Editorial:

We wish Chuck Smith, the senior pastor at Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, a swift recovery from his mild stroke. The 82-year-old Newport Beach resident has been a larger-than-life fixture in Newport-Mesa for more than four decades.

He’s proven to be one of the area’s most colorful if not endearing characters, and a giant among Southern California’s religious figures.

Smith started out at Calvary Chapel in 1965, turning a fractious 25-member church in the middle of a Santa Ana bean field into a powerhouse.

The church today seats 2,000 and boasts a near capacity crowd for nightly worship services, drawing as many as 25,000 weekly, according to its website. Calvary Chapel also has grown a network of some 1,500 independent affiliates nationwide and abroad.

Known for his low-key approach to attracting people to the Bible, as well as his constant smile and contagious friendliness, Smith perhaps is most famous as a leading figure of the Jesus People movement in Southern California during the late 1960s and early ’70s.

His church’s membership exploded when it started converting thousands of young people, many of whom were hippies or surfers, into born-again Christians.

It all began when Smith met a hitchhiking hippie from San Francisco with the surname of Frisbee. The young man became a church helper and brought along two dozen fellow hippies. They were the first among a new wave of Jesus People making their way in droves to Calvary Chapel.

Smith and his team of ministers would end up baptizing hundreds of these converts and ex-hippies by dunking them in the waters of Pirate’s Cove in Corona del Mar.

In May 1973, Smith told the Los Angeles Times that his mission wasn’t to found a new religion or convert the entire world. What the world needs is not religion, but faith, he said. Amen to that.