‘The Evangelist of the Future’ Marks 25 Years of California Outreach
Harvest Crusades with Greg Laurie will celebrate its 25th consecutive year of evangelistic outreach in Southern California during the 2014 SoCal Harvest, slated for Aug. 15-17 at Angel Stadium of Anaheim.
Founded by pastors Laurie and Chuck Smith in 1990, the Harvest Crusades have returned to Orange County each summer for the past 25 years, and have also drawn millions of people to additional stadium events across the country and around the world.
A Southern California pastor and evangelist, Laurie has spoken at each Harvest Crusade event since their inception, sharing the gospel message with more than 6.5 million people worldwide, both in-person and via live Internet broadcasts.
This year will be no different as each night of the 2014 SoCal Harvest outreach will feature a straight-forward message of faith from Laurie and music from top Christian recording artists including Chris Tomlin, Skillet, NeedtoBreathe, for King & Country, Sidewalk Prophets and Phil Wickham (musicians vary by night).
In addition to the 2014 SoCal Harvest, this year Harvest with Greg Laurie will host the Dallas Harvest at the American Airlines Center (Oct. 5), which will be simulcast to thousands of locations nationwide for a coast-to-coast evangelistic outreach called Harvest America.
Two previous Harvest America programs were simulcast from Angel Stadium in 2012 and from the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia in 2013. The Anaheim Harvest America event alone drew more than 302,700 participants, making it one of the largest evangelistic outreaches in U.S. history.
The Harvest with Greg Laurie events are known for relating to audiences through contemporary means like top notch music, live Internet webcasts and hosted video podcasts, but the crux of each event is the nightly message presented by Laurie.
Called the “evangelist of the future” by Billy Graham, Laurie draws on Scripture, flavored with personal and cultural examples, to describe the relevance of faith in today’s world. Laurie’s talks encompass topics that appeal to people of any age and answer questions like: Why am I here? Is God real? What happens when I die?
The 2014 SoCal Harvest will be broadcast live at harvest.org and video blog accounts of each message will also be made available. “Behind the scenes” updates about the Harvest outreach will be posted on Facebook, Instagram (harvest_org or search #HarvestSoCal) and Twitter.
Laurie also serves as senior pastor of one of the largest churches in the U.S., Harvest Christian Fellowship, which has campuses in Riverside and Irvine, California, and he is on the board of directors for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
