I need God. I just need God. It’s hard. When this happened, if Jesus didn’t come through for me, trust me when I tell you that I would have stopped preaching, but I have to say to you, it’s all true. I hit bottom and God was there. And this horror brought good things. If I could have all the faith, urgency, passion, abandon that came—if I could have all that—and Christopher, it would be a perfect world. For me, I had personal revival through it.
Greg Laurie
It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.
A. W. Tozer
The second that Greg Laurie heard his son was dead, he prayed a prayer.
“God,” he said, even as he was collapsed on his front porch, weeping. “You gave him to me in the first place, and now I give him back to You.”
It was no heroic, super-spiritual moment. It was just the culmination of years of consuming the Bible. Like a soldier who drills for so long that his performance on the field of battle comes automatically, or the athlete who practices until her muscles have a memory of their own . . . at the moment of crisis, faith was a net that caught him, and it held.
Greg kept thinking of the book of Job—how many times had he preached on Job? In a series of painful disasters, God takes everything, material and personal, away from Job. Job falls on the ground in worship, and cries out, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.”1
Greg had no choice, of course, regarding his son’s death. It happened. But in the aftermath, he did have a choice. On the one hand, he could sort of paint by numbers with a fake, superficial religiosity, and give up and drift for the rest of his life. On the other, he could go back to the bedrock, to the absolutes of his faith, and vigorously trust God for whatever new thing He was now doing. The Jesus Revolution that had turned Greg’s life upside down back in 1970 had to be real and powerful almost forty years later.
It was.
But the reality of faith didn’t anesthetize the pain. Trusting Jesus wasn’t an emotional Xanax. Greg and Cathe hurt all the time, their chests pressed with a constant, crushing weight. But faith did make it bearable, second by second by second.
And because they had studied the Bible, day in and day out, for years, they knew a few things. Not just intellectually, but deep in their souls, things they could hold on to in the midst of the storm.
First, they knew that life is full of trouble, just as Jesus had promised. Greg realized that he had unconsciously assumed that because his childhood was so full of pain, he might get a break as an adult. Not so. But the pain of this world made Heaven itself much more real, and now they found they were thinking of Heaven all the time, with great expectation.
Second, they knew God loved them.
Third, they knew that Jesus wept with them.
Fourth, they knew that God can be glorified, in some mysterious way, by human suffering.
These plain and dependable truths were amplified and supported by their community of faith. Though there will always be people who say ridiculous, hurtful things in times of bereavement—“Are you over it yet?”—they were in the minority. The Lauries’ church family, and the wider body of Christ, prayed for them, wept with them, listened to them, fed them, hugged them, and hung with them for the long run.
So the Lauries found that the faith they’d first found as hippie teenagers was still absolutely reliable in the perilous world of middle-aged loss. But they also found they were in a new revolution, one of coming back to the fixed point at which they’d started. Jesus. Everything else in their familiar landscape, with its unconscious assumption that things would proceed in a certain, safe way, was gone. Burned down like a forest fire. Nothing was left of the familiar except the foundations of faith, like the bones of the earth.
In some ways the Lauries felt what C. S. Lewis had expressed about the death of his beloved mother when he was a child: “With my mother’s death all settled happiness . . . disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”2
Storms will come. Fires will burn. Terrorists and rogue governments will attack. Stock markets will crash. Cancer and other disease, accidents, murder, suicide, betrayal, and death—they will come in this world. For Greg, in the fulcrum days after the loss of his son, life came down, oddly enough, to the same essential question that Lonnie Frisbee had posed to him when he was seventeen years old.
“Are you for Christ, or against Him?”
Except now the question was, “Do you trust Christ, really, or don’t you?”
When fires and floods come, you don’t mess with the small stuff. You grab on to what is most important. However much time Greg might have left in his own life journey, he didn’t want to coast. He wanted to trust Christ, take risks, and be bold. Eternity was a second away. This wasn’t the time to retire to Hawaii and collect seashells, or to show up on Sundays at his megachurch and dust off an archived sermon he’d written ten years earlier. This wasn’t the time to let down his guard against the enemy and have an affair, or turn to a little or a lot of social drinking, or to fall into bitterness. This was the time to gamble it all, to live as if he radically trusted Christ. Or not. It wasn’t like Greg had strayed; but it was time to make sure that he was doing the first things.
Not too many megachurch pastors start over. It’s too risky.
Greg Laurie did.
For a long time he’d loved Orange County. It was where he’d lived for years, even though his big church was in Riverside. It was where Greg had grown up, come to Christ, and seen the Jesus Movement burst out like a flame. It was time to come back home and plant a church. It was time to return to the first things, to take the principles he’d first seen in the Jesus Movement and do the basics. After all, they say if you want to see a revival, do revival-like things.
He’d stayed away from Orange County for years because of Chuck Smith’s big church there, the very first Calvary Chapel. But there were plenty of unsaved people in Orange County, and Greg felt a growing conviction that God was in fact calling him to start a Bible study there. Out of respect, Greg called his old mentor and asked for his blessing on this new venture. Chuck enthusiastically told Greg that, as always, he was behind him.
When the time came to launch, however, Chuck had cooled to the idea. He’d told other people that he was not happy about Greg’s new venture. He saw it as competition. Even when Greg met with him to talk further, Chuck was adamant, and Greg was less than successful in ironing out the tension between them.
He was determined to resolve the painful conflict with Chuck, but he knew it would take time. And in the aftermath of tragedy and his own new sense of urgency about the gospel, Greg wasn’t going to wait around. It would have been far easier to pull the plug on the new venture of faith to keep peace between him and Smith, but Greg could not deny the strong leading of the Holy Spirit to do this work.
He and Cathe were also concerned about Christopher’s wife, Brittany, and her mother, Sheryll. They wanted to continue their discipleship, but they were fragile. So the senior Lauries decided to start a Thursday night Bible study in Orange County, with the intention of helping to root Brittany and Sheryll deeper in the Scriptures that alone could anchor them. If others wanted to listen in for the study, so much the better.
Greg looked around for a venue. It was hard to find a church that wanted Greg Laurie to teach a Bible study there. It was like the stone Episcopal church in Riverside more than thirty years earlier. But back then the pastor thought Greg was too young and inexperienced to possibly shepherd a flock. Now it seemed like area pastors didn’t want to host “celebrity pastor” Greg teaching a study because he was a threat to their own flock. But then the leader of the Free Chapel in Irvine, Jentezen Franklin, opened up his large space for Greg and Cathe on Thursday nights. “This may turn into a church,” Greg told him. “No problem,” Jentezen said. He told Greg it was his privilege to help Greg fulfill what the Lord was calling him to in this new season of his life.
On the first Thursday, Cathe and Greg showed up well ahead of time. They brought worship leaders from their church in Riverside. Cathe and her closest friends, Marilyn, Shelly, and Sue, baked dozens and dozens of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies. They brought khaki tablecloths and draped round tables in the foyer. They brought glass cylinder vases from home, filled them with long, curly willow twigs, and hung lanterns from the branches. At the end of the service, they stood behind their festive tables, dispensing cookies and welcoming people.
A thousand people showed up. The next week there were more. And more each following week. Cathe and her faithful friends had to supplement their baking capacity with bulk purchases from Costco, but they kept it up for the first year.
But Greg purposely did not sprinkle Miracle-Gro on this new fellowship. He didn’t do splashy advertising or bring in big Christian bands that would draw a crowd. He didn’t prime the pump with anything besides cookies and the Word of God, taught simply, verse by verse by verse. He’d always told younger pastors that your people will develop an appetite for what you feed them, and now he was trying to keep it simple and pure.
He did find that his pain had had some benefits. He was more open with people about his own personal struggles. He judged other people’s life situations less. He moved toward suffering people rather than away from them. He took the time to connect.
It was kind of like being a grandparent, he thought. When you’re young and raising your children, it all goes so fast. When you’re a grandparent, you slow down and enjoy it. When Greg was young and starting his church, everything was new, the church was growing, and he was just trying to keep up. He had wanted to be successful, and he hadn’t wanted the numbers to diminish.
Now he could take it slower and enjoy the relationships. He wanted to know the people. It was a different dynamic. At his Riverside church, he’d be in the greenroom backstage, or passing quickly through a crowd with security around him, necessary because of frequent threats against his life. Now he was talking with people after the services, eating tacos from a food truck in the parking lot with everyone else. Security was still around, but at a distance so people could more easily approach him.
Now, instead of seeing a blur of faces, he saw people, and he knew their stories. Oh, that couple who had been struggling in their marriage, now they are mending, sitting together, holding hands. That single mom who was at the end of her rope, now she has a community. That teenaged kid who was strung out on drugs, now he’s clean and sober. Greg loved seeing people come to Christ, grow in maturity, discover their gifts, and serve God with passion and joy.
For her part, Cathe and her closest friends knew that women’s ministry would be the nucleus of this new church. Women, as always, set the tone. Women’s ministry at Harvest had never been emotionally based in the first place, but Cathe had seen other big churches where women’s events had a fluffy, feel-good focus or a lite menu of games, fashion shows, and skits. Cathe had experienced how the Scripture itself had sustained her in her deepest grief of losing her firstborn son. She wanted the women of Orange County to digest the strong meat of the Word of God together and to develop close friendships with like-minded sisters who could walk one another through the storms of life with love and grace.
So week by week, Harvest Orange County grew. Soon they added Sunday morning services to the Thursday evening Bible studies. They outgrew their borrowed building. They found a former graphic design studio that was properly cool and funky and actually had dozens of surfboards already hanging from the ceiling, thrown in for free. The Southern California vibe was perfect.
Starting up Orange County not only revived Greg and Cathe but it also injected fresh life back into their megachurch in Riverside. Returning to the essentials and doing the “first things” is not only for start-ups; it’s the only way to grow deeper and stronger for the long haul.
Still, the damaged relationship with Chuck Smith was painful. Greg wanted to repair it. When he was young, there were so many broken parts of his childhood, so he became a fixer. If his mother was drunk and passed out again, he’d take care of her. If he was the new kid in school yet again, he’d make friends. If his mom’s current husband was mean, he’d retreat to his own private world.
Now, as Greg thought about Chuck, he felt like he owed him a huge debt. It helped him to think of Chuck back when he was younger, how Chuck had loved people, opened the doors to his church, and sought God’s will in some pretty radical ways. Greg thought that actually, Chuck, on his worst day, was better than most people on their best day. He thought of how Chuck had taught him so much as a young person, and how he’d given him the keys to his first church when Greg was a twenty-year-old nobody.
Chuck had lost his brother and his father in a small plane crash when he was younger. Now, in Greg’s loss of his son, he thought that maybe Chuck had sealed off parts of himself, years ago, from relationships. He’d been a competitive, hard-driving, hardworking kind of guy. Greg remembered once pointing out to Chuck how many young men he’d inspired to go into ministry. “It’s not a big thing,” Chuck had said. “I just teach the Word of God in such a simple way that they think, ‘Oh, I can do that too!’”
In January of 2012, Greg invited Chuck to come to the Harvest church in Orange County. Just before the event, Chuck discovered that he had lung cancer; he would have surgery the following week. Two thousand people gathered to hear the old pastor and his protégé reflect on the Jesus Movement.
Greg and Chuck talked about the colorful days in the early 1970s when Chuck bucked convention and opened his church to barefoot hippies. Greg told people how Chuck had opened the doors for what became contemporary Christian music and worship. He described how Chuck’s “emphasis on Bible exposition not only changed a church, it changed a generation, because thousands of young men, now not so young, went out around the country and around the world and started Calvary Chapel–style churches . . . more than 1,400 around the world today.”3
Greg told the people how Chuck had asked him to do an outdoor event at an Orange County concert venue back in 1990. This grew into Harvest Crusades . . . which, at the time of their conversation in 2012, had reached 4,400,000 people with the gospel, and 370,000 of them had made commitments to follow Jesus.
Greg asked Chuck to share counsel for hard times. “Don’t give up,” the veteran pastor told the crowd. “Never trade what you do know for what you don’t know because [when tragedies strike] the question is always, ‘Why?’ That question will haunt you and make you crazy. . . . I don’t know why. But what I do know is that God is good and God loves me and God is working on His perfect plan in my life. So, I’m just content with that.”4
Greg asked his old mentor about Calvary Chapel. How had it served as a place where the Jesus Movement could flourish, back in the day?
The church had been built, Chuck said plainly, on the Bible. Nothing fancy or trendy. “It is the exposition of the Word of God. It’s encouraging people to read the Word of God and expounding to them the Word of God. . . . It’s just God honoring His Word, as He said He would.”5
A year or so later, Greg went to see Chuck preach at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. He thought of the great memories he had of that place, and all that this man had taught him and done for him. Chuck was in a wheelchair, and before the service Greg went to him and knelt by his side.
“Chuck,” he said, “I wanted to come and say hello, and tell you that I love you.”
Chuck turned to Greg and grinned his big old grin. “I love you too!”
After that, Chuck was rolled onto the stage, and some fellow pastors lifted him onto his stool so he could preach. He had a canister of oxygen next to him, and tubes running into his nose . . . and then Chuck opened and taught publicly from the Word of God one last time.
Chuck Smith died on October 3, 2013.
His funeral was held at the eighteen-thousand-seat Honda Center in Anaheim. Every seat was filled, with another fifty thousand people watching around the world. Asked by Chuck’s son-in-law to give the message that day, Greg paid a final, loving tribute to the man who gave him a chance when no one else would.