In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.
John Owen, Puritan preacher
During those early days of Greg’s experience of the Jesus Revolution, it would be hard to overestimate Lonnie Frisbee’s influence on Calvary Chapel. Chuck Smith conducted services on Monday nights, and Lonnie would do so on Wednesday nights. The combination of their skills and gifts was always explosive in terms of the church’s growth, but you could be certain that most of the drama would transpire on Wednesday nights. It was surprising: even though Lonnie had the gravitas of looking just like everybody’s mental picture of Jesus, he was a slender, physically unimposing person who didn’t read well and often mispronounced words. But Lonnie had a power that was more than the sum of his parts. When he spoke or taught, kids would stand up all over the packed chapel to receive Christ.
Then, after the chapel services, Lonnie would have follow-up “afterglow” meetings in a side room. He’d dim the lights and preside over extended times of singing and prayer. Then he’d begin to call things out about kids who were in the room.
“There’s someone in here who has a problem with his neck,” he’d say from the front. People would be standing, swaying, and then someone would say, “Yes! That’s me!” That person would come to the front, Lonnie would pray for him or her, and usually the hurting person would swoon to the floor. People were lined up in a row to catch those who fell.
For Greg, this was all new, just like the experience of even being in church was new. He noticed that if Chuck Smith was around, Lonnie was more reined in. But if Chuck wasn’t there, Lonnie would focus more on getting people to pray in unintelligible languages or to fall down in the front of the church. Lonnie told him it was called “being slain in the Spirit.”
Greg reasoned that God could, of course, do anything He wanted. Ever the observer, though, he also saw that people could get a bit hooked on emotions and psychological suggestions, looking for a certain thrilling experience over and over. He felt more centered when Chuck was in charge, teaching everybody straight from the Bible.
Still, Greg saw Lonnie as a role model.
He grew his hair out like Lonnie’s. He dressed like Lonnie. He was flattered one afternoon when Lonnie asked him to help him get ready for a Bible study later that evening.
They went to Lonnie’s small house. Creeping Charlie plants and Boston ferns overflowed from hand-glazed pots suspended in macramé hangers. The walls were covered with Lonnie’s oil paintings of historic California missions. Other large canvases leaned against the back of an old green sofa.
Lonnie changed out of his T-shirt and put on one of his Jesus tunics. Then, while he was washing his face and brushing his hair, he asked Greg to read the book of Jonah to him out loud.
It was only four chapters long, and Greg was honored. He felt like he’d made it to a new level. Greg Laurie: Lonnie Frisbee’s wingman!
He sat on the closed toilet seat lid while Lonnie brushed his hair at the bathroom sink. Greg read through the Old Testament account of the reluctant prophet who ran away from God, got swallowed and regurgitated by a large sea creature, and then preached a message of judgment and repentance to a cruel, idolatrous city named Nineveh.
While he was reading, Greg would pause occasionally and look up. Lonnie kept brushing his hair. Now and then he’d flip his head over and brush the hair down toward the floor, then flip his head back so his mane would cascade over his shoulders. He seemed to be listening, but he never took his eyes off the mirror.
Greg got to the end of Jonah. Lonnie did a few last strokes and put the brush down.
“Thanks, man!” he said.
That evening at church, Lonnie preached about Jonah to a packed house full of young people. He was electric. He gave an invitation at the end, and kids came forward, as usual.
But as Lonnie had told the story of Jonah to the crowd, Greg couldn’t help but notice that his hero had gotten some of the facts messed up. He told it a bit differently than how it was laid out in the Bible.
Greg just filed it away in his head. But it didn’t seem quite right. And when he went back and studied the story of Jonah and the Ninevites in the Bible, using his new commentaries, he couldn’t help but notice a few things that Lonnie had left out in his funny story about Jonah getting swallowed by a whale, or a giant fish, or whatever it was.
Yes, Jonah had finally, reluctantly obeyed God. And the violent people of Nineveh, their attention galvanized by Jonah’s post-whale appearance—blanched by digestive juices, he was quite a sight—had repented. God had spared their city.
And so it was for more than a century. Archeologists have found evidence of the Ninevites worshiping one God, rather than many, for a period of time. But then their polytheism, cruelty, and arrogance gradually returned. They slipped away from God, and new generations grew up. A new prophet named Nahum warned them of God’s judgment, but to no avail.
In 612 BC, mighty Nineveh was assaulted by the Medes and utterly destroyed. Today it is the ancient rubble under the newer rubble of modern-day Mosul, Iraq.
Though Greg didn’t really think about all that in great detail back then, he did absorb a lifelong warning from the whole biblical account of the ancient Ninevites. Repent . . . and repent as an ongoing lifestyle, so you don’t fall back into your old ways.
One of the ways Greg did want to be like Lonnie Frisbee and the others in his new family was to be able to share his faith. Street evangelism was a core habit of the Jesus People at Calvary Chapel. At the time, many of the streets in interesting parts of Orange County were open season for all kinds of things. Around Newport Pier, you’d see everyone from a homeless guy playing an old guitar, its battered case open for donations, to sunburned tourists and young teens taking in the scene, to orange-robed Hare Krishnas handing out literature, to Christians talking with anyone who would listen.
Greg wanted to tell other people about Jesus, but taking a risk in a social setting was a new dynamic for him. He was used to being the mocker, not the person who might be mocked. But he’d been reading his Bible. He knew that Jesus was more important to him than what anybody else might think. And he knew that he himself had come to Christ because Lonnie cared enough to come to his high school to talk about Jesus.
The first time Greg went out to share his faith with strangers, he relied heavily on a tool that was new back then. It was a little booklet called The Four Spiritual Laws. It was written by Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) founder Bill Bright in the 1950s, and by 1970 approximately one zillion copies had been mass-produced as a bright yellow-and-black tract. It likened the physical laws of the universe to fixed spiritual truths, and boiled down the gospel message in a concise way that was easily understandable for random people on the street.
One Saturday afternoon, Greg went to Newport Beach. As his feet hit the sand, he found himself almost praying that no one would be out on the beach that day. Not good. He opened his eyes. The beach was full. The first person he saw was a middle-aged woman about the age of his mother. She had shoulder-length blonde hair parted on the side, and was sitting alone on a flowered towel.
Greg approached the towel. “Excuse me,” he said. His voice seemed to be operating in a different octave than usual. “May I talk with you about God?”
“Uh, sure!” the woman said, to Greg’s shock. “I’m just sitting here.”
Greg sank to his knees on the sand next to her towel. He didn’t know what to say, so he just pulled his bright yellow copy of The Four Spiritual Laws out of his pocket. He started to read the tract, word by word by word. “Just as there are physical laws that govern the physical universe, so are there spiritual laws that govern your relationship with God,” he announced to the woman.
She nodded. Maybe she was humoring him.
“God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life,” he continued. Down deep, Greg was thinking that there was absolutely no way that his robotic reading of this tract could touch this woman’s heart, but when it was all over, at least he could say that he had actually “witnessed” to someone.
The lady kept listening. Greg kept reading. At the end, the booklet posed a question, something like “Is there any good reason you should not accept Jesus Christ right now?”
Reading along, Greg belatedly realized that this was a question. So he repeated it and paused for one second.
“No,” said the woman.
“No what?” Greg asked.
“No, there’s no reason I shouldn’t accept Jesus Christ right now.”
Greg’s mind slowly worked through the double negative.
“What? I mean, great! Let’s pray!” Greg sputtered.
He flipped through the pages of the booklet, madly looking for a prayer he could read. He found it. The lady prayed with him. There was a moment of silence. Greg didn’t want to look up . . . but then the woman said, “Something just happened to me. God did something inside of me!”
Greg eventually did get more comfortable sharing his faith, as his track record as a crusade evangelist makes pretty clear. But he realized, from his very first nervous sharing of the gospel, it is not the skill or eloquence of the evangelist but the power of the Holy Spirit that opens people’s hearts to recognize the truth of the gospel and yield their lives to Jesus.
As he got acclimated in this strange new world, Greg sometimes got starstruck. He was only seventeen, after all. He admired Lonnie, but Lonnie was close to his own age and easier to relate to than the older leaders like Chuck Smith. One evening Greg was at a social gathering at church, and Pastor Chuck was pouring punch. Chuck offered Greg a Dixie cup.
“Want something to drink?” Chuck asked.
“Sure,” said Greg. He held out the cup. He thought it was so cool that the church leader was humbly pouring punch for his people. Then Chuck kept pouring. And pouring. Greg’s cup overflowed, and then punch was streaming down his hippie sleeve, puddling on his sandals, and Chuck was laughing uncontrollably.
Even as he enjoyed the friendships in his new Christian community—Christians called it “fellowship,” Greg had learned—there was one aspect of his former life that he missed. The music.
After all, his ears were used to the golden age of rock and roll. He’d loved the Beatles, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, and the Animals. He loved Motown: Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. And of course the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, and Bob Dylan. He’d hallucinated his way through Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors.
Greg, who has never lacked confidence about his own aesthetic discrimination, knew what he liked. Back then, as now, he was sure that what he preferred was in fact the gold standard of good taste. As a new convert, he was sure that every Christian song he was hearing redundantly relied on the chords G, C, D, and E minor. He sadly reflected that his days of good music were over. Well, it was a sacrifice he was willing, if not happy, to make for Jesus.
One day he was sitting in a Christian coffeehouse in Newport Beach. There was a stack of albums piled near the window with a record player next to them. He looked through the vinyl pile. No Beatles or Hendrix; instead, the album covers featured people wearing outfits that made them look like they were trying a little too hard to be cool. Folk music.
Oh well, Greg thought. Then he turned over a record cover of a guy with long, blond hair. It was called Upon This Rock. The guy’s name was Larry Norman. He looked halfway okay.
Greg put the record on the turntable. It was good, he thought. Really good. Larry Norman had been a member of a one-hit-wonder mainstream band called People. He’d come to Christ and was now writing smart songs that were sometimes sassy, sometimes penetrating.
For Greg, it was a relief. He felt like he had at least one good Christian record to listen to.
At the time, “Christian music” was going through its own revolution, and Calvary Chapel was the epicenter of many of those changes.
There were three distinct types of music in the Calvary Chapel community. First, on Sunday mornings the congregation sang hymns that were brand-new . . . in the nineteenth century. Chuck Smith would carefully choose old hymns that amplified his Scripture message for the day, and the congregation would sing all the verses to the accompaniment of traditional organ and piano. Hippies and street kids gamely jumped right in and learned to sing along. Chuck would be attired in a traditional suit, and even Lonnie would be wearing a coat and tie.
Sunday evenings at Calvary were a different story. Lonnie would be in a flowing Jesus outfit, and Chuck would sit on a stool in comfortable clothes. He’d lead the diverse congregation a cappella in Gospel choruses sung from memory. Some were camp songs like “This Little Light of Mine,” and they were soon augmented by folk songs the new Jesus People were writing, like “Alleluia,” “Seek Ye First,” and “Father, I Adore You.” These songs of adoration, thanksgiving, and praise tended to be simple, pure, and organic. As Dr. Chuck Fromm, head of Maranatha! Music for many years, described this type of music,
It was fashioned for an audience of one—God—or fashioned to win a lost heart. It also sometimes had a childlike hootenanny quality to it. It knew nothing of recording studios, or radio. It was musical communication, heart to heart, abandoned, lacking in self-consciousness, and imbued with passionate excitement.1
As formerly pagan musicians came to know Christ and wrote new stuff, there was an eventual third strand of the musical experience at Calvary Chapel. Groups would be invited to sing in prisons or at youth gatherings or in faraway churches. Their ministry on the road was going great guns, and they needed money for expenses. Ever the entrepreneur, Chuck Smith figured out a way for them to record albums and sell them so they’d have the money to travel and do ministry. From those humble beginnings, today’s contemporary Christian music industry was born, a topic that deserves a book of its own.
The best known of these early groups was Love Song. This started with a group of guys who’d been playing music, together and separately, since the mid-1960s. Chuck Girard, Jay Truax, and Fred Field had played a lot of clubs, enjoyed some mainstream success, and had gotten disillusioned by the materialistic world. They’d embarked on a new spiritual quest. They’d read in Revelation about the New Jerusalem, and someone had the idea that Hawaii was absolutely where this was going to happen. They lived in caves there, ate fruit, and ingested a lot of mushrooms, but eventually got tired of waiting for the New Millennium. They came back to the mainland and formed a new band called Love Song. They played in clubs, preaching peace, love, and LSD as a path to God.
Still on their search for truth, Chuck Girard and his buddies would regularly pick up hitchhikers. Everybody did back then. The usual pattern had been that the guys they’d pick up might share some weed or LSD as an expression of thanks. Now, increasingly, the hitchhikers were sharing something else. They’d tell Chuck about how Jesus was better than any drug, and there was a hippie preacher they should go hear at a church called Calvary Chapel.
That sounded good. Chuck Girard and friends showed up one night.
Expecting Lonnie Frisbee, they heard the preaching of Chuck Smith instead. Chuck Girard realized that his spiritual search had come to an end; he gave his life to Jesus. Jay and Fred also decided to make Calvary Chapel their church home.
Chuck Smith welcomed them in.
During that time, many of the musical expressions at Calvary Chapel were earnest if not always professional. As a seasoned musician, Chuck Girard sometimes winced when he heard people up front shyly share that God had just given them a song. When they played it, he had two reactions. The first was that God had probably given them the song because He didn’t want it. The second reaction was that even though the music might be substandard to his professional ear, it was still deeply moving. He sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit, and Chuck Girard was further drawn into the new community at Calvary Chapel.
A few weeks later, Chuck Smith was due to speak at an anti-drug rally. He asked his new friends, Love Song, to come and play at the event. They needed a guitar player, so they called an old friend, Tommy Coomes, who had also been checking out Christianity.
While performing with them, during the last song of the evening, “Think About What Jesus Said,” Tommy found himself, in fact, thinking about what Jesus said. He realized that he hadn’t made a full commitment of his life to Christ. During the song he broke down in tears, ripped off his guitar, and decided to follow Jesus. On the spot, he also decided to quit his job and move back to Orange County so he could play full time for Jesus.
Jay, Fred, Chuck, and Tommy started playing together in the spring of 1970. Love Song would morph over the years, but they made an enormous contribution to Christian music and ministry as a whole, and to Calvary Chapel in particular. They were already accomplished, professional musicians channeling influences from the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and others . . . but now their music was also a passionate vehicle for communicating their own experience of God’s love and reality. Calvary Chapel, already swelling with young people, exploded with kids who heard echoes of their own search in Love Song’s powerful music.
Greg felt like the Holy Spirit was present when Love Song sang; their songs took him to another place. A holy place. It was a different destination than that of his former musical heroes like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison.
During this period, people were coming to faith in great numbers at Calvary Chapel. Though reports vary, the church was baptizing about nine hundred new believers every month. Chuck Smith, Lonnie Frisbee, and other leaders would wade into the water, and crowds of people would line up to confess their sins, their new faith in Jesus, and their trust in Him. Then they’d get dunked in the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean as an outward sign of the internal reality of their new life in Christ.
One Sunday in 1971, for a reason he can no longer recall, Greg went to a different church in Orange County. He was used to church by now and felt comfortable enough to attend someplace where he didn’t know anyone.
That morning Greg was wearing jeans and a loose muslin shirt with embroidery on it. His hair was long and flowing, and he had a full beard.
He got to the service a little late and realized that everyone was looking at him. He slid into a pew and looked around. Everyone there looked like they were from a television milk commercial or the set of Ozzie and Harriet. No long hair on men, and not a bead, bell, feather, or flower in sight.
The pastor was preaching away, but then he started addressing every sentence right at Greg, particularly as he wound down to an old-fashioned, Billy Graham–style invitation, calling anyone who wanted to come to Jesus to come forward.
The robed choir began the first verse of “Just as I Am.” They were all singing to Greg. The pastor was praying, but now and then he’d peek up and look at Greg. The choir kept going. It suddenly dawned on Greg, Oh, these people all think that they’ve got a real, live pagan hippie in their midst, and they so want me to come forward! He clutched his big leather Bible, wanting to hold it up above pew level so they’d all know he was a brother.
Somewhere after about the fiftieth verse of “Just as I Am,” seeing that Greg was still in his pew, the choir reluctantly drew to a halt. The pastor left the pulpit and headed straight down the aisle toward Greg.
“Son, do you know Jesus?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Greg.
“Have you been baptized?”
“Yes,” Greg said again.
He had passed the test.
“All right, then,” the pastor said. “Do you want to come to the church picnic this afternoon?”
Greg didn’t happen to attend that particular picnic, but one night he spontaneously did something that he hadn’t planned, and it changed his life course. He went to a group baptism at Pirate’s Cove but got there late. There were still dozens of people hanging around, though, and so he sat down with a group of kids who were playing guitars and singing.
Then he felt an irresistible urge to do something he’d never done. He’d been reading his Bible that morning, soaking up the story of a blind man whom Jesus had healed. The man’s excited words from two thousand years ago were fresh, real, and echoing in Greg’s head. I once was blind, but now I see! He felt like he just had to tell the other people about it.
This was not Greg’s personality. He didn’t like to take risks that had unknown social outcomes.
But he realized he had to say something.
Today Greg doesn’t even remember exactly what he talked about, but the real shocker came when he finished talking. Two teenagers had joined the group, and they got his attention.
“Pastor,” one of them said, “we missed the baptism earlier. We accepted Christ earlier this week. Can you baptize us?”
Greg looked around to see who they were calling pastor. He asked them to repeat what they’d said. He had no idea if he had any right to baptize people, but these kids were insistent, and he felt like Jesus was in favor of baptism. So maybe he should do it.
They waded out into the water. Greg asked the kids to declare their faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins, and repeated the ritual that he had seen Pastor Chuck do many times. He managed to dunk both teenagers without drowning them.
They all waded back to the shore.
Then Greg looked up. Now there were about forty people scattered on the rocks above the cove. They were waiting for what would happen next.
All Greg could think of was a memory from his druggie days, when he’d come to Pirate’s Cove and there would be this weird guy, dressed in long sleeves and long pants, preaching about Jesus. Greg had watched as people would laugh at the guy, or yell at him, or ignore him.
Now, evidently, he was that guy.
He called up to the kids sitting on the rocks, who looked like New Testament characters sitting by the Sea of Galilee. “Hey! You might be wondering why we’re down here baptizing people. You might be wondering what baptism even is! The reason is, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on a cross and paid for our sins. He rose from the dead! And He’s changed our lives!”
Greg went on. “If any of you want to, you can accept Christ as your Savior right now! Just come on down here, and I’ll tell you more, and I’ll pray with you.”
Five or six people actually climbed down the rocks and came to the water’s edge. Greg explained more about the gospel, answered their questions, and prayed with them. To his surprise, three of them decided they also wanted to be baptized right then.
Greg hadn’t even turned twenty yet. But to his shock, God did something that night that set a calling on the rest of his life. He knew he wanted to be an evangelist.