Background and career
Greg Laurie (born December 10, 1952) is an American evangelical pastor, evangelist, and Christian author, who as of July 2026 had continued to lead his congregation and serve as a crusade leader, in the role of senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, Riverside, California. He also is the founder of Harvest Crusades. Laurie is also the subject of the 2023 film Jesus Revolution, which tells the story of how he converted to Christianity and got his start in ministry in the midst of the Jesus movement.
Greg Laurie was born in 1952, in Long Beach, California. He was raised by a single mother who was married seven times in total. He worked as a newspaper boy for the Daily Pilot in Orange County, California. Laurie was not raised in the Christian faith or a church environment; in 1970, when Laurie was 17 years old (while attending Newport Harbor High School), he became a Christian as a result of the ministry of evangelist Lonnie Frisbee, in a period when the Jesus Movement was exploding in Southern California.
In 1973, Laurie began a home Bible study in Riverside, California, an opportunity given to him, at age 20, to lead 30 people under the mentorship of Calvary Chapel pastor Chuck Smith. The group quickly grew in size, and Laurie founded the Harvest Christian Fellowship in that same year, in Riverside, where, as of March 2013 (40 years later), he still served as senior pastor. In 1990, Laurie founded the Harvest Crusades, an organization that hosts large-scale evangelistic events around the U.S. As David Olson noted on the occasion of the organization's 25th anniversary crusade at Angel Stadium of Anaheim, California, the organization began its "Harvest America" program in 2012, in which "people from across the country [can] watch a crusade live in a church or other venue via high-quality Internet streams and satellite feeds".
As of June 2017, Harvest Christian Fellowship was maintaining its ties with "the Calvary Chapel association of evangelical churches". In June of that year, Harvest "officially joined the Southern Baptist Convention" (SBC) under Laurie's leadership, after a first-time, 2017 collaborative participation in the "Crossover Phoenix" evangelistic event of the SBC's North American Mission Board. Also noted in reporting was the fact that two days after Harvest America held a large - and what it considered a very successful - crusade at the University of Phoenix Stadium, the SBC began its 2017 annual meeting in Phoenix as well. As Samual Smith noted in reporting in the Christian Post, the reason for the decision by Laurie and the leadership at Harvest to affiliate with SBC was "to... work toward the ultimate [common] goals of 'national revival' and a 'great awakening'. Even with the new affiliation, Lurie "vowed to continue working with Christians from 'nearly every other denomination'".
When all California churches were forced temporarily to shut their doors because of COVID-19, Harvest Christian Fellowship and Greg Laurie started the online church program "Harvest at Home". On Palm Sunday 2020, then-president Trump tweeted that he would be watching Harvest at Home, and the webcast saw record viewership that week, with over 1,300,000 people tuning in to watch. On October 5, 2020, Laurie revealed that he had contracted COVID-19, and released a statement saying, "Unfortunately, the coronavirus has become very politicized. I wish we could all set aside our partisan ideas and pull together to do everything we can to defeat this virus and bring our nation back."
In 2013, Laurie served as the Honorary Chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force. President Donald Trump selected Pastor Laurie as one of several evangelical church leaders to participate in the National Prayer Service hosted at the Washington National Cathedral following the presidential inauguration of 2017. In 2017, Greg Laurie organized a movement titled "The Year of Good News". Multiple church leaders signed the letter he penned to initiate the movement. One paragraph of the letter reads, "In a time of fake news, distracting news, divisive news, disorderly news, and, sometimes, depressing news, we - as Christians and as leaders - want to recommit ourselves to making sure that the Good News of Jesus cuts through it all. We call upon Christians in America to make 2017 'The Year of Good News.'" As of 2006, Laurie was serving on the board of directors for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. As of this date, it was being reported that Laurie had served as a chaplain for the Newport Beach Police Department for over 25 years. As of 2013, Laurie was serving as chaplain for the Costa Mesa Police Department.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
