UNIVERSAL CITY — Crowd-pleasing evangelist Greg Laurie has booked the Universal Amphitheatre for a mid-November crusade, encouraging some San Fernando Valley clergy to envision the Riverside pastor as a popular heir to the mantle of Billy Graham.
"Greg Laurie has the voice of the '90s, a guy who can speak to yuppies and baby boomers," said the Rev. Chris Stanton, coordinator of the Valley Pastors Fellowship, whose leadership recently unanimously endorsed Laurie's first crusade in Los Angeles.
To be sure, 43-year-old Franklin Graham has received his father Billy's blessing as the nation's unofficial evangelist-in-waiting, not to mention the approbation of a Time magazine cover story this week.
In the meantime, Laurie, also 43, has been running up impressive figures for U.S. evangelistic crusades, preaching to 317,850 people in 20 appearances last year while serving as minister of the 12,000-member Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside.
As for "replacing" the 77-year-old Graham, "it might take 30 of us to fill the shoes of Billy Graham, who was also a chaplain to presidents and a leader of the evangelical world," said Laurie.
He regards Franklin Graham as a friend, not a competitor. "We want to cooperate. If one were to emerge as the premier evangelist, so to speak, that will be determined by time, and it will be up to God--not up to man."
Nevertheless, Laurie has drawn impressive crowds where he is well known. His Harvest Crusades last year outdrew the Angels and Padres baseball games in average attendance when he preached in stadiums in Anaheim (164,000 in four days) and San Diego (80,000 in four days). Laurie will return to those ballparks in July.
Given those precedents, the 6,251-seat Universal Amphitheatre may hardly be large enough for his Nov. 17-20 Los Angeles crusade. Assistants are already inquiring about places to put overflow crowds.
Even the somewhat disappointing turnout for the Luis Palau Crusade in the San Fernando Valley in June 1994 ranged nightly between 7,000 and 11,200--and that was on the bleacher seats of Birmingham High School's football stadium in Van Nuys.
Despite heavy promotion of Palau's evangelistic crusade, the biggest crowds were not, as expected, on the first and last nights. The audience was largest on the second night, when singer Smokey Robinson was on stage (9,600), and on the fourth night--Youth Night, with contemporary Christian music by the Newsboys and other groups (11,200).
