I admired their complete contentment, with nothing of the material realm. All they needed was a box of raisins and some oats and they were ready to minister for God anywhere they were called. It was so beautiful, their simplicity of faith and trust in Jesus.
Chuck Smith, reflecting on hippies who came to know Christ
Greg Laurie was but one of a crop of young men who met Christ during the Jesus Movement in Southern California and then went on to start growing, vital churches. This was in 1974, before the boom of casual worship, seeker-friendly churches, and many of the outreach innovations that are common today. Back then contemporary Christian music was in its infancy, and casual dress was still a new development in many sanctuaries.
But even though these new churches were contemporary in style, their pastors didn’t try to make the gospel more relevant by modifying its message. The young preachers stuck to the basic proclamation of the Bible that had evangelized and discipled them. They did what they had seen Chuck Smith do. They didn’t pursue trendy topics; they taught, verse by verse, through entire books of the Bible.
Greg’s church was overflowing with young people who were coming to church for the first time in their lives, excited about following Jesus. These kids were bringing their parents with them. The church grew. They expanded to three overflowing services on Sunday mornings, and two on Sunday evenings. A flourishing “Through the Bible” study met on Wednesday evenings.
Greg surrounded himself with people God was calling to minister in the same way, people he felt were smarter and more gifted than he was. In the beginning, they were brothers like Bob Probert, Paul Havsgaard, Fred Farley, and Duane Crumb. Later, John Collins, Jeff Lasseigne, Ron Case, Paul Eaton, and Brad Ormonde would join him, along with many other gifted colleagues over the years. He knew ministry was a team effort, not a one-man show, and he had seen what happened to pastors and leaders who had no accountability in their lives. They blew off course. And since he came from an early family life with little structure and lots of deception, he wanted to build a ministry with strong foundations and honest communications. He knew it wouldn’t be perfect—but even at a young age, he had the wisdom to design the new church with strong accountability in place.
As the church grew, Greg and his team launched a daily radio program, calling it Harvest Celebration. They recorded it in a friend’s bathroom because they thought the acoustics were better there. Greg had a drawing board set up in his office and was still doing all kinds of graphic design to support himself, as he had no real salary. They put out tracts designed to tell people about Christ. Eventually they got access to television programs and big public events where Greg would preach an evangelistic message and give people the opportunity to publicly come forward and receive Jesus. These updated Billy Graham–style events were called Harvest Crusades.
At this point, Calvary Chapels were popping up everywhere in Southern California, and sometimes people would get mixed up as to which church was which. Greg’s fellowship in Riverside was becoming better known for the “Harvest” name because of the outreaches. So while their theology and philosophy were the same as their original Calvary Chapel roots, they officially became Harvest Christian Fellowship. Today they are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
While Greg was cultivating the Harvest church, other hippie brothers were starting new congregations as well. These organic outreaches to the places the brothers had come from started as Bible studies, and then swelled naturally into new congregations.
Jeff Johnson was a great example. Jeff had been a surfing, opium-smoking hippie in the late ’60s. He’d searched for truth in Buddhism, Hinduism, Hare Krishna, yoga, and hypnosis. He dealt drugs on his home turf of Downey, California. When he came to know Christ at Calvary Chapel, he wanted to start teaching the Bible to the guys to whom he had been dealing drugs. Calvary Chapel in Downey started in a park; within five years, it was meeting in a facility as big as six football fields. Today the church has about eight thousand members, an adoption ministry, radio and mission outreaches, and Christian schools.
Mike MacIntosh was a poster child of the early Calvary Chapel days. His mind had been so damaged by drugs that he once turned himself in to law enforcement, telling police that he was the “fifth Beatle” and he’d lost part of his brain. He ended up in an Orange County psychiatric ward. Then one night in 1970, he came to faith in Jesus at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. He grew in a solid understanding of God’s Word. God restored his broken marriage. He became a pastor and went on to start Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego. It began as a home Bible study of twelve people, grew into a megachurch, and has planted more than thirty additional congregations.
Raul Ries had grown up in the tumultuous heart of urban LA. He was a fierce street fighter and kung fu expert who served in Vietnam. He received two Purple Hearts for bravery, but the war fueled the rage that filled his heart. Raul came home, married, and had children, but his fury corroded everything in his life. One night, gun in hand, he decided to end it all . . . but as God would have it, the television was on, and there was Pastor Chuck Smith, being interviewed about the Jesus Movement. Raul listened, and only the Holy Spirit could have orchestrated what came next: he surrendered his life to Jesus, right there in front of the TV.
God changed Raul’s life and restored his marriage. Raul started a church—where else?—in his kung fu studio. Today that little congregation has about thirteen thousand people; they no longer meet in the studio. Raul has a thriving ministry all over Southern California and far beyond.
A guy named Joe Focht came to Christ in Southern California and later moved to the East Coast. There he started a Bible study with twenty people. It became Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia, with more than ten thousand adults, and four thousand children enrolled in its Sunday school ministry. It’s planted twenty more churches in the Delaware Valley area.
Skip Heitzig grew up in a religious home in Southern California but sought his spirituality in drugs and the occult. One day in 1973 he gave his heart to Jesus Christ while watching a Billy Graham crusade on TV. He studied the Bible for eight years under Chuck Smith and then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1982, he and his wife began a home Bible study, which grew into Calvary Chapel Albuquerque. Within six years it was, for a time, the fastest growing church in America. Today about fifteen thousand people attend each week, and the congregation has planted churches in Arizona, Colorado, and other parts of New Mexico.
Don McClure grew up thinking he was a Christian because, after all, “everyone born in America was a Christian.” But when he was a junior in college, while at a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles, he made a decision to follow Jesus. He went on to Bible school, then seminary, and served as Chuck Smith’s assistant pastor for four years. Then he and his wife moved to Lake Arrowhead, where they planted a church, a Bible college, and a conference center before they moved on to plant churches in other areas. Today they teach at conferences, retreats, Bible colleges, intern programs, church services, and “any other door God opens,” as they put it.1
Steve Mays took the drug-addled prototype of rebellious ’60s youth to new heights. In high school he would take twenty dextroamphetamine tablets, crush them, add an Excedrin and a vitamin—for good health—and swallow it all with coffee. One evening his parents came home and found that he had wedged the front door shut with towels; when they crashed through it, a wave of water came gushing out. Steve had made the living room into a gigantic indoor bathtub and was sitting in the middle of it, smoking a pencil and laughing at a television show. The only problem was that the TV was not turned on.
The next day, as the house—and Steve—were drying out, Steve’s dad noted his son making two sandwiches and pouring two glasses of milk for lunch. When his dad asked who the other sandwich was for, Steve earnestly told him that it was for Brad, who lived in the clock on the wall.
Leaving Brad and his parents behind, Steve went on to darker adventures. He got involved with gangs and crime. One day he was literally lying in the gutter when a couple named Shirley and Henry picked him up. They were Christians. They took Steve in, gave him a shower, and fed him. Then they told him about Mansion Messiah, one of the Christian communes that had grown out of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. According to Steve, the rest of the story came down something like this:
“I walked in [to Mansion Messiah] with my gun stuck in the back of my pants. Immediately, this little squirt named Orville looked right in my eyes and said, ‘Do you know Jesus?’ And I said no.”
Steve prayed with the squirt to receive Christ. “God just grabbed me, reached in and burned in my heart,” he said later. “It was the most incredible power I have ever experienced in my life. . . . At that moment God delivered me from drugs. I flushed ten thousand dollars’ worth of drugs down the toilet that day. I also threw my gun away in the ocean. The residents of Mansion Messiah buried my clothes, they smelled so bad. From then on, I started singing Christian songs by myself when I was just walking down the street.”2
Steve went on to learn the gospel, study the Word, and become the lead pastor at Calvary Chapel South Bay, just south of Los Angeles, in 1980. The church started with seventy-five members, and Steve served as its leader for thirty-four years, until he died unexpectedly during back surgery in 2014.
Today, the little church started by the once-hopeless drug addict is a mission-minded, diverse, and flourishing congregation of more than eight thousand people.
So for Greg Laurie and his fellow hippie preachers, the decades that followed the excitement of the Jesus Movement were in fact a season of joyful but hard work: planting, cultivating, and shepherding new groups of Christians. These were new ekklesia, gatherings of believers that created an environment similar to Chuck Smith’s church where many of the hippie pastors had been born again. The brothers’ new churches evangelized, discipled, served, and grew over the years . . . and so did Greg’s.
One day many years ago, when Harvest Christian Fellowship had reached around eight thousand in Sunday attendance, Greg took a phone call from a person at an organization that specialized in megachurches. At the time, Greg didn’t even know what a megachurch was. But the guy told him that Harvest Christian Fellowship, the little church that no one wanted back in 1972, was at that point one of the largest churches in the United States.