April 25, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Pastor Greg Laurie tells the story of his life—from growing up in the tumult of the ’60s, to finding God, and ultimately making peace with his family
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we do a lot of stories about faith because
faith is such an important part of American life and
has been since our founding. Greg Glory is the founder
and senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, one of the
(00:31):
largest and most influential churches in America, with campuses in
California and Hawaii. Greg has written more than seventy books,
including Jesus Revolution, which was also released as a film
starring Kelsey Grammar. The movie is the true story of
the Jesus Hippie movement in the early nineteen seventies in
southern California. Here's Greg Glory with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
So I was born in nineteen fifty two. That seems
like ancient history now, Yes, I was actually alive in
the fifties. Eisenhower was president, we had just come through
World War Two. There was this buoyant optimism in our country.
Everything had this sort of futuristic look that now we
(01:17):
call fifties design. But in the day it was supposed
to look like the future, and it was actually a
really great time to be alive. I read a survey
a while ago that said, if people could live in
any era, what era would you pick? And the most
popular choice was the fifties. But it wasn't long until
the fifties turned to the sixties, and then the sixties
(01:39):
turned very dark. I was born in Long Beach, California,
in nineteen fifty two to a woman named Charlene McDaniel.
She was from a very large family with many siblings.
They were from Friendship, Arkansas, old fashioned values, and as
you look at the old of my mother with her siblings,
(02:03):
she stands out. It's not that the siblings weren't good
looking men and women. It's just that my mom was
extraordinarily beautiful, literally a Marilyn Monroe look alike, and so
she ran away from home at a very early age.
My mom was a rebel at heart, and she would
(02:23):
wear pants when you weren't supposed to wear pants, and
to show you how what her home was like, her father,
Charles McDaniel, once saw her wearing pants. He made her
take him off. He cut him up with scissors and
threw him into the fire. That just fueled my mother's rebellion,
and my aunt Willie actually helped her pack a suitcase
and she eloped with some guy and off my mother
(02:46):
went to her series of what would become seven marriages
that would take her all around the United States. So
along the way she met a guy. I found this
out later. His name was Barney. He was a sailor
in the US Navy, and they had a one night stand,
a fling, and my mom got pregnant, and she married
(03:08):
another guy named Kim and put his name on my
birth certificate, and I believed he was my father. So
my mother just went on a series of marriages and divorces.
She was a raging alcoholic. She was a literal men
magnet men were always coming to her, so she had
(03:29):
a lot of boyfriends in between the husbands. And I
went along for what we might describe as Charlene's wild Ride.
You've heard of mister Toad's wild Ride at Disneyland. It
was Charlene's wild Ride. But at times she would leave
me to live with my grandparents. So I, now as
a little boy, was living with the parents she rebelled from.
(03:49):
And it's not just that they were older, they were
from another generation, but they were strong disciplinarians. They forced
me to adhere to standards rules, which was actually kind
of good for me, because up to that point I
felt like I'd been raised by wolves almost. I really
didn't have any absolutes or standards to live by, so
it was a stable time in my life. But they
(04:13):
would take me to church and I was bored, and
I remember drawing on the little church bulletin. But in
the house where my grandparents lived, there was a little
portrait of Jesus hanging up on the wall, and I
would often find myself just staring at that portrait. There
was something about Jesus that fascinated me at a very
young age. Another thing that we used to do was
(04:34):
watch television together. They had these two big lazy boy
type chairs and I had a little stool in the middle,
and we would watch this little black and white TV
and watch Bonanza and gun Smoking, all these popular shows
of the late fifties early sixties. And I remember we
also watched a preacher named Billy Graham, and I really
liked him. Sometimes that night, after my grandparents went to bed,
(04:58):
I would pull a cover of my head and I
would talk to an imaginary character I had invented, and
I named him mister nobody, and I would just kind
of pour my heart out to him, tell him what
was troubling me, what was bothering me? And I think
in my own little kid way, I was reaching out
to God. You know, the Bible says God has placed
eternity in our hearts. And I knew that God was
(05:21):
out there somewhere. I just didn't know who he was
or what his name was. So fast forward now and
we're in the turbulent sixties and youth are starting to
rebel against their parents, and I joined them. And there
was a saying of the day, never trust anyone over thirty,
And that ring truth for me, because all of the
(05:42):
adult role models that I was exposed to disappointed me.
And there was not one adult that I admired or
looked up to or wanted to be like. Now, I
left up one of my mother's seven husbands she was
married to divorce seven times. He was different than all
all the other husbands. His name was Oscar Laurie. He
(06:04):
actually took the time to adopt me. He treated me
as a father should treat his son. He disciplined me,
he gave me an allowance, He took time to help
me explain things to me, and I really loved him,
so it was really a big shock when one day
I came out of school in New Jersey where we lived.
He was a practicing attorney, and our Cadillac was loaded
(06:24):
up with luggage, and I asked my mother, where are
we going. She said, we're going to Hawaii. Well, I'd
never been to Hawaii before. I was very excited. I said,
where's Dad. She said, he's not coming. So we got
in the car. We went to the airport, we landed Honolulu, Hawaii,
and there standing before me is this very tall man
named Eddie, and this was my mother's new husband. How
(06:46):
she met him, how this came about, I did not know,
but I remember one thing. They literally had recreated the
room I had in New Jersey in Hawaii, which I
found very surreal.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
And you're listening to Pastor Greg Glory tell the story
of his own life. A surreal life, is right, And
he said something so so haunting. I had not one
adult I admired or looked up to or wanted to
be like in my life. What a sad thing to hear.
But in the end it would fuel who we'd become
when we come back. More of Greglory's life here on
(07:21):
our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our
American Stories, the show where America is the star and
the American People, and we do it all from the
heart of the South Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can't
do this show without you. Our shows will always be
(07:43):
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, consider making a tax
deductible donation to our American Stories. Go to our American
Stories dot com. Give a little, give a lot. That's
our American Stories dot com. And we continue with our
(08:10):
American Stories and the story of Pastor Greg Glory's life
told by Greg Glory himself.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Let's pick up where we last left off. This man
Eddie was very violent. He and my mother would drink
every night and they would start hitting each other. And
one night I was in bed and I heard a
loud crash and a thud, and I came out. My
mother was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Eddie was standing over her, holding on to it. I
(08:39):
remember it distinctly, a don Quixote wooden statue, which were
very popular back in those days. I have no idea
why and there was blood on it, and he said,
go back to bed, It's just catch up. But even
as a little kid, I knew this was real and
I knew he had hit my mother. I thought she
was dead. I climbed out of the window of my bedroom,
(08:59):
ran to a neighbor, and the ambulance came, and we
left Hawaii and moved to California. Well, now I'm in
high school. I'm at Corona dom Or High School. I
know everybody in campus. I'm the cartoonist for the school paper.
I started to correspond with Charles M. Schultz, creator of Peanuts,
(09:20):
and I would send him my cartoons and ask him
to critique them, which he very graciously did. I have
no idea why he took the time to write letters
to me, but I can tell you when I got
a letter from Charles M. Schultz, it was like getting
a letter from heaven because I would open it and
it had a little snoopy and Charlie Brown drawing on
the envelope. I still have one. I actually framed it.
(09:40):
And he would talk about my art work. Okay, this
is looking good, Greg, And one time I asked him,
can I have a piece of original art who asked
for that. I did, and he sent it to me
one of his comic strips, which actually quite large, those
panels he would draw that would be in the newspapers.
So the whole drug cultures coming on strong. And I
(10:02):
was a big fan of the Beatles, and the Beatles
now are in their drug phase, singing things like I'd
love to Turn you on, and we're hearing about LSD,
and I decided that I wanted to change my life.
I decided I didn't want to be the person I was.
I was kind of this surfer, preppy ish kid in
this very affluent high school. I was affluent, and I
(10:25):
thought I want to become a hippie because I thought, hey,
if I start doing drugs, maybe I'll find what I'm
looking for in life. So I literally transferred to this
other campus called Harbor High School, also in Newport Beach.
No one knew me there, and my objective and goal
was to become a different person. So I started using
drugs quite heavily. I was smoking marijuana every day, taking
(10:49):
LSD on most weekends, and living my altered state of existence.
I noticed that my artistic skills were going down the tubes.
I noticed my creativity was being sapped. I realized I
was not the person I used to be, and I
didn't like the person I was becoming. So one day
on my high school campus at Harbor High, I see
(11:11):
this cute girl. Her name is Chrissy. So I noticed
she had a textbook for class and a notebook, and
then I noticed she had one of those Bibles. And
I thought, oh no, she's a Jesus freak. What a
waste of a perfectly cute girl. And when I transferred
to this campus, all my loady doper friends said, careful, Greg,
(11:32):
there's a lot of Jesus freaks on this campus. I said,
the last thing you'll ever see is Greg Glory becoming
a Jesus freak. Famous last words. So one day I'm
walking along and there are a group of Jesus freaks
sitting on the front lawn of Harbor High and they're
singing songs about God, and Chrissy is sitting among them,
(11:54):
and I was looking around at them, and I was thinking,
these people are delusional, they're crazy, they're weird. But there
was one problem because one of the people there, his
name was Bill. I went to elementary school with him.
I knew Bill was a normal person, and he used
to be a good friend of mine, and he had
become a Jesus freak, so I couldn't completely dismiss it.
And then this guy stands up who had joined them.
(12:17):
He was from off campus. He had long hair parted
down the middle, and a full beard, and this kind
of flowing hippie shirt that almost looked like a robe. Frankly,
he looked a lot like Jesus. He got my attention
and I thought, well, what's going on here? But he
made one statement. He said, Jesus said, you're either for
me or against me. And I looked around at the
(12:38):
Christians and I thought, well, they're for him and I'm
not one of them. Does that mean I'm against Jesus. Well,
I don't want to be against Jesus. I always admire Jesus.
So Lonnie says, you're either for me or against me,
and if you would like to accept Jesus Christ, get
up and walk forward right now. Next thing I knew,
(12:58):
I was up there praying with a group of people,
and then the school bell rang and we all had
to go back to class. So one day some guy
sees me walking across the campus and he yells out,
brother Greg. He hasn't really loud him. Bro. I'm like, uh, yeah, what,
and he goes, I saw that you prayed and accepted
(13:19):
Jesus the other day. And I'm kind of resentful and
sort of yeah. So hey, Bro, I got you a Bible.
And he gives me this Bible that is the most
obnoxious looking bible I think I've ever seen. It had
two popsicles to ex glued together in the shape of
a cross. Bro, it's the Bible here. And I took
it from him. I just wanted him to go away.
I shoved it him of the pocket of my coat
(13:40):
I was wearing. And I hadn't been over to see
my old friends. And we would always go over to
this guy's house at lunchtime and literally get high and
go back to class high. And so I walked in
the door, and as I was walking in, I thought,
I can't walk in with a bible. So I pulled
this Bible out. And he had a little hedge in
front of his house, a little planter with a hedge.
(14:01):
So I hid my Bible in the hedge and I
walked in and my friend said, Greg, Glorie, they call me, LORI, actually, Laurie,
where are you being? I said, nowhere? What have you
been doing? We haven't seen you for a while. I
said nothing, and they said, hey, you want to get stoned.
They said, no, you don't want to get stoned. No,
I don't want to. Why I just don't want to?
(14:22):
And they'd seen something's happened to me, and I felt
very uncomfortable there where I used to feel very comfortable.
All of a sudden, the front door bursts open and
they're standing in the doorway is the mother of one
of the guys that lived in the house, and she's
holding my bible up and in a very accusatory way, says,
who does this bible belong to? And I look up
(14:45):
at it, and every one in the room looks at
the Bible and they look at me. It's like, I'm thinking,
what's going on with this woman? Is there something wrong
with having a Bible? And it said kids are doing
drugs in her house and she's alarmed that there's a
Bible in her bushes. Who does this belong to? Everyone
figured out really quickly I was connected to it. I
said it's me And someone said, what is that? Greg?
(15:10):
I said, it's a Bible, No, Greg, what is that?
What a Bible? A Bible? And one of my friends said, oh,
praise the Lord, brother Greg, are we going to start
reading the Bible now? And I said, now, I'm going
to hit you, is what I'm going to do. I
hadn't read the Bible yet, I didn't know I'm supposed
to love people yet. And I lived there realizing something
very significant. It happened. First of all, I didn't want
(15:33):
to live this old life anymore. But what now? So
I was in sort of this no man's land where
I wasn't comfortable with my old friends, and I didn't
quite feel comfortable with the Christians. They seemed a little
intense for me. And the Lord brought just the right
guy into my life. His name was Mark. I didn't
know him from Adam's house. Cat just walks up to me. Hi,
my name is Mark. Oh hi Mark. Yeah, I saw
(15:54):
that you became a Christian. Yeah, I did. Well. I'd
like to take you to church and I said no,
that's okay, and he goes, no, I want to take
you to church with me. I said no, I don't
really want to go, and he said, where do you live?
I'll come pick you up. No, no, I don't want
you to pick me up. Next thing, I know, I
gave him my address. He's at my house and I'm
on my way to church. And then someone comes out
(16:18):
to speak. And it wasn't Lonnie Frisbee, the cool hippie preacher.
It was an older gentleman named Chuck Smith. It turns
out he was a senior pastor of the church. And
I thought, oh, no, an adult. I just had this
problem with adults when I was in high school. I
was always mouthing off to teachers, always getting sent to
the vice principal's office for disciplinary measures, and I just
(16:41):
had a whole problem with authority figures in the adult world.
This adult comes out, opens up his Bible, immediately begin
to close off. But then I found that he was
really understandable, and I really enjoyed listening to him, and
all of a sudden I began to change and I thought,
I actually really like this.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And we've been listening to Pastor Greg Glory, and what
a story he's telling us. Boy, the many marriages of
his mom. He comes to Los Angeles and he wants
to reinvent himself, and he's entranced by the music of
the Beatles, particularly their psychedelic music, and there's Jefferson Airplane
and Jimmy Hendrix, and well, psychedelic drugs and the like
(17:24):
are everywhere in southern California, and so he chooses to
reinvent himself through drugs. Only he knows that's not working,
and there are those Jesus freaks. As he starts to
gravitate towards the beginning of his Christian life, he finds
himself caught between two worlds, not comfortable with his old
friends and not quite comfortable with his new ones. When
(17:45):
we return more of Greg Glory's story here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(18:10):
Pastor Greg Lori's story, let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
And so my life started changing rapidly, and they began
to read the Bible. And what surprised me so much
about the Bible, I had a modern translation that I
was reading called good News for modern Man, is that
this book related to me. I understood it, and so
I'd never had anything like that to guide my life by,
(18:36):
to have principles to live by. So my life began
to change, and I began to attend Calvary Chapel pretty
much every night of the week that had all kinds
of services going there. And it wasn't long after that
that I thought I would use my cartooning ability for
my faith. And I found out where Chuck Smith lived,
so I went to his house. He had never met
(18:57):
me before. I said, hi, Pastor Chug, I had ten
and I heard you give a message on the woman
at the Wall, and I drew this little cartoon booklet.
He's looking at it and he starts smiling. He goes,
I love this, Hey, can you redraw it in this
other format? Why don't we publish it? Ultimately, I think
well over a million of those were printed. And that
was my entree, if you will, into what we'll call ministry.
(19:21):
And I remember one day I was walking along down
in Newport Beach and there was this woman about the
age of my mom sitting on the beach. And I'd
heard that we needed to talk to people about our faith.
So I walked up and engaged her in a conversation,
and much to my surprise, after I was done talking
to her, this woman said she wanted to accept Christ.
(19:42):
So I prayed with her and she put her faith
in Jesus, and I realized that God was putting a
call on my life to reach people a lot like
I was cynical, who had had rough lives, who weren't
raised in the church. And so so that became the
start of what was ministry for me. So I'm still
(20:05):
living with my mother. I go home and I decide
I want to tell her what has happened to me.
She didn't look very excited about it. I think she
went out of her way to keep me from ever
hearing anything about Jesus. I remember when I was a
younger boy, I once asked her what is Easter about?
She said, I don't know. She knew. My mother was
(20:28):
raised in the church. She went to church with her
siblings and mom and dad Sunday morning, Sunday night, and
even to a midweek study. My mother knew all about it,
and she was rebelling against it, and she didn't want
her son to know anything about it. But my first
attempt to reach my mother was not successful, nor was
(20:50):
it good. I think I was way too blunt, way
too harsh. I think I said something along the lanes
of you're going to go to Hell, revent and I
realized I needed to move out of this house because
it was this drinking world of her still and getting
in fights with her husband every night and passing out
(21:12):
from a night of drinking. And I just was really
sick of it, you know, because I had to be
the parent through most of this relationship when I was
a little boy. Well now I'm like seventeen years old,
I'm about to turn eighteen. I don't want to do
this anymore. I don't want to live my mother's life anymore.
So I went home and I told my mother I'm
going to move out. I was really surprised to see
(21:33):
her be very sad. She teared up, but I had
to leave for my own survival. Well, coming back to
Lonnie Frisbee, the guy who was preaching, he befriended me.
I was hanging around him and he took me once
up to a city called Riverside, which is about forty
five minutes away from where I was living. In Orange County.
(21:55):
There was an Episcopalian church that wanted their own version
of the g this movement. So they came to Chuck
Smith and said, could we have Lonnie come up to
our church? And he agreed and Lonnie was up there preaching,
and I went up there a few times with Lonnie,
and that grew to a round three hundred people. And
then then Lonnie moves off to Florida with his wife
to work in his marriage. And this little Bible study
(22:17):
started being handed around to various pastors at work at
Calvary Chapel who were all around ten years older than
I was, and I would just hang around. I would
do what ever needed to be done. I'd do janitorial work,
I'd run an errand, and I had my drawing board
set up and I was doing my artwork. I wanted
to be used by God, so they would give me
(22:38):
the things that no one else wanted to do, like, hey,
somebody wants someone to speak at a home Bible study
two hours away, Greg, why don't you do it? And
so I literally went and did all these things no
one else wanted. But it was great experience because I
was being exposed to every kind of person in every
kind of setting imaginable. And so one day they're talking
(22:59):
the pastors and one of them said, who's going to
go to the church this Sunday. The church was called
All Saint's Episcopal Church. Who's going to go this Sunday. Well,
I'm going next Sunday. What about you? I went last Sunday, Oh,
well I don't want to go. And then they turned
to me and said, well, Greg, you want to go,
and I said I'll go. And so I went up
that Sunday and sort of the head deacon didn't know
(23:22):
I was coming. No one took the time to tell him.
So I said, hy, I'm here to preach tonight. Understand,
I'm an eighteen year old kid. I've here down passed
my shoulders full length spirit. I'm here to preach tonight.
He said, well, I don't know you. I don't know
if you've come from Calviy Chopel. We'll just wait until
the right guy shows up. I said, I am the
right guy. Well, no one else showed up because I
was a speaker. He said, okay, you can go ahead
(23:44):
and speak, which I did, and then I went back
the next Sunday and the next Sunday, and before I
knew it, people started calling me pastor Greg. The last
thing I felt qualified to be was a pastor. But
I saw this little church was growing and it was
becoming the congregation, and I tried to find someone to
take it over, but no one wanted to take it over.
(24:05):
So then I started a midweek study and we started
teaching through books of the Bible. Greg I was literally
reading things for the first time in that morning and
teaching them that night. It was like on the job training.
And so that became the beginning of our church that
now just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Now, if you've seen
(24:28):
the Jesus Revolution film, which is on Netflix right now
and on the Apple streaming platform Amazon, you know, the
story is a little different in the film, but the
arc of the story is the same. Okay, So fast
forward many years now, we're in the nineties and I
have started evangelistic crusades again because of Chuck Smith. And
(24:52):
one day Chuck comes to me and says, Greg, I
think we had to take this to a larger venue,
and I think we had to do a Billy Graham
style crusade and have you preach at it. And so
we rented a venue called the Pacific Amphitheater, which seated
around seventeen thousand people. That's a big place. We were
in a church that seated around twenty five hundred, so
(25:15):
that's a big jump. But we booked the Pacific Amphitheater
for maybe five nights and we had our first crusade.
We broke attendance records, and then the next year we
went to Angel Stadium. So my crusade ministry is now launched,
and I'm speaking around the United States, and I come
on the radar of Billy Graham and I became friends
(25:38):
with his son, Franklin, and Billy was doing a crusade
at Angel Stadium in nineteen eighty five and I was
asked to get up on the stage and pray, which
I did, and then I Billy and I became friends.
And he was kind of coming toward the end of
his evangelistic ministry as I was starting mine, and he
(25:59):
said that he wanted help with his sermon illustrations to
reach younger people. I'm in my thirties at this point,
and so I said, I'd be thrilled, I'd be honored
to help you in any way I could. So I
found myself traveling with Billy.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And you've been listening to Pastor Greg Glory tell his
story and he discovers the Bible and for the first
time reads a book that is he put it related
to me. And then he started to attend church regularly,
Chuck Smith's Cavalry Chapel, and he used his prolific artistic skills,
his cartooning talents to help the church spread the gospel.
(26:36):
God was putting a call on my life, Brake said,
And then he had to deal with his mom. He
just couldn't live that life anymore, and he just had
to move out. And I love that part about him
talking about reading the Bible verse in the morning and
preaching on it in the afternoon. What courage that took,
What faith that took, and how else to learn but
(26:58):
to teach? And he just had the faith to step
out and do that, and then began his crusade life.
And my goodness being able to have the helping hand
of Billy Graham. As Graham is ending his evangelistic life,
Greg Glory is beginning his. When we come back more
of this remarkable journey, this story of one man's faith
(27:21):
journey here on our American stories, and we continue with
our American stories, and Pastor Greg Glory, let's pick up
(27:42):
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
I'm preaching the people at this point around the world,
and my own mom is not a believer. Now. I
found out later she was very proud of me because
my aunt said she kept like a little scrap book
and every time an article was written about me, or
I appeared somewhat and you know, it was interviewed, she
would keep a record of it. But she never said
it to me. She never said to me once I
(28:06):
love you, or I'm proud of you or anything. And
so I thought she, you know, wasn't even paying attention.
But I was seeing kind of that hard shell of
my mother's start to crack a little bit because her
lifestyle had taken its tolls. She was no longer a
Marilyn Monroe look alike. She was now a woman who
had been ravaged by bad choices of drinking, to access
(28:31):
and smoking. And when she was seventy, she looked like
she was in her late nineties. She was getting dialysis treatment,
her kidneys were failing. So one day I'm driving to
church and God just spoke to my heart as clear
as day and said, go talk to your mother. So
I called my wife, Kathy, and I said, I'm going
(28:52):
to go talk to my mom today about her relationship
with God or lack thereof. Pray for me So I
went over to my house and I walked in and
she goes, what are you doing here. I said, I'm
here to talk to you today about your soul. She said,
I don't want to talk about it. And this was
her response every time I brought spiritual issues up. She
would say, I don't want to talk about it. I said, today,
(29:15):
we're going to talk about it, and I pressed her,
and that conversation thankfully resulted in my mother making a
recommitment to the Lord. And little how was I to
know that one month later she would die. But I
had a full time ministry sharing the gospel with my
mother's former husbands. Oscar Laurie was the first. So I
(29:37):
mentioned earlier that we loaded up the car and drove
to the airport. And I didn't see him from my childhood.
But now I'm a young adult. Our church is just
starting and I decide I need to talk with him somehow.
So I found him. I located him. This is pre Google,
and I found him practicing law still in New Jersey.
(29:59):
So I called him on the phone. It's kind of
funny because I called his law office and I said, yes,
is Oscar Loriy there in the secretary said, well, mister
Lorry's out to lunch right now. Can I say who called?
I said, yes, tell him Greg LORI called. She said,
how do you spell your last name? I said, l
A U r Ie the same way he spells his.
This is his son. Well, I got a call not
(30:20):
long after that, and he said, oh, Greg, so good
to hear your voice. And I said, well, you know,
I'm going to be in New York. I'm going to
be speaking. I'm a minister now. I don't know what
he thought of that. And I said I'd love to
maybe have lunch with you. And he says, oh, come
and stay at our house. I'm remarried to a woman
named Barbara and we would love to have you come.
And I said, well, I'm married, I have a wife
(30:42):
and a son, Christopher. Oh, come on join us. And
so I spoke at Central Park at this event. Then
we got on the train and we made our way
out to New Jersey where he lived Red Bank, New Jersey.
As I got off the train, I saw him, and boy,
it was just like I went back in time. I
still recognized him though it had been many years. And
(31:04):
so that night we caught up on all that had
happened since we last saw each other. Before I knew it,
I was calling him Dad, and so was a great reunion.
And he actually told me he had tried to get
custody of me when he heard about the crazy decisions
my mother was making in the life she was living.
But she fought him tooth and nail, which had found
(31:24):
ironic because she never seemed to want to have me around.
She was gone so much. I lived with my grandparents.
I even did a stint in military school twice. But
I look back and I realized God was in control,
because if I'd lived with him, my life would have
probably followed a different course. So the next night, his wife,
(31:46):
Barbara made us a great Italian meal, and she said, Greg,
tell me how you became a Christian and a minister.
So I shared my entire life story and my dad
is sitting on the opposite end of the table. Now
remember he's a lawyer. He spends a lot of time
in courtrooms and he was going to eventually become a judge.
(32:10):
The whole night he just sat there with his hands
up to his face, kind of folded, analyzing what he
was saying. So as I'm talking about what Christ has
done for me. I'm thinking this is not going over well.
He's not liking this at all. Barbara was very responsive. Oh,
that's wonderful, that's fantastic. He just stared and listened. And
at the end of the night he said, Greg, will
(32:31):
you walk with me tomorrow morning? Because he had to
walk every morning. And one part I left out is
he had had a heart attack. He was in his
later sixties at this point, and blacked out behind the
steering wheel of his current had driven into a telephone pole.
So now he's on medication. He has to walk every day.
He has a very strict diet. Will you walk with
me in the morning? He has I said sure, Dad.
(32:54):
So the next morning he knocks at the door of
my bedroom at six o'clock in the morning, New Jersey time,
three o'clock California time. I roll out of bed, wiping
the sleep out of my eyes. And we're walking now
and the brisk New Jersey era is in our face,
and he says, Greg, I listened very carefully to what
she said last night. I said yeah, And he said,
(33:16):
and I want to become a Christian. And I couldn't
believe what I was hearing. I said, well, Dad, let
me go over it one more time so you understand
what it means. I went over again. He goes, yes,
I understand that. What do I need to do? And
we're still walking At this point, we're in a park.
I said, well, you need to pray, and he drops
to his knees in this park on his knees. So
(33:37):
I too, dropped to my knees. What do I do?
He said, Well, we pray and I let him in
this prayer to accept Christ. And after we're done Prayney says, Greg,
pray that Jesus heals my heart. So I prayed for
his heart and after we're done, prainey. He says, Greg,
my doctor's office says right over here, Why don't we
go over there. I want to tell him I've just
become a Christian and that God's healed my heart. I said, wait, hey, Dad,
(34:00):
we don't know that God's healed your heart, because let's
go over there. And so I over with him to
his doctor's office. He walks in, Hey, Doc, this is
my son Greg. He's from California. He's a preacher. And
I'm thinking, what is this doctor thinking? You know? And
he says to the doctor, I've just become a Christian
and I believe God has healed my heart. And the
doctor says, now, Oscar, we have to run some tests.
(34:22):
We don't know that your heart is healed. And they
ran tests on him, and sure enough, his heart was healed.
And he lived fifteen more years and got very involved
in this church. And I have never seen such a
radical transformation of a person's life. I was living in
California still, so I had to go home. I did
find him at church to go to, and when I returned,
(34:45):
maybe a month and a half later, I was talking
to him and sharing scriptures. He had pretty much read
the whole Bible already, because my dad would read these
really thick books on history that lined his bookshelves. So this,
I said, deep thinker and intellect, and he was processing
it all so quickly, So that was wonderful. So coming
(35:08):
back to my mother, she married a man named Eddie
that I referred to. Someone told me that Eddie was
really sick and wasn't going to live long, and he
lived in Hawaii while I was over there preaching, so
I had not really seen him since he had knocked
my mother unconscious and almost killed her I had a
deep resentment toward him, and I didn't really even want
(35:32):
to talk to him about God. I didn't care about him,
but I felt bad about that, and I knew I
should talk to him. So someone said, you need to
go see him. He's not going to live much longer.
So I went over to his little apartment which was
right across the street from the Waikiki show where I
was going to be preaching that night, and I told
him my whole story of how I came to faith,
(35:53):
and he just listened. And I said, would you like
to accept Jesus Christ? And he said, no, we want to,
you know, get closer to God. No, No, he's just
totally closed off to it all. I said, well, I'm
going to be speaking across the street over here, which
I like to come over and listen to me. No,
I don't want to. So it wasn't always successful, and
there were others that my mom was involved with that
(36:15):
I shared the Gospel with, with varying degrees of success.
But the point of it all is, you know, you
look back in your life and you can't control what
can your dealt in life. All you can control is
how you react to it. You know, you can become
better or you can become bitter. And I decided to
go back to these rough times of my childhood and
(36:40):
try to do the best I could to reach people
with this gospel that had changed my life.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
Pastor Greg Laurie, who's the founder and senior pastor of
Harvest Christian Fellowship and it's one of the law just
in most influential churches in the country who campuses in
California and Hawaii. Greg is also the author of seventy books,
including Jesus Revolution. By the way, it streams everywhere. Watch
(37:12):
it with the kids, I think over fourteen or fifteen,
actually not too young, but a beautiful, beautiful movie about
his life and about a moment in time in America.
And that's of course, the early nineteen seventies where America
is in turmoil, the kids are up for grabs, it's drugs,
it's anti authoritarianism, it's America at one of its darkest times,
(37:34):
and up arises this youth movement towards Christ and towards
God and my goodness, He's preaching around the world, we learn,
but still his mom, his mom is not a believer,
and this is just aching his heart. His he learns,
kept a secret scrap book, and yet she had never,
ever once told him she loved him. And of course
(37:57):
his mission, which he said so beautiful, God was putting
a call in my life to reach people like me,
people who had led rough lives, people who are cynical
like me. The story of Pastor Greg Laori here on
our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we do a lot of stories about faith because
faith is such an important part of American life and
has been since our founding. Greg Glory is the founder
and senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, one of the
(00:31):
largest and most influential churches in America, with campuses in
California and Hawaii. Greg has written more than seventy books,
including Jesus Revolution, which was also released as a film
starring Kelsey Grammar. The movie is the true story of
the Jesus Hippie movement in the early nineteen seventies in
southern California. Here's Greg Glory with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
So I was born in nineteen fifty two. That seems
like ancient history now, Yes, I was actually alive in
the fifties. Eisenhower was president, we had just come through
World War Two. There was this buoyant optimism in our country.
Everything had this sort of futuristic look that now we
(01:17):
call fifties design. But in the day it was supposed
to look like the future, and it was actually a
really great time to be alive. I read a survey
a while ago that said, if people could live in
any era, what era would you pick? And the most
popular choice was the fifties. But it wasn't long until
the fifties turned to the sixties, and then the sixties
(01:39):
turned very dark. I was born in Long Beach, California,
in nineteen fifty two to a woman named Charlene McDaniel.
She was from a very large family with many siblings.
They were from Friendship, Arkansas, old fashioned values, and as
you look at the old of my mother with her siblings,
(02:03):
she stands out. It's not that the siblings weren't good
looking men and women. It's just that my mom was
extraordinarily beautiful, literally a Marilyn Monroe look alike, and so
she ran away from home at a very early age.
My mom was a rebel at heart, and she would
(02:23):
wear pants when you weren't supposed to wear pants, and
to show you how what her home was like, her father,
Charles McDaniel, once saw her wearing pants. He made her
take him off. He cut him up with scissors and
threw him into the fire. That just fueled my mother's rebellion,
and my aunt Willie actually helped her pack a suitcase
and she eloped with some guy and off my mother
(02:46):
went to her series of what would become seven marriages
that would take her all around the United States. So
along the way she met a guy. I found this
out later. His name was Barney. He was a sailor
in the US Navy, and they had a one night stand,
a fling, and my mom got pregnant, and she married
(03:08):
another guy named Kim and put his name on my
birth certificate, and I believed he was my father. So
my mother just went on a series of marriages and divorces.
She was a raging alcoholic. She was a literal men
magnet men were always coming to her, so she had
(03:29):
a lot of boyfriends in between the husbands. And I
went along for what we might describe as Charlene's wild Ride.
You've heard of mister Toad's wild Ride at Disneyland. It
was Charlene's wild Ride. But at times she would leave
me to live with my grandparents. So I, now as
a little boy, was living with the parents she rebelled from.
(03:49):
And it's not just that they were older, they were
from another generation, but they were strong disciplinarians. They forced
me to adhere to standards rules, which was actually kind
of good for me, because up to that point I
felt like I'd been raised by wolves almost. I really
didn't have any absolutes or standards to live by, so
it was a stable time in my life. But they
(04:13):
would take me to church and I was bored, and
I remember drawing on the little church bulletin. But in
the house where my grandparents lived, there was a little
portrait of Jesus hanging up on the wall, and I
would often find myself just staring at that portrait. There
was something about Jesus that fascinated me at a very
young age. Another thing that we used to do was
(04:34):
watch television together. They had these two big lazy boy
type chairs and I had a little stool in the middle,
and we would watch this little black and white TV
and watch Bonanza and gun Smoking, all these popular shows
of the late fifties early sixties. And I remember we
also watched a preacher named Billy Graham, and I really
liked him. Sometimes that night, after my grandparents went to bed,
(04:58):
I would pull a cover of my head and I
would talk to an imaginary character I had invented, and
I named him mister nobody, and I would just kind
of pour my heart out to him, tell him what
was troubling me, what was bothering me? And I think
in my own little kid way, I was reaching out
to God. You know, the Bible says God has placed
eternity in our hearts. And I knew that God was
(05:21):
out there somewhere. I just didn't know who he was
or what his name was. So fast forward now and
we're in the turbulent sixties and youth are starting to
rebel against their parents, and I joined them. And there
was a saying of the day, never trust anyone over thirty,
And that ring truth for me, because all of the
(05:42):
adult role models that I was exposed to disappointed me.
And there was not one adult that I admired or
looked up to or wanted to be like. Now, I
left up one of my mother's seven husbands she was
married to divorce seven times. He was different than all
all the other husbands. His name was Oscar Laurie. He
(06:04):
actually took the time to adopt me. He treated me
as a father should treat his son. He disciplined me,
he gave me an allowance, He took time to help
me explain things to me, and I really loved him,
so it was really a big shock when one day
I came out of school in New Jersey where we lived.
He was a practicing attorney, and our Cadillac was loaded
(06:24):
up with luggage, and I asked my mother, where are
we going. She said, we're going to Hawaii. Well, I'd
never been to Hawaii before. I was very excited. I said,
where's Dad. She said, he's not coming. So we got
in the car. We went to the airport, we landed Honolulu, Hawaii,
and there standing before me is this very tall man
named Eddie, and this was my mother's new husband. How
(06:46):
she met him, how this came about, I did not know,
but I remember one thing. They literally had recreated the
room I had in New Jersey in Hawaii, which I
found very surreal.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
And you're listening to Pastor Greg Glory tell the story
of his own life. A surreal life, is right, And
he said something so so haunting. I had not one
adult I admired or looked up to or wanted to
be like in my life. What a sad thing to hear.
But in the end it would fuel who we'd become
when we come back. More of Greglory's life here on
(07:21):
our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our
American Stories, the show where America is the star and
the American People, and we do it all from the
heart of the South Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can't
do this show without you. Our shows will always be
(07:43):
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, consider making a tax
deductible donation to our American Stories. Go to our American
Stories dot com. Give a little, give a lot. That's
our American Stories dot com. And we continue with our
(08:10):
American Stories and the story of Pastor Greg Glory's life
told by Greg Glory himself.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Let's pick up where we last left off. This man
Eddie was very violent. He and my mother would drink
every night and they would start hitting each other. And
one night I was in bed and I heard a
loud crash and a thud, and I came out. My
mother was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Eddie was standing over her, holding on to it. I
(08:39):
remember it distinctly, a don Quixote wooden statue, which were
very popular back in those days. I have no idea
why and there was blood on it, and he said,
go back to bed, It's just catch up. But even
as a little kid, I knew this was real and
I knew he had hit my mother. I thought she
was dead. I climbed out of the window of my bedroom,
(08:59):
ran to a neighbor, and the ambulance came, and we
left Hawaii and moved to California. Well, now I'm in
high school. I'm at Corona dom Or High School. I
know everybody in campus. I'm the cartoonist for the school paper.
I started to correspond with Charles M. Schultz, creator of Peanuts,
(09:20):
and I would send him my cartoons and ask him
to critique them, which he very graciously did. I have
no idea why he took the time to write letters
to me, but I can tell you when I got
a letter from Charles M. Schultz, it was like getting
a letter from heaven because I would open it and
it had a little snoopy and Charlie Brown drawing on
the envelope. I still have one. I actually framed it.
(09:40):
And he would talk about my art work. Okay, this
is looking good, Greg, And one time I asked him,
can I have a piece of original art who asked
for that. I did, and he sent it to me
one of his comic strips, which actually quite large, those
panels he would draw that would be in the newspapers.
So the whole drug cultures coming on strong. And I
(10:02):
was a big fan of the Beatles, and the Beatles
now are in their drug phase, singing things like I'd
love to Turn you on, and we're hearing about LSD,
and I decided that I wanted to change my life.
I decided I didn't want to be the person I was.
I was kind of this surfer, preppy ish kid in
this very affluent high school. I was affluent, and I
(10:25):
thought I want to become a hippie because I thought, hey,
if I start doing drugs, maybe I'll find what I'm
looking for in life. So I literally transferred to this
other campus called Harbor High School, also in Newport Beach.
No one knew me there, and my objective and goal
was to become a different person. So I started using
drugs quite heavily. I was smoking marijuana every day, taking
(10:49):
LSD on most weekends, and living my altered state of existence.
I noticed that my artistic skills were going down the tubes.
I noticed my creativity was being sapped. I realized I
was not the person I used to be, and I
didn't like the person I was becoming. So one day
on my high school campus at Harbor High, I see
(11:11):
this cute girl. Her name is Chrissy. So I noticed
she had a textbook for class and a notebook, and
then I noticed she had one of those Bibles. And
I thought, oh no, she's a Jesus freak. What a
waste of a perfectly cute girl. And when I transferred
to this campus, all my loady doper friends said, careful, Greg,
(11:32):
there's a lot of Jesus freaks on this campus. I said,
the last thing you'll ever see is Greg Glory becoming
a Jesus freak. Famous last words. So one day I'm
walking along and there are a group of Jesus freaks
sitting on the front lawn of Harbor High and they're
singing songs about God, and Chrissy is sitting among them,
(11:54):
and I was looking around at them, and I was thinking,
these people are delusional, they're crazy, they're weird. But there
was one problem because one of the people there, his
name was Bill. I went to elementary school with him.
I knew Bill was a normal person, and he used
to be a good friend of mine, and he had
become a Jesus freak, so I couldn't completely dismiss it.
And then this guy stands up who had joined them.
(12:17):
He was from off campus. He had long hair parted
down the middle, and a full beard, and this kind
of flowing hippie shirt that almost looked like a robe. Frankly,
he looked a lot like Jesus. He got my attention
and I thought, well, what's going on here? But he
made one statement. He said, Jesus said, you're either for
me or against me. And I looked around at the
(12:38):
Christians and I thought, well, they're for him and I'm
not one of them. Does that mean I'm against Jesus. Well,
I don't want to be against Jesus. I always admire Jesus.
So Lonnie says, you're either for me or against me,
and if you would like to accept Jesus Christ, get
up and walk forward right now. Next thing I knew,
(12:58):
I was up there praying with a group of people,
and then the school bell rang and we all had
to go back to class. So one day some guy
sees me walking across the campus and he yells out,
brother Greg. He hasn't really loud him. Bro. I'm like, uh, yeah, what,
and he goes, I saw that you prayed and accepted
(13:19):
Jesus the other day. And I'm kind of resentful and
sort of yeah. So hey, Bro, I got you a Bible.
And he gives me this Bible that is the most
obnoxious looking bible I think I've ever seen. It had
two popsicles to ex glued together in the shape of
a cross. Bro, it's the Bible here. And I took
it from him. I just wanted him to go away.
I shoved it him of the pocket of my coat
(13:40):
I was wearing. And I hadn't been over to see
my old friends. And we would always go over to
this guy's house at lunchtime and literally get high and
go back to class high. And so I walked in
the door, and as I was walking in, I thought,
I can't walk in with a bible. So I pulled
this Bible out. And he had a little hedge in
front of his house, a little planter with a hedge.
(14:01):
So I hid my Bible in the hedge and I
walked in and my friend said, Greg, Glorie, they call me, LORI, actually, Laurie,
where are you being? I said, nowhere? What have you
been doing? We haven't seen you for a while. I
said nothing, and they said, hey, you want to get stoned.
They said, no, you don't want to get stoned. No,
I don't want to. Why I just don't want to?
(14:22):
And they'd seen something's happened to me, and I felt
very uncomfortable there where I used to feel very comfortable.
All of a sudden, the front door bursts open and
they're standing in the doorway is the mother of one
of the guys that lived in the house, and she's
holding my bible up and in a very accusatory way, says,
who does this bible belong to? And I look up
(14:45):
at it, and every one in the room looks at
the Bible and they look at me. It's like, I'm thinking,
what's going on with this woman? Is there something wrong
with having a Bible? And it said kids are doing
drugs in her house and she's alarmed that there's a
Bible in her bushes. Who does this belong to? Everyone
figured out really quickly I was connected to it. I
said it's me And someone said, what is that? Greg?
(15:10):
I said, it's a Bible, No, Greg, what is that?
What a Bible? A Bible? And one of my friends said, oh,
praise the Lord, brother Greg, are we going to start
reading the Bible now? And I said, now, I'm going
to hit you, is what I'm going to do. I
hadn't read the Bible yet, I didn't know I'm supposed
to love people yet. And I lived there realizing something
very significant. It happened. First of all, I didn't want
(15:33):
to live this old life anymore. But what now? So
I was in sort of this no man's land where
I wasn't comfortable with my old friends, and I didn't
quite feel comfortable with the Christians. They seemed a little
intense for me. And the Lord brought just the right
guy into my life. His name was Mark. I didn't
know him from Adam's house. Cat just walks up to me. Hi,
my name is Mark. Oh hi Mark. Yeah, I saw
(15:54):
that you became a Christian. Yeah, I did. Well. I'd
like to take you to church and I said no,
that's okay, and he goes, no, I want to take
you to church with me. I said no, I don't
really want to go, and he said, where do you live?
I'll come pick you up. No, no, I don't want
you to pick me up. Next thing, I know, I
gave him my address. He's at my house and I'm
on my way to church. And then someone comes out
(16:18):
to speak. And it wasn't Lonnie Frisbee, the cool hippie preacher.
It was an older gentleman named Chuck Smith. It turns
out he was a senior pastor of the church. And
I thought, oh, no, an adult. I just had this
problem with adults when I was in high school. I
was always mouthing off to teachers, always getting sent to
the vice principal's office for disciplinary measures, and I just
(16:41):
had a whole problem with authority figures in the adult world.
This adult comes out, opens up his Bible, immediately begin
to close off. But then I found that he was
really understandable, and I really enjoyed listening to him, and
all of a sudden I began to change and I thought,
I actually really like this.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And we've been listening to Pastor Greg Glory, and what
a story he's telling us. Boy, the many marriages of
his mom. He comes to Los Angeles and he wants
to reinvent himself, and he's entranced by the music of
the Beatles, particularly their psychedelic music, and there's Jefferson Airplane
and Jimmy Hendrix, and well, psychedelic drugs and the like
(17:24):
are everywhere in southern California, and so he chooses to
reinvent himself through drugs. Only he knows that's not working,
and there are those Jesus freaks. As he starts to
gravitate towards the beginning of his Christian life, he finds
himself caught between two worlds, not comfortable with his old
friends and not quite comfortable with his new ones. When
(17:45):
we return more of Greg Glory's story here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(18:10):
Pastor Greg Lori's story, let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
And so my life started changing rapidly, and they began
to read the Bible. And what surprised me so much
about the Bible, I had a modern translation that I
was reading called good News for modern Man, is that
this book related to me. I understood it, and so
I'd never had anything like that to guide my life by,
(18:36):
to have principles to live by. So my life began
to change, and I began to attend Calvary Chapel pretty
much every night of the week that had all kinds
of services going there. And it wasn't long after that
that I thought I would use my cartooning ability for
my faith. And I found out where Chuck Smith lived,
so I went to his house. He had never met
(18:57):
me before. I said, hi, Pastor Chug, I had ten
and I heard you give a message on the woman
at the Wall, and I drew this little cartoon booklet.
He's looking at it and he starts smiling. He goes,
I love this, Hey, can you redraw it in this
other format? Why don't we publish it? Ultimately, I think
well over a million of those were printed. And that
was my entree, if you will, into what we'll call ministry.
(19:21):
And I remember one day I was walking along down
in Newport Beach and there was this woman about the
age of my mom sitting on the beach. And I'd
heard that we needed to talk to people about our faith.
So I walked up and engaged her in a conversation,
and much to my surprise, after I was done talking
to her, this woman said she wanted to accept Christ.
(19:42):
So I prayed with her and she put her faith
in Jesus, and I realized that God was putting a
call on my life to reach people a lot like
I was cynical, who had had rough lives, who weren't
raised in the church. And so so that became the
start of what was ministry for me. So I'm still
(20:05):
living with my mother. I go home and I decide
I want to tell her what has happened to me.
She didn't look very excited about it. I think she
went out of her way to keep me from ever
hearing anything about Jesus. I remember when I was a
younger boy, I once asked her what is Easter about?
She said, I don't know. She knew. My mother was
(20:28):
raised in the church. She went to church with her
siblings and mom and dad Sunday morning, Sunday night, and
even to a midweek study. My mother knew all about it,
and she was rebelling against it, and she didn't want
her son to know anything about it. But my first
attempt to reach my mother was not successful, nor was
(20:50):
it good. I think I was way too blunt, way
too harsh. I think I said something along the lanes
of you're going to go to Hell, revent and I
realized I needed to move out of this house because
it was this drinking world of her still and getting
in fights with her husband every night and passing out
(21:12):
from a night of drinking. And I just was really
sick of it, you know, because I had to be
the parent through most of this relationship when I was
a little boy. Well now I'm like seventeen years old,
I'm about to turn eighteen. I don't want to do
this anymore. I don't want to live my mother's life anymore.
So I went home and I told my mother I'm
going to move out. I was really surprised to see
(21:33):
her be very sad. She teared up, but I had
to leave for my own survival. Well, coming back to
Lonnie Frisbee, the guy who was preaching, he befriended me.
I was hanging around him and he took me once
up to a city called Riverside, which is about forty
five minutes away from where I was living. In Orange County.
(21:55):
There was an Episcopalian church that wanted their own version
of the g this movement. So they came to Chuck
Smith and said, could we have Lonnie come up to
our church? And he agreed and Lonnie was up there preaching,
and I went up there a few times with Lonnie,
and that grew to a round three hundred people. And
then then Lonnie moves off to Florida with his wife
to work in his marriage. And this little Bible study
(22:17):
started being handed around to various pastors at work at
Calvary Chapel who were all around ten years older than
I was, and I would just hang around. I would
do what ever needed to be done. I'd do janitorial work,
I'd run an errand, and I had my drawing board
set up and I was doing my artwork. I wanted
to be used by God, so they would give me
(22:38):
the things that no one else wanted to do, like, hey,
somebody wants someone to speak at a home Bible study
two hours away, Greg, why don't you do it? And
so I literally went and did all these things no
one else wanted. But it was great experience because I
was being exposed to every kind of person in every
kind of setting imaginable. And so one day they're talking
(22:59):
the pastors and one of them said, who's going to
go to the church this Sunday. The church was called
All Saint's Episcopal Church. Who's going to go this Sunday. Well,
I'm going next Sunday. What about you? I went last Sunday, Oh,
well I don't want to go. And then they turned
to me and said, well, Greg, you want to go,
and I said I'll go. And so I went up
that Sunday and sort of the head deacon didn't know
(23:22):
I was coming. No one took the time to tell him.
So I said, hy, I'm here to preach tonight. Understand,
I'm an eighteen year old kid. I've here down passed
my shoulders full length spirit. I'm here to preach tonight.
He said, well, I don't know you. I don't know
if you've come from Calviy Chopel. We'll just wait until
the right guy shows up. I said, I am the
right guy. Well, no one else showed up because I
was a speaker. He said, okay, you can go ahead
(23:44):
and speak, which I did, and then I went back
the next Sunday and the next Sunday, and before I
knew it, people started calling me pastor Greg. The last
thing I felt qualified to be was a pastor. But
I saw this little church was growing and it was
becoming the congregation, and I tried to find someone to
take it over, but no one wanted to take it over.
(24:05):
So then I started a midweek study and we started
teaching through books of the Bible. Greg I was literally
reading things for the first time in that morning and
teaching them that night. It was like on the job training.
And so that became the beginning of our church that
now just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Now, if you've seen
(24:28):
the Jesus Revolution film, which is on Netflix right now
and on the Apple streaming platform Amazon, you know, the
story is a little different in the film, but the
arc of the story is the same. Okay, So fast
forward many years now, we're in the nineties and I
have started evangelistic crusades again because of Chuck Smith. And
(24:52):
one day Chuck comes to me and says, Greg, I
think we had to take this to a larger venue,
and I think we had to do a Billy Graham
style crusade and have you preach at it. And so
we rented a venue called the Pacific Amphitheater, which seated
around seventeen thousand people. That's a big place. We were
in a church that seated around twenty five hundred, so
(25:15):
that's a big jump. But we booked the Pacific Amphitheater
for maybe five nights and we had our first crusade.
We broke attendance records, and then the next year we
went to Angel Stadium. So my crusade ministry is now launched,
and I'm speaking around the United States, and I come
on the radar of Billy Graham and I became friends
(25:38):
with his son, Franklin, and Billy was doing a crusade
at Angel Stadium in nineteen eighty five and I was
asked to get up on the stage and pray, which
I did, and then I Billy and I became friends.
And he was kind of coming toward the end of
his evangelistic ministry as I was starting mine, and he
(25:59):
said that he wanted help with his sermon illustrations to
reach younger people. I'm in my thirties at this point,
and so I said, I'd be thrilled, I'd be honored
to help you in any way I could. So I
found myself traveling with Billy.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And you've been listening to Pastor Greg Glory tell his
story and he discovers the Bible and for the first
time reads a book that is he put it related
to me. And then he started to attend church regularly,
Chuck Smith's Cavalry Chapel, and he used his prolific artistic skills,
his cartooning talents to help the church spread the gospel.
(26:36):
God was putting a call on my life, Brake said,
And then he had to deal with his mom. He
just couldn't live that life anymore, and he just had
to move out. And I love that part about him
talking about reading the Bible verse in the morning and
preaching on it in the afternoon. What courage that took,
What faith that took, and how else to learn but
(26:58):
to teach? And he just had the faith to step
out and do that, and then began his crusade life.
And my goodness being able to have the helping hand
of Billy Graham. As Graham is ending his evangelistic life,
Greg Glory is beginning his. When we come back more
of this remarkable journey, this story of one man's faith
(27:21):
journey here on our American stories, and we continue with
our American stories, and Pastor Greg Glory, let's pick up
(27:42):
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
I'm preaching the people at this point around the world,
and my own mom is not a believer. Now. I
found out later she was very proud of me because
my aunt said she kept like a little scrap book
and every time an article was written about me, or
I appeared somewhat and you know, it was interviewed, she
would keep a record of it. But she never said
it to me. She never said to me once I
(28:06):
love you, or I'm proud of you or anything. And
so I thought she, you know, wasn't even paying attention.
But I was seeing kind of that hard shell of
my mother's start to crack a little bit because her
lifestyle had taken its tolls. She was no longer a
Marilyn Monroe look alike. She was now a woman who
had been ravaged by bad choices of drinking, to access
(28:31):
and smoking. And when she was seventy, she looked like
she was in her late nineties. She was getting dialysis treatment,
her kidneys were failing. So one day I'm driving to
church and God just spoke to my heart as clear
as day and said, go talk to your mother. So
I called my wife, Kathy, and I said, I'm going
(28:52):
to go talk to my mom today about her relationship
with God or lack thereof. Pray for me So I
went over to my house and I walked in and
she goes, what are you doing here. I said, I'm
here to talk to you today about your soul. She said,
I don't want to talk about it. And this was
her response every time I brought spiritual issues up. She
would say, I don't want to talk about it. I said, today,
(29:15):
we're going to talk about it, and I pressed her,
and that conversation thankfully resulted in my mother making a
recommitment to the Lord. And little how was I to
know that one month later she would die. But I
had a full time ministry sharing the gospel with my
mother's former husbands. Oscar Laurie was the first. So I
(29:37):
mentioned earlier that we loaded up the car and drove
to the airport. And I didn't see him from my childhood.
But now I'm a young adult. Our church is just
starting and I decide I need to talk with him somehow.
So I found him. I located him. This is pre Google,
and I found him practicing law still in New Jersey.
(29:59):
So I called him on the phone. It's kind of
funny because I called his law office and I said, yes,
is Oscar Loriy there in the secretary said, well, mister
Lorry's out to lunch right now. Can I say who called?
I said, yes, tell him Greg LORI called. She said,
how do you spell your last name? I said, l
A U r Ie the same way he spells his.
This is his son. Well, I got a call not
(30:20):
long after that, and he said, oh, Greg, so good
to hear your voice. And I said, well, you know,
I'm going to be in New York. I'm going to
be speaking. I'm a minister now. I don't know what
he thought of that. And I said I'd love to
maybe have lunch with you. And he says, oh, come
and stay at our house. I'm remarried to a woman
named Barbara and we would love to have you come.
And I said, well, I'm married, I have a wife
(30:42):
and a son, Christopher. Oh, come on join us. And
so I spoke at Central Park at this event. Then
we got on the train and we made our way
out to New Jersey where he lived Red Bank, New Jersey.
As I got off the train, I saw him, and boy,
it was just like I went back in time. I
still recognized him though it had been many years. And
(31:04):
so that night we caught up on all that had
happened since we last saw each other. Before I knew it,
I was calling him Dad, and so was a great reunion.
And he actually told me he had tried to get
custody of me when he heard about the crazy decisions
my mother was making in the life she was living.
But she fought him tooth and nail, which had found
(31:24):
ironic because she never seemed to want to have me around.
She was gone so much. I lived with my grandparents.
I even did a stint in military school twice. But
I look back and I realized God was in control,
because if I'd lived with him, my life would have
probably followed a different course. So the next night, his wife,
(31:46):
Barbara made us a great Italian meal, and she said, Greg,
tell me how you became a Christian and a minister.
So I shared my entire life story and my dad
is sitting on the opposite end of the table. Now
remember he's a lawyer. He spends a lot of time
in courtrooms and he was going to eventually become a judge.
(32:10):
The whole night he just sat there with his hands
up to his face, kind of folded, analyzing what he
was saying. So as I'm talking about what Christ has
done for me. I'm thinking this is not going over well.
He's not liking this at all. Barbara was very responsive. Oh,
that's wonderful, that's fantastic. He just stared and listened. And
at the end of the night he said, Greg, will
(32:31):
you walk with me tomorrow morning? Because he had to
walk every morning. And one part I left out is
he had had a heart attack. He was in his
later sixties at this point, and blacked out behind the
steering wheel of his current had driven into a telephone pole.
So now he's on medication. He has to walk every day.
He has a very strict diet. Will you walk with
me in the morning? He has I said sure, Dad.
(32:54):
So the next morning he knocks at the door of
my bedroom at six o'clock in the morning, New Jersey time,
three o'clock California time. I roll out of bed, wiping
the sleep out of my eyes. And we're walking now
and the brisk New Jersey era is in our face,
and he says, Greg, I listened very carefully to what
she said last night. I said yeah, And he said,
(33:16):
and I want to become a Christian. And I couldn't
believe what I was hearing. I said, well, Dad, let
me go over it one more time so you understand
what it means. I went over again. He goes, yes,
I understand that. What do I need to do? And
we're still walking At this point, we're in a park.
I said, well, you need to pray, and he drops
to his knees in this park on his knees. So
(33:37):
I too, dropped to my knees. What do I do?
He said, Well, we pray and I let him in
this prayer to accept Christ. And after we're done Prayney says, Greg,
pray that Jesus heals my heart. So I prayed for
his heart and after we're done, prainey. He says, Greg,
my doctor's office says right over here, Why don't we
go over there. I want to tell him I've just
become a Christian and that God's healed my heart. I said, wait, hey, Dad,
(34:00):
we don't know that God's healed your heart, because let's
go over there. And so I over with him to
his doctor's office. He walks in, Hey, Doc, this is
my son Greg. He's from California. He's a preacher. And
I'm thinking, what is this doctor thinking? You know? And
he says to the doctor, I've just become a Christian
and I believe God has healed my heart. And the
doctor says, now, Oscar, we have to run some tests.
(34:22):
We don't know that your heart is healed. And they
ran tests on him, and sure enough, his heart was healed.
And he lived fifteen more years and got very involved
in this church. And I have never seen such a
radical transformation of a person's life. I was living in
California still, so I had to go home. I did
find him at church to go to, and when I returned,
(34:45):
maybe a month and a half later, I was talking
to him and sharing scriptures. He had pretty much read
the whole Bible already, because my dad would read these
really thick books on history that lined his bookshelves. So this,
I said, deep thinker and intellect, and he was processing
it all so quickly, So that was wonderful. So coming
(35:08):
back to my mother, she married a man named Eddie
that I referred to. Someone told me that Eddie was
really sick and wasn't going to live long, and he
lived in Hawaii while I was over there preaching, so
I had not really seen him since he had knocked
my mother unconscious and almost killed her I had a
deep resentment toward him, and I didn't really even want
(35:32):
to talk to him about God. I didn't care about him,
but I felt bad about that, and I knew I
should talk to him. So someone said, you need to
go see him. He's not going to live much longer.
So I went over to his little apartment which was
right across the street from the Waikiki show where I
was going to be preaching that night, and I told
him my whole story of how I came to faith,
(35:53):
and he just listened. And I said, would you like
to accept Jesus Christ? And he said, no, we want to,
you know, get closer to God. No, No, he's just
totally closed off to it all. I said, well, I'm
going to be speaking across the street over here, which
I like to come over and listen to me. No,
I don't want to. So it wasn't always successful, and
there were others that my mom was involved with that
(36:15):
I shared the Gospel with, with varying degrees of success.
But the point of it all is, you know, you
look back in your life and you can't control what
can your dealt in life. All you can control is
how you react to it. You know, you can become
better or you can become bitter. And I decided to
go back to these rough times of my childhood and
(36:40):
try to do the best I could to reach people
with this gospel that had changed my life.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to
Pastor Greg Laurie, who's the founder and senior pastor of
Harvest Christian Fellowship and it's one of the law just
in most influential churches in the country who campuses in
California and Hawaii. Greg is also the author of seventy books,
including Jesus Revolution. By the way, it streams everywhere. Watch
(37:12):
it with the kids, I think over fourteen or fifteen,
actually not too young, but a beautiful, beautiful movie about
his life and about a moment in time in America.
And that's of course, the early nineteen seventies where America
is in turmoil, the kids are up for grabs, it's drugs,
it's anti authoritarianism, it's America at one of its darkest times,
(37:34):
and up arises this youth movement towards Christ and towards
God and my goodness, He's preaching around the world, we learn,
but still his mom, his mom is not a believer,
and this is just aching his heart. His he learns,
kept a secret scrap book, and yet she had never,
ever once told him she loved him. And of course
(37:57):
his mission, which he said so beautiful, God was putting
a call in my life to reach people like me,
people who had led rough lives, people who are cynical
like me. The story of Pastor Greg Laori here on
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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