More Than 100,000 Expected at Revival : Religion: Anaheim Stadium will be the scene of the third annual Summer Harvest Crusade, the Southland’s largest festival of its kind.

Anaheim Stadium is rented, posters are up, thousands of bumper stickers have been distributed, radio ads are running, bands are set to play and banners will be unfurled. But when the Summer Harvest Crusade opens Friday, organizers will be seeking converts not to a political candidate but to Christianity.

More than 100,000 people from throughout the state are expected to converge on the stadium Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the third annual staging of the religious festival, which organizers say is the largest of its kind in the Southland. About 150 Orange County Protestant churches are sponsoring the event.

Last year’s event drew 51,000 to a one-day stay at the stadium after two days at the Pacific Amphitheater, and a revival festival drew 30,000 to Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego on Sunday.

“Our object is to show people who Jesus Christ is, what he said about himself and how to come into a relationship with him and have the hope of heaven,” said Greg Laurie, the event’s organizer and pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, one of the state’s largest Protestant churches. “Also, Christians from many different denominations come together so we can celebrate what we have in common.”

Bradley Starr, an assistant professor of religious studies at Cal State Fullerton, said major religious festivals such as the Harvest Crusade are part of an ongoing debate among scholars over whether the United States is experiencing its fourth “Great Awakening”--periods of 15 or more years marked by large-scale religious revivals.

The first of these periods began in Colonial New England in the 1720s among the Calvinists, Starr said. They believed that revivals were matters of chance brought about by prayers to God.

The second awakening occurred in the years around 1800 and was led by Charles Finney--”the first professional revivalist”--who, like today’s practitioners, believed that awakenings could be helped along by using more worldly tools, Starr said.

“They would go into communities and, using advertising and other techniques, they could turn out a whole city for days or weeks,” Starr said. He said the second awakening led to efforts aimed at abolishing slavery.

The third awakening started around 1900 and lasted about 20 years, Starr said. Highlighted by ministers such as Billy Sunday, the third awakening led to a split between Protestant conservatives, who feared the wave of European immigration and the Catholicism it brought, and liberals who believed Christianity should be used as a tool for social progress.

Which leaves today, with the possibility a fourth Great Awakening in progress.

“Clearly the rise of (Christian) fundamentalism recently is one aspect of that,” Starr said. “Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement (in the 1960s) was religious in nature. There was the ‘Age of Aquarius’ people in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the New Age movement today that might mean this awakening is more varied” than previous awakenings, which were Christian in nature.

With crusades also scheduled to be held in Seattle, Honolulu and Sacramento in the next two months, Laurie said he hopes another Christian awakening is occurring.

“I would pray that that would be so,” said Laurie, 39, a San Clemente resident. “Every awakening has brought about a moral rebirth in this country. Just look at the violence that took place in Los Angeles and elsewhere during the riots. That shows our society is suffering from moral chaos.”

Among those scheduled to speak at Saturday’s gathering is television personality Stephanie Edwards. Dave Dravecky, a former pitcher for the San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres whose pitching arm was amputated because of cancer, will speak Sunday.

Admission to the festival, which begins at 7:30 p.m. each day, is free. The city will charge a parking fee of $3 per car.