Twelfth Edition, 2005

Founded: 1965 Membership: statistics not available, s_ but at least 500,000 in 1,000 churches (2004) _r The Calvary Chapels is one of the most successful new denomina tions in U.S. history. It began as a single Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, in 1965 and has grown to over seven hundred related congregations, most of them also named Calvary Chapel, across the nation. The founder and head of Calvary Chapels is Church Smith (b. 1927), who began his ministry career in 1946 in the Foursquare Gospel Church.* Frustrated with the restrictions of that and other denominations, Smith went independent in the early sixties with a focus on campus ministry. His focus was on addressing the everyday needs and concerns of his listeners. Two years after taking over the twenty-five-member Calvary Chapel, he had increased atten dance to over two thousand. Soon they built a much larger facility which regularly has over twenty-five thousand worshipers (18,000 members). It is the fountainhead for the Calvary Chapel network. One of the hallmarks of Smith’s ministry in the 1960s was reach ing out to the “hippies” and drug users of the California beach cul ture. He was a leader of the “Jesus Freak” movement that encouraged people to “turn off to drugs and on to Jesus.” Smith founded over a hundred “community houses” modeled on the origi nal “House of Miracles” for recent converts who needed a support ive environment. INTERNATIONAL CONCIL OF COMMUNITY CHURCHES Smith was a pioneer in the adaptation of secular rock and roll music for Christian worship. He established the Maranatha Music and Calvary Chapel recording companies, which have had a major impact on contemporary Protestant music. This “praise music” uses guitar and piano rather than traditional church instruments and has an upbeat tempo that has become very popular on Christian radio stations. This informal, lively music corresponds to the practice of wearing casual clothing and following very informal worship. Worship, fellowship, and study times may be very emotional since members are encouraged to express their love for Christ, love for one another, and offer their personal tes timonies of salvation. Calvary Chapels emphasize evangelism, conversion, and personal experience of the Holy Spirit, but they try to do so in an invitational rather than confrontational way. Slightly fewer than 15 percent of the members report that they had no previous church connection before joining a Calvary Chapel.

"Theological troglodytes worship at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, where the original Jesus Freaks, transformed by their baptisms in pic turesque Corona Del Mar State Beach, began preaching the End Days. If you re compassionate and your bigotry is soft, drive down to Lake Forest and Saddleback Church, home for the mega-phenomenon called the Purpose-Driven Life®." p.11 "Saddleback represents the “new” Orange County—remember that Lake Forest is in South County—but its true heart roars half an hour away in a campus that looks like a former school, on the border between Costa Mesa and Santa Ana. Fire! Brimstone! Bad gays! The End Times are here! From this pulsing abscess springs forth the Calvary Chapel doctrine of accepting the world’s rejects, then transforming them into homo-hating zealots—if one of their thousand or so branches aren’t in your town soon, expect them next fall. Or, is this land’s soul inside the fake-antebellum mansion that serves as the headquarters for the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest televangelism network? HAPPY birthday, JESUS!" p. 124 In 1962, Smith received an invitation from a Costa Mesa ministry named Calvary Chapel to save its floundering church. His wife opposed a move from Corona (just across the Orange County line, where they had just started a church) until receiving what Smith described in an official church history as a revelation: One night I came home from a Bible study and my wife met me at the door. She had been crying. She said, “Honey I’ve been in prayer and God has really spoken to my heart. The Lord has made it clear that I’m to submit to you. You’re the pastor, you’re my husband. Wherever you feel God wants you to minister, I must submit to you . . . though I think you’re crazy to even think about it. Surely, you’ve forgotten about it by now. But even if you decided to go, I would have to submit to you. ” Smith attempted to tell his wife that the Calvary Chapel board wanted a decision the following day before she interrupted him, Don t tell me! Don t talk to me about it. I’m not ready to move, I’m only to submit at this point.” Submission to Smith and his proxy Jesus would become the trademark of Calvary Chapel. Smartly, Smith knew that to draw adherents to his fundamentalist message in the liberal 1960s, he had to offer more than rigidity. At that time, Orange County was becoming a haven for the counterculture, much to the consterna tion of the county fathers. In Laguna Beach, acolytes of Timothy Leary’s created a nonprofit church called the Brotherhood of Eter nal Love, which quickly expanded from teaching Eastern religious principles into running one ofthe largest drug cartels in the United States. (I could continue, but this is where I’ll shamelessly plug my colleague Nick Schou, who wrote an amazing article about this a couple of years ago and is currently writing a book on the subject. E-mail him at nschou@ocweekly.com). The hippie movement also created the creepy cult known as the Children of God, but nowa days called the Family International, best known for introducing the concept of “flirty fishing” (enticing converts through sex) to Christendom—it began in Huntington Beach in 1969. “These long-haired, bearded, dirty kids going around the streets repulsed me,” Smith admitted in his Calvary Chapel history. “They stood for everything I stood against. We were miles apart in our thinking, philosophies, everything.” But Smith’s wife felt the call of God to reach out to these kids. And the boyfriend of Smith’s daughter—a hippie-turned-Christian identified in church narra tives only as John—regaled the couple with talk of his successful conversion efforts. Smith asked John to bring him a hippie. John drove down Fairview Road in Costa Mesa and picked up Lonnie Frisbee, a Costa Mesa native who had spent the previous years wandering through California on one long acid trip. When John asked Fris bee if he needed a ride, the hippie refused. “Hey, I’m not going anywhere, man,” Frisbee replied. “I’m a Christian and I’m just hitchhiking to witness to whoever picks me up.” Smith was pleased. “I wasn’t prepared for the love that came forth from this kid,” he wrote in Calvary Chapel’s 1981 history. “His love for Jesus Christ was infectious. The anointing of the Spirit was upon his life, so we invited Lonnie to stay with us for a few days.” With Frisbee’s flowing hair and beard, bonafide bells in his bell-bottoms, and flowers in his hair, it’s logical that The Encyclo pedia of Evangelicalism described him as “the quintessential Jesus freak.” Frisbee and Smith began baptizing en masse on the pic turesque beaches of Corona Del Mar State Beach. The Jesus Movement was born, fascinating the nation, receiving prominent play in Time and network news. The Calvary Chapel movement became one of the largest Christian ministries on earth and birthed other megamovements such as the Vineyard Movement and the Harvest Crusades. Smith also revolutionized Christian music through Maranatha! music, a record label that allowed non-traditional Christian singers—rock bands, folksingers, etc.—to record their songs and mass-distribute to churches. Equally influ ential was The Word for Today, a radio program Smith began in the 1970s that he also recorded on cassette tapes and distributed across the globe—podcasts before iPods. But Frisbee and Smith split just a couple of years into their hippie ministry over doctrinal reasons; it also didn’t help that Fris bee was a homosexual. Frisbee never returned to the Calvary Chapel fold, yet Smith gave the eulogy at Frisbee’s 1993 funeral, held at Crystal Cathedral. Before thousands, Smith compared Frisbee with a well-known, long-haired biblical figure, “Samson— a man who knew the powerful anointing of God’s light. What could have been ... a man who never experienced the ultimate of the potential. I often wondered what could have been.” As Calvary Chapel helped spark the rise of New Wave evangelicalism in the United States...." pp. 135-138

Chuck Missler: Friend of Patriots Chuck Missler is the founder of Koinonia House, a conservative Christian ministry based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He gained popularity with mainstream Christians primarily through his close affiliation with the California-based Calvary Chapel system of churches founded by evangelist Chuck Smith. Although Missler has had his own ministry for many years, he continues to teach regularly at Calvary Chapels nationwide. Missler is a major bridge between Christianity and the patriot/militia movement. His Personal Update newsletter has carried several articles promoting New - World Order conspiratorial theories. In the July 1995 issue of Personal Update, he suggests that the government blew up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. He also condemns the government for launching “a highly orchestrated propaganda attack” against “talk radio, the pro-life movement, Constitutionalists, militias, pro-family groups, survivalists, and all forms of ‘politically incorrect’ views.” *’ Personal Update, like patriot publications, is brazenly anti-government. Missler believes America is no longer in a contest “between the Democrats and the Republicans but between the Constitutionalists who value our traditional heritage and the global socialists who are pursuing the dream of the New World Order. The conflict is between individual liberty and totalitarianism.” “Missler additionally contends that many of “the most knowledgeable” Bible commentators believe the Antichrist may be alive today. According to Missler, the demonic world leader will be even more deceitful “than the politicians who presently dominate the District of Corruption.” *’ This biting reference to Wash ington, D.C., officials is common among patriots. An article in Media Bypass, a popular patriot magazine, reads: “The mindset in the ‘District of Corruption’ appears appalled by the resentment of ‘we the people’ toward the federal government.” °° Patriot magazines are only one of the many sources from which Missler gleans his information. He claims to use “extensive contacts and private sources” to give a “behind-the-scenes perspective of the major issues.”°' Unfortunately, some of his sources are tied directly to the white supremacist movement. In the November 1995 issue of Personal Update, Missler not only quotes from but expresses thanks to and gives the address of the “American Patriot Fax Network. . . and ‘The Spotlight.’ ”* The American Patriot Fax Network (currently operated by Ken Varden of Las Vegas) was co-founded by Gary Hunt, a shadowy figure whose name first surfaced during the Davidian siege when he showed up in Waco claiming to hold Koresh’s power of attorney. He said he had observed an allegedly “ pre-arranged signal from the Branch Davidian leader—a jiggle of the compound's satellite dish.”°* Hunt was ignored by both law enforcement authorities and the courts. According to Linda Thompson, Hunt’s network began when he started faxing 200 American Militias information to her, Ken Varden and a Florida couple named Lynda Lyon and George Sibley.** The network soon became connected to numerous fax “news” services run by tax protesters, white supremacists and Christian Identity believers.°> It has since branched out to include non-racist patriots and Christians such as Missler. A steady stream of moderate to blatantly racist/anti-Semitic materials are regularly faxed to everyone on the network.It is noteworthy that approximately a year after Hunt’s network began, forty-five-year-old Lynda Lyon and fifty-one year-old George Sibley were arrested and subsequently convicted in the death of thirty-eight-year-old Alabama policeman Roger Motley. °’ The white supremacist couple shot and killed Motley in a shopping center parking lot when he approached their car.** After the shooting, Lyon and Sibley “led police on a high-speed chase and held law enforcement sharpshooters at bay for more than four hours before surrendering at a road block.”*’ Their vehicle contained three handguns, two semi-automatic rifles and an M-14 rifle. In the couple’s Orlando home, police found a large cache of weapons, ammunition and white supremacist literature. At their Georgia “safe house,” authorities seized an M-1 rifle that had been converted into a fully automatic weapon, a riot shotgun and 5,000 rounds of ammunition. The day after Motley was killed, Hunt sent out the following message over his fax network: Many of those in the Patriot Community fully expect that a state of war will exist in this country in a relatively short period of time. George and Lynda . . . felt that this state of war existed.°! For several weeks, Hunt used the network to send a series of faxes about the incident. His version of the killing perfectly illustrates the danger now facing non-patriots in this country, especially those in law enforcement: A cop comes up to the car and they know that they have a car full of guns. . . . Without time to contemplate a better solution, they reacted as the Branch Davidians should have reacted. I know that it is politically correct to condemn George and Lynda, but I cannot, and will not. I can only fear for them and fear for our country. . . . George had been sitting in his car. . . . Lynda was making a phone call. . . . The officer refused to listen to George explain that he was under no contract as a free Citizen of Florida, to have to produce a (drivers) license in Alabama. The officer then informed George . . . that he was under arrest. George got out of his car, and then began balking. The officer reached for his gun but George was a bit quicker. George and Lynda were defending their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, and did not allow the officer to deny them their freedom. George and Lynda’s actions were to deny “law enforcement” from stealing your rights to travel freely in this country.” A 1995 Los Angeles Times investigation found that several racist organizations belong to the American Patriot Fax Network.” Members who supply and receive information through the network include: Arizona Patriots, a militant Christian Infiltration of Hate 201 Identity group; Guardians of American Liberty (GOAL), led by Stewart Webb, who from the mid-1980s and into the 1990s “made a series of threatening anti-Semitic phone calls” ;* and James Wickstrom, a Posse Comitatus leader, who in 1984 was convicted “on two counts of impersonating a public official and one count of bail jumping.” © Missler’s use of information from the Spotlight, and his recommendation of it as a news source, is even more disturbing. Besides being unreliable, Spotlight is notorious for its racist articles and advertisements. It would be difficult for Missler to not notice the blatant anti-Semitism that is regularly featured in its pages. A survey of Spotlight stories from January 1994 through June 1995 reveals that the paper’s main purpose is not only to propagate New World Order conspiracy theories, but also to link them to anti-Semitic ideas. The number of articles found on relevant topics are as follows:™ O New World Order: 75 Anti-Israel: 50 Concentration Camps, FEMA, black helicopters: 49 International Jewish bankers: 40 Anti-Black or Pro-Apartheid: 28 Pro-militia: 26 Foreign troops on U.S. soil: 24 Jewish holocaust denial: 13 It is odd that Missler, who professes to be pro-Israel, would read Spotlight, a publication of the quasi-Nazi Liberty Lobby founded by Willis Carto, whose history of anti-Semitism dates back as far as 1960 when he edited a publication “calling for voter support for the American Nazi Party.”®’ According to a 1994 article in Covert Action Quarterly, a widely respected investigative magazine, Carto’s Liberty Lobby “is the major source of anti-Semitic propaganda in the United States.” : Missler seems to have fallen into a trap laid long ago by Carto. According to Louis T. Beyers, a former associate of Carto’s, the Liberty Lobby’s plan is to draw support from non-racists as a means of strengthening anti-government ranks: “Willis has talked to me about playing the role of a respectable conservative when his true feelings are those of a racist nationalist.”® Beyers also maintains that Carto’s ultimate aim is “to form a new power base ready to act when the country turned hard right.” ’ Carto has set up a number of front organizations to pull off ei Been ee his scheme: To draw the support of those whose political beliefs might not include hatred for Jews, it [Liberty Lobby] has established an array of front groups, surrogates, and publications. These enterprises have not so much expanded the Lobby’s influence as made it seem to represent a vast constituency. Among the groups sponsored by the Lobby over the past 30 years, have been (in no particular order): Americans for National Security, American Committee on Immigration 202 American Militias Policies, United Republicans of America, Committee for Religious Development, Friends of Rhodesian Independence, Action Associates, Youth for Wallace, National Youth Alliance, Save Our Schools, Emergency Committee to Support Victims of Political Persecution, National Taxation, Inc., and Council on Dangerous Drugs.” To understand the level of anti-Semitism being promoted by the Liberty Lobby and Spotlight, one need only look to the philosophy of Willis Carto. In a 1955 letter to Earnest Sevier Cox, Carto boldly identified America’s main enemy: Who is calling the shots? History supplies the answer. . . . History plainly tells us who our Enemy is. Our Enemy today is the same Enemy of 50 years ago and before—and that was before Communism. . . . The Jews came first and remain Public Enemy Number One. . . . Hitler’s defeat was the defeat of Europe. And America. How could we have been so blind?” Ina letter to the Aryan Nations, a new supporter of the racist organization expressed interest in learning more about the white supremacy movement based on a a neo-Nazi advertisement he had seen in Spotlight.” Now Spotlight is being advertised in Chuck Missler’s Personal Update. This is precisely how racist conspiracy theories are gaining acceptance in mainstream Christian circles.