Laurie, Evangelist to Baby Boomers, Plans L.A. Crusade

Crowd-pleasing evangelist Greg Laurie has booked the Universal Amphitheatre for a mid-November crusade, encouraging some San Fernando Valley clergy to envision the Riverside pastor as a popular heir to the mantle of Billy Graham.

“Greg Laurie has the voice of the ‘90s, a guy who can speak to yuppies and baby boomers,” said the Rev. Chris Stanton, coordinator of the Valley Pastors Fellowship, whose leadership recently unanimously endorsed Laurie’s first crusade in Los Angeles.

To be sure, 43-year-old Franklin Graham has received his father Billy’s blessing as the nation’s unofficial evangelist-in-waiting, not to mention the approbation of a Time magazine cover story this week.

In the meantime, Laurie, also 43, has been running up impressive figures for U.S. evangelistic crusades, preaching to 317,850 people in 20 appearances last year while serving as minister of the 12,000-member Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside.

As for “replacing” the 77-year-old Graham, “it might take 30 of us to fill the shoes of Billy Graham, who was also a chaplain to presidents and a leader of the evangelical world,” said Laurie.

He regards Franklin Graham as a friend, not a competitor. “We want to cooperate. If one were to emerge as the premier evangelist, so to speak, that will be determined by time, and it will be up to God--not up to man.”

Nevertheless, Laurie has drawn impressive crowds where he is well known. His Harvest Crusades last year outdrew the Angels and Padres baseball games in average attendance when he preached in stadiums in Anaheim (164,000 in four days) and San Diego (80,000 in four days). Laurie will return to those ballparks in July.

Given those precedents, the 6,251-seat Universal Amphitheatre may hardly be large enough for his Nov. 17-20 Los Angeles crusade. Assistants are already inquiring about places to put overflow crowds.

Even the somewhat disappointing turnout for the Luis Palau Crusade in the San Fernando Valley in June 1994 ranged nightly between 7,000 and 11,200--and that was on the bleacher seats of Birmingham High School’s football stadium in Van Nuys.

Despite heavy promotion of Palau’s evangelistic crusade, the biggest crowds were not, as expected, on the first and last nights. The audience was largest on the second night, when singer Smokey Robinson was on stage (9,600), and on the fourth night--Youth Night, with contemporary Christian music by the Newsboys and other groups (11,200).

Laurie’s Harvest Crusades have been wise to that phenomenon, offering along with the sermon appearances by Christian performers such as the Maranatha! Praise Band, singer Crystal Lewis, vocalist Lou Gramm and the Kry.

“The No. 1 violent criminal today is the teenager,” Laurie said. “These young people must be reached, and the only thing that will turn them around will be a change of heart.”

At the core of his rallies, however, are Laurie’s plain-spoken messages and a manner of delivery that is praised by fellow evangelical and charismatic pastors. “He says ordinary things, but people listen to him,” marveled Stanton of the Valley Pastors Fellowship.

Comparisons are common between Laurie and Franklin Graham, the latter only 6 months older. Both like to ride their Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and friends say they have a risk-taking sense of humor not found in an older, cautious generation of evangelists.

Both had teen years when they smoked marijuana, wore the late-1960s signature beard and long hair, and were far from the conservative Christians they would soon become.

The Franklin Graham story is more compelling because he was the firstborn son of a famous evangelist, and only at age 22 did Franklin reassess his avoidance of Christian commitment and steer himself into humanitarian relief ministries.

Laurie, who says he came from an unsettled family life, confronted no such expectations. He became a Christian at age 17 at a high school Christian club and came under the tutelage of Pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, which attracted legions of born-again hippies in the early 1970s.

Laurie’s ministry took off in 1989, when Smith helped him start an affiliate of Calvary Chapel in Riverside. In 1990, a popular Bible study group Laurie led back in Costa Mesa blossomed into his first Harvest Crusade, attended by 90,000 people in Costa Mesa’s Pacific Amphitheatre. While continuing with special crusades, his congregation grew into the eighth-largest church in the country, according to one study.

The evangelistic careers of Laurie and the younger Graham have become intertwined. Laurie sits on the boards of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn. and Franklin Graham’s longtime ministry, Samaritan’s Purse.

Laurie said he will attend a Salvation Army banquet next week when Franklin Graham receives an award, and Franklin will speak July 7, during the closing night of Laurie’s Orange County Harvest Crusade at Anaheim Stadium.

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One key to successful mass evangelism--charted by Billy Graham ever since his breakthrough crusade in Los Angeles in 1949--is getting the backing of as many local churches and pastors as possible.

In the Valley, the influential Pastor Jack Hayford of the Church on the Way is enthusiastic about Laurie’s Harvest Crusades.

Hayford was the prime mover for the Palau Crusade two years ago. His church houses the office of the Valley Pastors Fellowship and, as a backer of Laurie’s Universal Amphitheatre crusade, he wondered aloud last week to fellow pastors at the Valley Prayer Breakfast whether a Laurie crusade in the Rose Bowl might be possible in five years.

An unexpected supporter of the Harvest Crusades is the Rev. John MacArthur, pastor of the large Grace Community Church in Sun Valley and president of The Master’s College in Newhall. He has often been critical of other conservative Christian pastors on grounds of theology and style.

“I believe God has His hand on this young man,” reads a MacArthur endorsement of Laurie and the Harvest Crusades. “I believe that the Word of God which he preaches is clear and penetrating.”