed God was going to do a great work among the young people in his church. That turned out to be the understatement of a decade as that church grew to hundreds, and then thousands in a few short years — most of them young people coming to Christ as part of a spiritual revival of which his church became a hub.

He redefined church for a whole generation by encouraging casual dress, guitars for worship, and a come-as-you-are welcoming. It was just the ticket for a generation of young people seeking spiritual answers but distrustful of the institutional church.

However, if Chuck could talk to us right now, he would take none of the credit for any of this. He would say that he was merely managing what God was doing. He was the right man at the right time. He had an idea what God was up to, just as he shared with me in his home that Sunday, and he wanted to be there for it. He was the epitome of doing what Bono once pointed out as our job description — not to do something and ask God to bless it, but to find out what God has already blessed and get in on that. Chuck Smith followed the Spirit of God and a generation of kids followed him into the kingdom.

That’s our takeaway from this remembrance. That is all God asks of any of us: to find out what God is up to and get there with whatever gifts He has given us. You may preach, teach, evangelize, pray, serve, administrate, encourage or be merciful, but it will all be done by God in and around what He is accomplishing in establishing His kingdom on earth.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Chuck Smith got in on God’s will, and from what I can see, he had a lot of fun doing it.