Harvest Christian Fellowship Pastor Greg Laurie told Newsmax Wednesday that the United States needs to undergo a new "spiritual" revolution like what took place during the turbulent late 1960s and 1970s.
"I think the ultimate need in our country right now is [that] we need another spiritual awakening," Laurie said during "The Chris Salcedo Show" Wednesday. "Things were very bleak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drug use was really exploding for the first time, sexual immorality, and of course, the breakdown of the family, and then add to that fact, fear of a potential nuclear war, and it's almost like deja vu all over again."
Laurie said that he is seeing the same dynamics playing out again, and so is the need for a greater spiritual awakening.
"It's like it's happening again before our eyes, and what happened was a spiritual awakening [that] changed the course of our nation," he said. "I'm praying we have another one."
Laurie documented that first spiritual awakening in his autographical book "Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today," which is now a new movie opening nationwide.
The book and movie tell the story of a teenage Laurie and his then girlfriend, and later wife of 49 years, Cathe, living through those tumultuous times with rampant drug use and promiscuity, leading him to a spiritual mentor and a vocation as a spiritual leader, an Amazon listing for the book said.
According to the Harvest Christian Fellowship website, Laurie started his ministry at 19 with a 30-member Bible study group, which has grown to a more than 15,000 member congregation with campuses in California and Hawaii.
"It's a love story, but it's also the story of two very unlikely characters that came together," Laurie said. "Pastor Chuck Smith, a conservative pastor with the smallest church, and Lonnie Frisbee, a dynamic hippie evangelist, and they came together. It was sort of like nitro met glycerin, and the spiritual awakening broke out. I accepted Christ listening to Lonnie preach and walked right into the middle of a spiritual awakening, and that story is told in this film."
Laurie said the movie is available at local theaters, and he hopes that people will go and see it and start a similar spiritual revival.
"It's a very entertaining film. It's funny, it'll make you cry for sure," he said. "But it tells the powerful story of how a generation was saved, a generation that was crying out for revolution and a revolution came, but it wasn't a political revolution. It wasn't a moral revolution. It was as Time magazine put it, 'A Jesus Revolution.'"
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