Chuck Smith - Telegraph Smith recalled the first time some of his new converts turned up at his chapel during a service: "First I heard bells tinkling. Then here came 15 kids, most of them with these tiny strings of bells tied around their ankles... and flowers in their hair. They swayed barefoot up the aisles and sat right down there on the floor in front of the pulpit, even though there were still pew seats to be had. You could almost hear an audible gasp from the rest of the congregation. But they had such love that they captivated everybody's heart. A couple of weeks later, a small group approached Smith and asked if they could play some rock music at one of the services. "Love Song," as the group became known, played their first concert on a Monday night, missing the Sunday service because one of the guitar players had spent the weekend in jail on charges of marijuana possession. Before long Smith was carrying out mass baptisms - sometimes 500 at a time - in the Pacific Ocean at Pirates Cove in Corona del Mar. Eventually Calvary Chapel grew into an empire of some 2,000 independent congregations, while Smith's own chapel, where the flock grew to more than 10,000, became one of the best-attended churches in America. The Children of God, part of the 1970s Jesus Movement But Smith's influence went far wider. In 1971, to promote the bands who played in his church, he founded a company, Maranatha! Music, which went on to play a powerful role in spreading the popularity of "Jesus rock" - also known as "praise and worship" - in mainstream churches more widely. Meanwhile, out of the ranks of hippies, beach bums and druggies whom he converted emerged a cadre of idealistic youths, known disparagingly as "Jesus freaks," who went on to fill the ranks of the "Jesus movement" of the 1970s and establish what has been called a "new paradigm" of independent mega-churches. But if Papa Chuck, as he was known to his followers, replaced pipe organs with electric guitars, preached in Hawaiian shirts and jettisoned traditional church symbols and rituals, theologically he was about as far removed from the hippie counterculture ethos as it was possible to be. He preached damnation for the unsaved; the wickedness of homosexuality as "the final affront against God"; and had a habit of finding signs of divine wrath and impending Armageddon in everything from earthquakes to terrorist outrages (the September 11 attacks were, in his view, an indication of God's displeasure with America's acceptance of homosexuality and abortion). In particular he was a powerful exponent of the "Rapture," the notion that God's chosen few will be whisked off to His side when He destroys the world to punish it for its sinful ways. When Smith predicted that "the Lord is coming for His church before the end of 1981," many of his followers congregated on New Year's Eve expecting to be beamed up out of their pews at any moment. Though New Year's Day 1982 dawned without incident, Smith remained unperturbed and continued to announce the imminence of the Rapture with cast-iron confidence: "Every year I believe this could be the year. We're one year closer than we were. He had never, he said, known a moment of doubt. Charles Ward Smith was born in Ventura, California, on June 25 1927, to "Bible quoting Christian" parents. Originally he had wanted to become a doctor, but at the age of 17, at a Christian summer camp, he came to the conclusion that "being a doctor would help people in the here and now, but becoming a pastor could help people in this life and afterward." After training at the Bible college of the Foursquare Church, a Pentecostal denomination, Smith served as a Pentecostal pastor in various communities before leaving to set up his own church in the early 1960s and moving to Calvary Chapel in 1965. In the late 1980s, by which time many of his ex-hippie followers were approaching middle age, Smith decided to reach out to a new generation of young people and in 1990, he co-founded the "Harvest Crusade," a non-profit ministry which has become an international movement. If Smith appeared a warm, avuncular figure to his followers, there was not much room in his theology for human frailty. In one of his books he championed "the ideal of a biblical man who is strong and not vacillating or weak" and denounced "the new touchy-feely man." This approach led to differences with his son Chuck Jr, who was, at one time, seen as his likely successor, but who had developed a more open-minded, questioning approach to faith. In 2006 Smith was instrumental in removing Chuck Jr from ministry in the Calvary Chapel movement, subsequently issuing a memo denouncing tolerance for homosexuality and "the soft peddling of hell as the destiny of those who reject the salvation offered through Jesus Christ." Chuck Smith is survived by his wife and by his two sons and two daughters. Chuck Smith, born June 25 1927, died October 3 2013