Who gives the keys of a church to a twenty-year-old? Chuck Smith did.
Greg Laurie
Chuck Smith didn’t know just where a new church for Greg Laurie would be, but he recognized the movement of God when he saw it. He saw God planting a new congregation of young people in Riverside. Now it was just a matter of finding a building for that new church to meet in.
The building came in the form of a Baptist church that had split, and both of the factions had gone elsewhere. Its former building was for sale. The former congregants had actually hauled away their stuff, like pews with brass nameplates that told who had donated them, memorial hymnbooks, and chandeliers. The pulpit was still there, but the scene looked like something from a war zone.
It did not look like the “spacious place” Greg had read about in Psalm 118.
Chuck Smith set up a meeting with the realtor, who was ecstatic that someone was actually interested in the shell of a building. As Chuck and the realtor huddled, Greg walked through the bombed-out sanctuary, thinking about the warring Baptists, the cold Episcopalians, and the fledgling congregation of new believers who just wanted to hear the Word of God. He was twenty years old. He’d been a Christian for three years. He knew God was calling him to preach and teach. But was this how churches started?
Still, Greg had read the book of Acts. He’d seen how the original Jesus Movement moved. His faith was in God, not in a marketing or branding campaign, not in a media platform, not in church growth techniques. He was ready to do what God called him to do, whatever it was.
Chuck was shaking hands with the realtor. He pulled out his checkbook, wrote a check, handed it to the agent, and grinned at Greg.
“Well, Greg,” he said. “You’ve got yourself a church.”
Chuck had made the deposit and the first payment for month number one. The rest would be up to Greg and the congregation of young people from the weekly Bible study. None of them had any money besides what they spent on gas and goulash.
Greg made an appointment with the Episcopal rector and told him that he need not worry, Greg was going to move. God had already been building up a new church—a body of believers—and now they had a new building they could meet in.
The rector looked at Greg over his half glasses. “You’re going to fail,” he said reassuringly. “The only reason all those kids come to the Bible study is because their parents know there are adults here to chaperone them. They won’t let their kids come if it’s just a big gathering of young people.”
Greg thought briefly about breaking the guy’s glasses, but decided that would be unbiblical. “All right,” he told the older man. “I respect your opinion. We’ll just have to see what God does!”
The next week, during the last gathering at the old stone church, Greg announced that the Bible study would be moving to a new location the following weekend. Three hundred excited people were crammed into the church, and they erupted into spontaneous applause.
All that week, Greg had a split screen in his head. On one hand he was trusting God, didn’t care about outcomes or numbers, and was ready to speak to however few people came to church, no problem. On the other side he was terrified that no one would show up and he’d be shown up as a total failure.
The following Sunday, more than five hundred people arrived to the humble, former war-zone church. To Greg’s shock, the rector was one of them. To Greg’s further shock, God moved him to have the priest stand before the new congregation as Greg publicly thanked him for his role in getting the new congregation started. Greg didn’t elaborate as to what that role had been. Everyone applauded.
The oldest person in the congregation was in his late twenties. There was one child, and so his parents were in charge of Sunday school.
Soon a godly, middle-aged man named Keith Ritter became part of the fellowship. Greg had told the teenagers and converted hippies that they wanted to have “an outreach to older people” on Sunday mornings. That meant people over the age of thirty. Wearing a tie and looking the part of an “older person,” Keith preached on Sunday mornings, and Greg preached on Sunday and Wednesday evenings. The fellowship soon had one thousand people, then two thousand in the evening meetings.
But the Sunday morning gathering was staying quite small. In spite of encouragement for him to take it on, Greg felt hesitant. He felt that older people could relate better to Keith than to a youngster in his early twenties who looked like an early cast member of Duck Dynasty.
Then Keith had a heart attack. Thankfully, he survived, but he needed to cut back on his schedule. The people in the congregation were already calling Greg pastor. So evidently it was time to step up, even though Greg felt vastly unqualified, and unworthy, to stand in the pulpit.
But for those who were watching, it seemed like God was bringing Greg along step by step. Since his early experience of leading people to Christ in Pirate’s Cove, he had wanted to be an evangelist. But he needed the tempering, accountability, and week-in, week-out work that comes with pastoring a flock of people through the ups and downs in their lives. And this fledgling congregation, which needed a pastor, had chosen Greg. He believed in the centrality of the local church, that it was Jesus’s designated way to fulfill the Great Commission and bring the love of the kingdom of God to bear on neighborhoods, communities, and nations. And, bottom line, he was really starting to love the people who were part of that church family that would become Harvest Christian Fellowship.
The Jesus Revolution had broken through the structures and strictures of previous, more formal times. In certain areas—like Southern California—the movement was almost a democratization of church life. The cultural model of earlier times had put a premium on a pastor with advanced degrees and a model family, a pillar in the community at large who was as comfortable in the country club or the Rotary Club as in the pulpit. Greg, like many of his young contemporaries of the day, was just amazed he was part of the Jesus Club, where membership was free and all were welcome.
Within a year of getting started, the new church had outgrown its building, and so it was meeting in Riverside’s downtown civic center, the Municipal Auditorium. The facility had no air conditioning, and during the sweltering inland summers the faithful would roast like ducks. They called it the “Riverside Municipal Microwave Oven,” in honor of that brand-new technology of the day.
The sweaty flock kept growing week by week. Greg couldn’t explain why. But, as Warren Wiersbe used to say, quoting former Youth for Christ president Bob Cook, “If you can explain what’s going on, God didn’t do it.”1
The other key development in Greg’s life that he could not explain was the fact that he was in love with Cathe Martin and wanted to marry her. Coming from the wreckage of his mother’s many relationships and the emotional frigidity of his early life, Greg was absolutely amazed that God was giving him something so different. He wanted to grow old with Cathe and to serve God, together, as long as God gave them breath. He wanted to raise children and establish a warm, loving, safe home for all kinds of people in need. He wanted to be part of something he never had as a kid.
That was scary, but Greg had already seen God do miracles. So he was confident that he and Cathe could, with the help of the Holy Spirit, build something strong and healthy and enduring.
Cathe’s parents, however, were not so sure. They came from a very different background. They’d lived in affluence all over the world. They wanted Cathe to be provided for, and they were worried that the sins of Greg’s mother would somehow be visited upon her son.
So Cathe sat down and wrote her father a long, impassioned letter, trying to show him the new foundation that had changed Greg’s trajectory and that would undergird their marriage. She and her dad were living in the same house, of course, but she felt like she could communicate more clearly, and he would pause to really consider her words, if she wrote out her thoughts.
“I love and respect you, Daddy,” she wrote, “and I understand your fears for me. But Greg is not his mother. He’s a different person.” She went on to say how God had changed Greg and was continuing to do so. He was blessing the roast duck church in Riverside—Cathe didn’t call it that in the letter—and soon, Greg would even have a regular paycheck of some kind.
Cathe asked for her dad’s blessing. She mailed the letter and then crept around the house for a day or two.
As was typical, her dad did not respond outright. But her mother came to Cathe and hugged her tight.
“Honey, your dad got your letter,” she said. “It was beautiful. We will give you our blessing.”
Greg bought a wedding ring from a friend who’d bought it and then been jilted. So the price was right. And on February 2, 1974—two days after Cathe’s eighteenth birthday—Greg and Cathe were married. Calvary pastor Tom Stipe served as best man, and his wife, Maryellen, was Cathe’s matron of honor. Cathe wore her mother’s beautiful vintage wedding dress. Greg chose a gray tux with wide lapels, a frilly shirt, and pointy, shiny shoes that looked like they’d been purchased at Pimps ‘R’ Us.
Still, Chuck Smith, who performed the ceremony, was like a proud father. He beamed through the entire proceedings, probably amazed as he contemplated all that God had done in Greg’s life over the few short years since he’d first met the seventeen-year-old new Christian brought into the fold by Lonnie Frisbee. Uncharacteristically, Chuck got a little flustered. When he came to the culmination of the service, he paused and then affirmed, “I now pronounce Greg and Laurie man and wife!”
Greg and Laurie—we mean Cathe—moved into a creaky old home in Riverside that had been a commune. Another couple lived upstairs. People had given them furniture, like the old green sofa from an earlier century that spewed feathers onto their floor. Cathe sewed her own clothes by hand since she had no sewing machine. She’d been raised in lovely homes around the world, with servants to care for her every need. Now, as mistress of their hippie castle, it was a new world. The first time they received a bill in the mail, Cathe looked at it like it was an artifact from outer space.
“Wow!” she said, shaking her head. “You mean you have to pay for water?”
Yes, they did have to pay for water, but when Cathe became pregnant, they found an obstetrician who would deliver their baby for free. Actually, Cathe was working for the doctor, so he donated his services to deliver baby Christopher, who arrived fourteen months after they were married.
Christopher was an enthusiastic, inquisitive, energetic only child for ten years, and then Jonathan arrived. He was as easygoing as Christopher was irrepressible. Sometimes, watching his boys play outside with Cathe, Greg would feel overwhelmed. As the son of a serial divorcée, he never could have dreamed he would have a fruitful, faithful, enduring marriage. As a fatherless boy, he never could have dreamed he would get to be a father to two beautiful sons.
Still, he didn’t know then that they would break his heart.