Dispatches From the Front in a Christian Army Crusade

The evening skies had not yet darkened. They were more slate gray than black and a whippy breeze forced some in the crowd to wrap coats around themselves or snuggle together. Looking at the assembled multitudes on the hillside at the Pacific Amphitheatre, it wasn’t hard to imagine how it may have looked a couple thousand years ago in the hills of Galilee.

“Are you going to be saved tonight?” the teen-age girl said to her friend, sitting next to her on the amphitheater’s terraced lawn.

She said it almost matter-of-factly, as if she were merely curious and nothing more.

Her friend wasn’t so sure, even as another friend told him of the biblical imperative to publicly commit to Christ if he wanted redemption.

These are weighty matters for some teen-agers. In the crush of news about all the teen peer pressure to be bad, we tend to forget that in some circles there can be equal peer pressure to be good.

If all their friends have publicly confessed their sins, why can’t they? Who wants to be the only one in the youth group who hasn’t done it?

“As we open our hearts to let the Holy Spirit have His way. . .” Pastor Chuck Smith said from behind the microphone.

The rhythmic sound of Christian pop music cascaded upon the masses. A teen-age girl on the terrace started to shake her booty. “No dancing,” her girlfriend said playfully to her.

“I know. We’re not allowed to dance,” the girl answered. “We’re Baptists.”

It was midweek at the Summer Harvest Crusade, an outdoor song-and-gospel festival that serves as a recruitment exercise for future Christian soldiers. The crusade concludes tonight with a program at Anaheim Stadium. Featured speaker Greg Laurie, a Riverside pastor and leader of weekly Bible study classes at Smith’s Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, said 1,700 new soldiers already had been recruited this week.

It’s an easy army to join.

My family has a picture of me at 7, standing outside the Procter Street Baptist Church in Port Arthur, Tex. Estus Autrey, a tall, thin man and the pastor at Procter Street, has his arm around me. I’m holding a Bible.

The night before, in the presence of relatives and in a scene almost fogged in my mind’s eye, Autrey led me from an anteroom and to the baptismal altar, where he immersed me in the cleansing waters of eternal salvation.

The week before, he had visited the house at least once, presumably to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into. Although I don’t remember his questions or my answers, I must have satisfied him, because on that warm night in May of 1957, I joined the army of Christian soldiers.

We are born into sin, Greg Laurie told the audience Wednesday night. “It’s incurable, apart from Jesus Christ,” Laurie said. “There’s nothing you can do to get rid of it.”

It comes as naturally to us as breathing, Laurie said. God who made us soon saw that mankind had turned sinful, and “He realized radical means had to be taken, so he sent Jesus to the cross.”

That is probably what Estus Autrey said to me, that 7-year-old kid in Texas, some 34 years ago. I was no doubt moved by the story and fascinated by the other tales in the Bible that Autrey gave me. No wonder I wanted to be baptized as soon as possible.

“You change from darkness to light in a moment, in a flash,” Laurie said Wednesday night.

But you must make the public commitment, he said. “Living a good life won’t do it. Being a religious person won’t do it.”

He asked people to come down to the front of the amphitheater and make that commitment. And like they have done for years in audiences like this across America, they streamed down to make their commitment. I watched them file down--young, old, teen, preteen. People on the terrace and in the fixed seats of the amphitheater applauded these total strangers as they came down, apparently rejoicing at their decision.

As for the teen-age boy who had been seated near me on the terrace--whose evening began with his friend asking if this would be the night--his salvation was put on hold. He and his friends had bailed even before Laurie took to the microphone, perhaps safe in the knowledge that they could be saved another day.

Indeed.

Had they stuck around, they would have heard Laurie’s reassuring words that in this faith, you can achieve an instant conversion.

With a guarantee like that, kids, you’ve got more time to figure things out.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.