Calvary Chapel Split Again. My Honest Take on the Movement
Calvary Chapel has split again.
And honestly, it just makes me sad.
I grew up in this movement. Both my dad and my father-in-law faithfully planted and pastored Calvary Chapel churches.
But Calvary Chapel isn’t just where I grew up. It’s also where I learned to pastor.
I spent years serving and eventually pastoring within the movement. I preached behind a Calvary Chapel pulpit, sat through more Calvary pastors’ conferences than I can count, wrestled with the distinctives, and experienced both the beauty and dysfunction of the movement from the inside.
I’m not a Calvary Chapel pastor anymore. I don’t currently attend a Calvary Chapel church. So I’m writing this from outside the movement, but I don’t feel like an outsider.
Calvary Chapel is part of my story. Even though I no longer carry the name, it shaped so much of how I understand church, ministry, preaching, worship, and the work of the Holy Spirit. And I still deeply care about what happens to it.
When I think about the Calvary Chapel I grew up in, I never thought of it in terms of an “organization” or really anything other than a group of like-minded, blue-collar men who were trying to faithfully pastor their local churches.
That’s what I remember.
I remember joy.
I remember simplicity.
I remember excitement.
I remember walking around the beautiful Calvary Chapel Bible College campus in Murrieta, California, when I was 12 years old and meeting Chuck Smith for the first time.
The campus was filled with hundreds of young people excited to learn about Jesus and study the Bible. There was an incredible sense that God was doing something special.
And there was Chuck.
Not surrounded by an entourage or hiding in an office or a greenroom somewhere.
He was driving around the campus in a golf cart, doing maintenance and landscaping.
That example has stuck with me all these years.
Here was a man that God had used to help lead this massive movement of churches, pastors, missionaries, and young people around the world, and he’s driving around a Bible college pulling weeds and taking care of the property.
There was something so beautiful and simple about it.
And that was Calvary Chapel.
Open the Bible.
Teach the Word.
Love people.
Depend upon the Holy Spirit.
Tell people about Jesus.
And then stand back amazed at what God did.
That’s why watching the movement split again is painful.
Today there are now three branches or expressions from the same Calvary Chapel family: the Calvary Chapel Association, the Calvary Global Network, and now the Calvary Chapel Cooperative.
Three groups.
Three visions for carrying something forward.
When a Movement Loses Its Founder
It’s impossible to talk honestly about Calvary Chapel without talking about Chuck Smith.
God used Chuck tremendously.
What happened through Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa during the Jesus Movement is an incredible chapter in modern American church history. People the traditional church didn’t know what to do with were welcomed. They heard about Jesus. They got saved. Pastors were raised up. Churches were planted.
And eventually, a small Southern California church became a movement around the world.
Chuck’s approach to ministry was refreshingly simple: teach through the Bible, trust the Holy Spirit, love people, and don’t make church unnecessarily complicated.
That’s why, when I think of Chuck, I think of a man who was faithful to his calling as a Bible teacher and shepherd.
But Chuck was also just a man.
A broken man.
An imperfect man.
And that’s okay.
God has always used broken people.
Chuck remained in the pulpit until the final days of his life, preaching while battling lung cancer and requiring oxygen. There’s something deeply moving about that kind of perseverance.
But there’s also something worth questioning.
Should that really be our model of healthy pastoral leadership?
Chuck was the relational center of this extraordinary non-denomination “denomination,” as we jokingly called it. And although CCA was established before his death, there was no single successor capable of occupying the role Chuck had organically filled for decades.
“What Would Chuck Do?”
In the years following Chuck’s death, one side of Calvary Chapel became deeply concerned with preserving what Chuck had created.
I understand that instinct.
Some of the pastors within CCA are good and faithful men who genuinely love Jesus and want to protect something precious that God entrusted to them.
However, I think preservation became too much of the vision.
I remember attending one of the first Calvary conferences after Chuck died. The theme was built around the language of Jeremiah chapter 6, verse 16: “the old paths” and “the good way.”
I remember thinking even then: Well, if that doesn’t tell you something about where we’re headed, I don’t know what will.
I understand the biblical point. Jeremiah wasn’t calling God’s people to nostalgia. He was calling them back to faithfulness.
But within the Calvary Chapel world after Chuck’s death, “the old paths” could easily begin to mean something else:
Back to Chuck.
Back to the way we did it.
Back to the glory days.
And I think that’s where something unhealthy began to creep in.
Eventually honoring Chuck became asking, “What would Chuck do?”
What would Chuck say about this?
Would Chuck approve of that?
And I’m not even sure that’s the question Chuck would want us asking.
The question should really be:
What does the Holy Spirit want to do?
That’s a big difference.
I deeply respect men like Sandy Adams, Mike MacIntosh, and others from that first generation. These are men God has used. They lived through something extraordinary. They watched the Jesus Movement unfold with their own eyes. They experienced what I would consider the golden era of Calvary Chapel through the 1980s and 1990s.
I understand why you would want to go back there.
But you can’t.
And I don’t think we’re supposed to.
The Jesus Movement doesn’t belong to us.
Chuck isn’t coming back.
And constantly looking over our shoulder at the last great thing God did can make us miss what God wants to do right in front of us.
And that’s the irony of all of this.
Chuck didn’t create Calvary Chapel by trying to recreate somebody else’s movement.
He responded to what God was doing in his generation.
Hippies were coming.
Traditional churches didn’t know what to do with them.
Chuck opened the doors.
The methods changed because the mission of God mattered more than the methods of men.
So if we really want to honor Chuck Smith might not be to reproduce Chuck Smith.
Maybe it’s to have the same courage to follow the Holy Spirit in our generation that Chuck demonstrated in his.
The old paths aren’t old methods.
The old paths are faithfulness to Jesus.
Faithfulness to Scripture.
Dependence upon the Holy Spirit.
Love for people.
Grace.
Evangelism.
Those are worth preserving forever.
And I think this was one of the main tensions that eventually split Calvary Chapel after Chuck.
One side seemed primarily concerned with protecting what had been handed down.
The other was asking how we could steward what had been handed down into the future.
Those aren’t necessarily opposing ideas.
But at the time, it split a movement.
Stewarding the Future
Before there was ever a Calvary Global Network, I was excited about Brian Brodersen.
To me, Brian represented something Calvary Chapel desperately needed after Chuck… Someone thinking about how to steward the future of the movement.
I didn’t hear Brian saying we should throw away our history.
I heard him asking whether our history was supposed to be a museum or an inheritance.
There’s a difference.
An inheritance is received gratefully from the generation before you, but then it is entrusted to you to do something with it.
What excited me about Brian was that he seemed willing to honor what God had done without assuming that what God had done yesterday was the formula for what God wanted to do tomorrow.
There is no formula.
You can’t use the same tool for every job.
Even when you look at the ministry of Jesus, you don’t see Him operating from a ministry playbook. He healed one blind man by touching his eyes. And with another, He spit on the ground, made mud, and put it on the man’s eyes.
The power was the same.
The Person was the same.
The methods weren’t.
And I think movements can forget that.
We experience God working through a particular method, philosophy, leader, conference, worship style, or season of ministry, and before long we start trying to reproduce the method that accompanied the miracle.
But the method was never the source.
God was.
Brian began using a word during those years that I remember creating real tension within Calvary circles… Intentionality.
For some of the older generation, that word almost seemed offensive.
Calvary Chapel was organic.
Nobody sat in a boardroom and designed the Jesus Movement.
Nobody created a strategic plan that produced hundreds of Calvary Chapels.
God moved.
The end.
And that’s part of what makes the story so beautiful. But sometimes I think we spiritualized our lack of structure.
Intentionality was treated almost as though planning meant we weren’t trusting the Holy Spirit anymore… but I never understood it that way.
I understood intentionality as stewardship.
If God had sovereignly and organically created this incredible family of churches, what would happen if Spirit-filled men prayerfully and intentionally stewarded what He had given them?
What if we intentionally raised up young pastors?
What if we intentionally planted churches?
What if we built healthy structures capable of caring for pastors and providing resources for churches around the world while still remaining completely dependent upon the Holy Spirit?
Not because we believed we could manufacture another move of God.
We couldn’t.
But because when God entrusts something to us, our responsibility is to steward it faithfully.
Organic doesn’t have to mean accidental.
Spirit-led doesn’t have to mean unplanned.
Intentional doesn’t have to mean manufactured.
That was what excited me about Brian.
I thought Calvary Chapel had an opportunity to stop asking how we could preserve the golden years and start asking how we could faithfully steward whatever God wanted to do next.
Eventually, that vision needed somewhere to live.
The Birth of CGN
In 2017, that desire is what led to the creation of the Calvary Global Network.
CGN grew out of many of the ideas that had excited me about Brian in the first place: reaching the next generation, equipping churches, encouraging church planting, strengthening global relationships, and advancing the gospel.
So when CGN came on the scene, I was hopeful.
One thing I really appreciated about Brian is that he seemed less interested in “majoring on the minors” and more interested in asking how Calvary Chapel could participate in what God was doing throughout the broader global church.
To me, that was healthy.
Because somewhere along the way, some of Calvary Chapel’s distinctives had begun to feel less like distinctives and more like tests of faithfulness.
CGN seemed willing to ask questions that, within Calvary Chapel, had sometimes felt almost unaskable.
Church government is one example.
Historically, Calvary Chapel strongly held to what became known as the “Moses Model.” Jesus is the head of the church, the senior pastor seeks His direction, and elders help support the pastor in leading the congregation.
In practice, that meant Calvary Chapel was generally suspicious of elder-ruled churches.
CGN seemed more willing to make room for churches that shared Calvary Chapel’s theology and philosophy of ministry while operating with a plurality of elders.
And honestly, I thought that was healthy.
Not because the Moses Model is necessarily wrong. It can work beautifully.
But maybe the question shouldn’t be, “Is this how Chuck structured a church?”
Maybe the question should be, “Is this biblical, healthy, and faithful to Jesus?”
And there’s an irony here that’s hard for me to ignore.
After Chuck died, the movement that had historically been skeptical of leadership by a plurality suddenly found itself being led by a council of pastors.
Obviously, CCA’s Leadership Council isn’t the same thing as a local church elder board. But the tension is still interesting.
The Moses Model worked remarkably well for Calvary Chapel when there was a Moses.
But what happens when Moses dies?
Maybe that’s the bigger question CGN was willing to ask: Which parts of Calvary Chapel were biblical convictions, and which parts were simply the way Calvary Chapel had always done things?
Those aren’t the same thing.
Chuck himself was famous for repeating an old Christian saying:
“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
Where did we forget that?
The Problem CGN Couldn’t Escape
But CGN developed a problem of its own.
It was often easier to understand what CGN wasn’t than what CGN actually was.
It wasn’t CCA.
It wasn’t interested in rigidly enforcing every traditional Calvary distinctive.
It wasn’t confined to the American expression of Calvary Chapel.
It wanted a larger table.
Again, I understood the heart and desire.
But eventually the question emerged… How large can you make the table before nobody knows why the table exists?
CGN describes itself as a family crossing national and denominational borders, working together for gospel-centered renewal through relationships and resources.
Those are wonderful goals.
But those are also the same goals as many other great evangelical networks.
So what makes a Calvary Chapel truly a Calvary Chapel?
And I ask that with sincerity.
Because churches need doctrine, and networks need identity.
If every distinctive becomes optional, eventually the word distinctive doesn’t mean very much.
Perhaps CCA feared that without the distinctives, Calvary Chapel would lose its identity.
Perhaps CGN feared that if the distinctives became the identity, Calvary Chapel would lose its mission.
Both concerns are legitimate.
And Now, Another Split
Now another group has emerged… the Calvary Chapel Cooperative.
The Cooperative was formed in early 2026 and they say they exist for pastors and churches sharing the “heart, convictions, and lived philosophy of Calvary Chapel,” with an emphasis on fellowship, shared labor, mutual trust, faithfulness to Scripture, reliance upon the Spirit, and being rooted in grace.
I don’t know yet what CCC will become.
And I don’t think anyone does.
But I hope they can find the balance.
I hope they can recover a meaningful Calvary Chapel identity without simply becoming CCA with younger faces.
I hope they can hold convictions without making every conviction a test of fellowship.
I hope they can honor Chuck without canonizing him.
I hope they can learn from CGN’s emphasis on relationships and global mission without becoming so broad that nobody knows what connects everyone.
Most of all, I hope they resist the temptation every movement eventually faces… believing the movement itself must be preserved at all costs.
Distinctives Aren’t the Enemy
I want to be careful.
I’m not arguing that Calvary Chapel shouldn’t have distinctives.
Actually, I fully understand why they exist and matter.
If a group of churches is going to associate together, something needs to connect them. Otherwise, what’s the point of the association?
There should be theological identity.
There should be shared philosophy.
There should be enough common conviction that when someone says, “This is a Calvary Chapel,” the words communicate something.
The problem isn’t having distinctives.
The problem comes when our distinctives begin carrying the weight of the gospel.
There are doctrines that define historic Christianity.
Who is Jesus?
Did He bodily rise from the dead?
Is salvation by grace through faith?
Can Scripture be trusted?
Those aren’t peripheral questions.
But there are other doctrines upon which faithful, Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Christians have disagreed for centuries.
Those questions matter.
But they don’t all matter equally.
When Yesterday Becomes the Vision
Today, when I look at portions of the movement, I don’t see what I grew up seeing…
I see tiredness.
I see confusion about identity.
I see anxiety about preserving a legacy.
And maybe most concerning, I see a movement that was once radically forward-looking becoming increasingly suspicious of the future.
The problem isn’t that the first generation of Calvary pastors got older. Everybody gets older. The problem is when a movement that once had the courage to reach a new generation begins treating change itself as compromise.
And sometimes, if we’re willing to admit it, I see an attitude that suggests our way of doing church is somehow more biblical, more faithful, or more spiritual than everyone else’s.
How did a movement born with so little interest in religious machinery become so anxious about preserving itself?
How did a movement that welcomed people traditional churches didn’t know what to do with become so concerned about whether everyone fits neatly inside our distinctives?
How did a movement built around the simplicity of opening the Bible and pointing people to Jesus become so complicated?
Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.
For years the question has been:
“Is this Calvary Chapel?”
Maybe we need to start asking:
“Does this look like Jesus?”
Could It Still Be Calvary Chapel?
This is where it becomes deeply personal for me.
I’ve spent more time than I probably care to admit daydreaming about what a healthy, balanced Calvary Chapel could look like today.
A church that still feels like Calvary Chapel.
Open Bibles. Expository preaching. Evangelism. Grace. Simplicity. A genuine dependence upon the Holy Spirit.
But maybe a little less dogmatic about some of our distinctives and a whole lot more desperate for the presence of God.
A church where some can have strong convictions about the end times without pretending our prophecy chart belongs in the back of the Bible.
Where “Calvary Chapel” describes our family and heritage, but Jesus is our identity.
Honestly, I would love that.
But could it still be Calvary Chapel?
I want so badly to answer that with a big yes.
But part of me understands why some would say no.
Because if none of the distinctives distinguish us anymore, then we’re no longer describing a particular family of churches.
That’s a fair argument.
But there’s another danger we need to be willing to consider.
Can we grip the distinctives so tightly that we cease to resemble the movement that produced them?
Calvary Chapel was never beautiful because we had the best prophecy charts.
It was beautiful because broken people encountered Jesus.
Maybe that’s the distinctive worth fighting hardest to preserve.
My Prayer for Calvary Chapel
I don’t know what the future holds for Calvary Chapel.
Maybe CCA will continue faithfully serving the churches and pastors connected to it.
Maybe CGN will find greater clarity in its identity and continue doing beautiful work around the world.
Maybe CCC will find the balance I hope it does.
I genuinely want all three to flourish.
Because this isn’t about picking a side for me.
It’s about a movement I love.
A movement that helped teach me the Bible.
A movement that taught me to love the church.
A movement that taught me to believe the Holy Spirit still leads, still empowers, and still uses ordinary, broken people.
And maybe that’s why seeing it divided hurts.
But I’m also reminded of something… Jesus isn’t nervous about the future of Calvary Chapel.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t need any of us to keep a movement alive.
So my prayer for Calvary Chapel is simple.
I pray Calvary Chapel would rediscover the joy.
That it would honor the past without living in it.
That pastors would hold their convictions deeply without making every conviction a dividing line.
That Calvary Chapel would hold tightly to Jesus and a little more loosely to everything else.
I pray it would be known for open Bibles, open doors, humble pastors, scandalous grace, and a genuine desperation for the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
I pray the older generation would finish well, not by protecting their place, but by joyfully giving it away. By raising up younger pastors, cheering them on, and giving them permission to follow the Holy Spirit in ways that may look different than what came before.
And I pray the younger generation would have enough humility to remember they didn’t get here by themselves. That they would honor those who came before them, learn from their faithfulness, and refuse the arrogant mindset that says everything old needs to be replaced.
I pray CCA flourishes.
I pray CGN flourishes.
I pray CCC flourishes.
Not because Calvary Chapel needs three successful organizations.
But because there are churches to strengthen, pastors to encourage, people to reach, and a world that desperately needs Jesus.
And maybe somewhere along the way, these different branches of the same family could even find their way back to one another.
Not because everyone suddenly agrees about everything.
But because they remember something Chuck used to remind them:
In essentials, unity.
In non-essentials, liberty.
In all things, charity.
You see, Calvary Chapel was never the point.
Jesus was.
The movement belongs to Him.
The Church belongs to Him.
The future belongs to Him.
So maybe the best prayer I can offer for a movement that has given me so much is simply this…
Jesus, do whatever You want with Calvary Chapel.
