A Recap
Gary Hornsby turned sixty and asked the people who shaped his life to come and tell him what God had done. One after another, they took the microphone. What follows is what they said.
Gary Hornsby
He walked to the edge of the stage and told everyone what the night was for.
I know many of you could come up on this stage and you have your own stories. But you're here tonight because you left a fingerprint on my life. And that's why I've invited you here tonight.
Then he went around the tent naming people — not by title, by story. The man who gave him chairs out of the back of his church when he had none. The friend who drove down from Las Vegas. The pilot attached to half the stories he was about to hear. The neighbor he couldn't recognize at distance because of the glasses.
He prayed before he handed over the microphone.
Though it is a celebration of my life, it's really a celebration of you. Lord, your hand and the purpose is on each and every one of our lives in this room.
Gary Hornsby
In 2000 an international magazine ran a feature on the street parties he was throwing across the Inland Empire. For color they called his pastor, Steve Brian at Reality Bible Fellowship, who knew him better than anyone.
The article came out and described him as a lay pastor. He didn't know the term, so he looked it up. The first word in the definition was unprofessional.
He didn't read any further. It ate at him for weeks — driving to work, driving home, turning it over. People all around the world are reading that I'm unprofessional. Why would he say that about me.
Eventually he worked up the nerve to ask.
Gary, because I wanted to give you a compliment. Everything you do — you don't get paid for it.
Steve Brian
He has used it in counseling sessions ever since. We decide we know what someone meant, we take offense, and the whole time they were trying to hand us something.
A pastor listening that night added one correction: in the Bible there is no such thing as a lay pastor. There are pastors, and there are pastors. "So you're a pastor. Just a little asterisk."
A board member of Quaker Meadow
A new board had taken over a struggling Christian camp in the Sequoias. There was no money, and the camp truck was a hole they kept pouring money into.
The replacement had to be four-wheel drive, had to take a tow package, had to be diesel — the camp sits at seven thousand two hundred feet.
"It's like — I know a guy."
He called Gary and explained the situation. Gary said let me see what I can do. Inside a month, a truck worth sixty or seventy thousand dollars was donated by a group of dealerships to a camp none of them had ever seen.
It was through his credibility with his higher-ups. They knew the man of God he was. They knew the man of integrity he was. They went off his word.
Gary's only interruption was to move the credit: his higher-ups, Billy Mack and Mike Segal, are believers themselves. "They were excited for the opportunity. It was an easy sell."
The camp still runs on that truck.
Daniel
Daniel was around forty when they met. Gary was about twenty and freshly out.
Daniel asked him to come to Mexico and help feed children. Gary answered honestly.
I just came out of jail. I'm afraid of the Mexican mafia.
They went. They started with children living at the dump site in Tijuana — kids picking through it for something to eat and for aluminum to sell. About twenty of them at first. In 1990 the work was incorporated as Emergency Operation International.
Later, in Ensenada, they met a pastor named Armando Guerra who was ministering to children beside a pigsty while neighbors made fun of him for it. There was land nearby for about fifteen hundred dollars. Daniel, Gary and a dentist named Joseph bought it. The pastor handed over plans for a church that would cost around five thousand, and they promised to go home and raise it.
Three months into collecting, they drove down with candy and flyers to gather the neighborhood children onto the empty lot and tell them a church was coming.
The pastor came out of his house delighted. Oh pastor — you came to bless the church.
They assumed he meant carpet, or paint. They walked over to the lot.
There was a finished church standing on it, with an office and a pastoral house at the end of the building.
I asked him, how did you build this? And he looked at me and said — you did.
Daniel told him that was impossible. They were still collecting the money. The pastor said no, brother: your people came about a month ago, stayed ten days, bought all the equipment and built it. They even had your car here.
They were a group from San Francisco.
On Monday, Daniel called the pastor in San Francisco. The man explained his half of it. His church had planned a trip to help a pastor in that area build a building. The day they were due to leave, his wife got sick and he couldn't go, so he sent the group without him.
They went. They didn't speak Spanish. The pastor didn't speak English.
They built the church anyway.
Daniel offered to repay whatever it had cost. The pastor told him to keep it. It was from the Lord.
A friend who prays with pastors
Gary had a heart attack in Pasadena and clinically died. People were praying over him when he came back.
Sometime after, a pastor with a chapel up on Mount Baldy offered his church for a gathering of pastors to pray. Gary offered to drive.
They were partway up the mountain road when Gary turned to him.
Oh, by the way — you know after my heart attack they put in a defibrillator. Not a pacemaker. A defibrillator. Because my heart stops sometimes, and it takes a few seconds, and then it kicks back on. So if I just kind of black out — would you grab the steering wheel and drive for me?
"So I prayed all the way up. We prayed with the pastors. And I prayed all the way down."
Peggy — KSGN Radio
It was the first of the year and the station had been fielding call after call — people losing their businesses, losing their homes, losing hope.
That day, driving her family around, she noticed a small white sign on every freeway on-ramp and off-ramp they passed. Cast your cares on Him. He cares for you. He loves you. Underneath was writing too small to read at speed. By the third or fourth ramp she asked her husband to stop.
The small print read: sponsored by Inland Empire churches that love Jesus and love you.
And I'm like — churches don't work together.
She knew it from the station. Pastors who didn't know each other. Not out of hostility — just busy.
The next day the signs were gone. One day there, one day not, until she started to wonder whether she'd seen them at all. She asked everyone she knew for eleven days before a thread led her to a place called GNS Diesel.
She called and said, you don't know me, but there are these signs all over the Inland Empire. The man who answered said hang on a minute, came back, and said: we do. Let me put you through.
I'll tell you the story if you do not mention my name.
The first thing Gary ever said to her
"He won me over right then. Because he didn't want the credit."
What she had found the edge of was a seven-month campaign. Eighteen billboards went up on the major freeways carrying the same line. The station got behind it.
Then Gary told her the rest of the plan. Motorcycles. Prayer over the Inland Empire. And seven pastors in an airplane, anointing the whole of it from the sky.
And I'm like — what?
She wanted her thirteen-year-old to see what happens when somebody follows the Holy Spirit all the way through, so she and her husband agreed to come and pray at the airport on the day.
When they arrived Gary told her she was going up. She said no — it's all men, her husband should go. He flipped a coin. She called it wrong.
I guess it was the right one.
Before the radio station, Peggy had worked for Terminix pest control — crawling under houses, going up into attics, doing it scared every time because she had three kids to put through school.
She stepped into the airplane and found three B&G sprayers sitting in the middle of the cabin, filled with olive oil.
Only God could have known that what I did before was right there in the center of that airplane.
She never opened her eyes the whole flight. She prayed for women and children, because that was her heart.
Gary filled in the mechanics afterward. The Lord had told him seven gallons. Three men pumped, three held the wands, and his friend Jonah — now with the Lord — rode up front beside the pilot. They pumped and prayed with no clear idea what was below them.
As they turned back toward Chino to land, the last of the oil ran out.
That seven gallons was the exact amount. Not too much, not too less. The exact amount.
Not long after the flight, a freeway was detoured and Peggy ended up on Baseline Avenue, where she came into close contact with a young girl who was being trafficked.
She didn't know what trafficking was. She says God broke her heart in an instant.
She started a journey to rescue girls in her own community. Gary was the first pastor to back it. Out of that came CADE — Christians Actively Demolishing Exploitation. There is still a home in the city today for girls who came out of that life. A documentary went worldwide and became one of the catalysts that told this country trafficking was happening here.
If you believe what God's told you to do, and you do it — what could happen?
Peggy, to Gary
A friend of eight years
They met properly in 2018 at a downtown mission, then ran into each other days later at a noodle house up the street. He asked Gary what he did at the church.
"I help leaders find their passion and help them grow."
"Well — I'm a new leader in the church."
They started having breakfast every week. Eventually they were traveling the world together.
Over one of those meals he was telling Gary about moving into the neighborhood back in 2005. A young man had ridden up on a motorcycle, introduced himself, and offered to show the new guy around. They got on a quad and spent three or four hours riding the whole neighborhood. At one point the kid pulled up to a house and went inside for a minute. Then he was gone, and the man never saw him again.
Gary stopped him.
That was me. That's my son Jacob.
They had lived two blocks apart since 2005 and didn't meet until 2018. The first person he met in that neighborhood was Gary's son.
God knew, even before I moved back to San Bernardino, that we were going to be doing this together.
He finished with something Gary took up immediately: "He's sixty. But he's starting the greatest chapter of his life now."
Joseph — founder, The Way TV
Joseph runs an Arabic satellite network reaching Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and beyond. He first saw Gary on television and had a straightforwardly commercial thought: this style would work over there.
He asked Gary to take a weekly program. Gary and Kristin said yes.
Gary has a different style. He had a cool style. A lot of people received Jesus Christ through his message in the entire Arab world.
His counsel to Gary, repeated three times so it would land: be yourself. "That's when you get the maximum harvest you'll ever have in your life."
Then he told his own.
He received Christ at twenty-two. Before that he sang in a nightclub in Egypt, performing alongside the belly dancers. His father was a pastor there — preaching salvation on Sunday while his oldest son did that, and came home drunk every night.
His father waited up for him. Every night, on the couch, to pray for him. Joseph told him not to bother. I'm not coming to the Lord. I'm not a PK. I don't want to be that.
And his father would point a finger at him and say the same sentence.
You are a man of God.
Joseph would look at himself — drunk, two or three in the morning — and wonder who his father was talking about.
His father did it every night for three years and never missed one.
The break came in the nightclub. Joseph met a man there who wasn't interested in dragging him to a service and simply showed him the love of the Lord where he stood. He went home to his father that night.
I received Jesus Christ in the nightclub.
A neighbor, a few streets over
He had been in a solid men's group, but his work schedule changed and it fell apart. So he prayed something specific: God, I need more godly men in my life.
The route the answer took was long. One of the main safety coordinators at his job became a good friend. That friend's best friend happened to be Pastor Gary's neighbor. And then he moved a couple of blocks down the same street himself.
I asked God, I said I need good men in my life. And He brought me Pastor Gary.
Mentor, spiritual father — and his own word for it, fingerprints, on his marriage and on his walk.
Gary's answer was one line. "When you say yes to Jesus, and you just keep saying yes to Jesus, all kinds of cool things happen."
Tim — friends since they were eleven
Tim's wife had never seen him cry. Fifteen minutes before he spoke she noticed tears running down his face and asked what was wrong.
It was a memory: the day Gary went to prison.
The two of them had lived every story that came before the walk Gary is on now. Tim has brothers by blood, and Gary was still the closest thing to a brother he ever had.
In my heart I never thought I would see him again. I didn't know what to do with myself.
Someone came into his room and found him crying, and he said he didn't know why — he couldn't stop.
She said: because he can't.
Gary couldn't show it. He had barely started walking. Part of that early walking was phoning Tim and asking him to come to church, then leaving him sitting in the seat alone — fifteen minutes into the sermon Gary would get up and go outside. He couldn't take it. Something was working on him and he had nowhere to put it yet.
We all know people that are lost. Don't tell me that God can't do it. When you talk about grace not being in vain — this story is real. This story is true.
"The journey that I am now on is because you inspired it. God gave it to me. You watered it."
Jose Alonso, with Joe and Richard
"We've laughed, cried, worshipped, prayed, flown, slept — I mean everything. I really wouldn't know where I would be if I hadn't met Gary when we did."
The trip was Africa.
Ismael picked them up from the airport. He was Muslim, a friend of the local pastor — the kind of man who drives people to church for years and never goes inside. He spent the week watching them.
The hotel. One night Richard was sitting at a table talking with a girl, and the room turned. Joe's description is that everything slowed down. Cooks came out of the kitchen. Desk staff. Workers from all over the building. The area was more than half Muslim and plenty of them were frightened to come forward, and came anyway. The owner was saved. The cook. The servers.
The hotel, they found out later, was called Shalom.
The slums. Gary's plan for walking through what he reckons are some of the worst slums in the world was no guards, Richard on guitar, straight up the middle.
It was like the Pied Piper. All these people started coming and following us. And then we got to this intersection and we were completely surrounded.
They preached there in the road, and people were saved.
The shoes. At a mall, Richard and Jose got talking with a vendor and ended up buying an entire bin of shoes — a bin the size of a table — and fitting the whole thing into the trunk of a car. They weren't sure why. The shoes were meant for a school.
Driving out, they passed a single barefoot boy walking in the fields. They stopped. They washed his feet. They had every size in the trunk, so they found his, put shoes on him, and he walked off.
Before you know it, kids were coming out of the bushes. From everywhere. Literally everywhere. It was just like — who told them? How did they know?
They handed out shoes until they ran out.
At the end of the week, driving to the airport, Ismael said he wanted to receive Jesus. He was saved in the parking lot, dropping them off.
He saw so much that we really didn't even have to say much.
Joe — from Texas
Around 2010 he was out from Texas rehabbing houses, away from his kids and his family, going through a hard stretch.
One night he got on his knees and asked God to send him to a church. He needed to connect with somebody.
He drove past River's Edge. Nobody was there. He was going to keep driving and forget it.
The Lord just pulled me back over there. I walked in the doors, and there was a small Bible study.
He ended up moving out for a stretch, and going out with Gary to parks with backpacks, to the men's ranch, picking up people along the way.
I've never seen a man walk with so much wisdom. And he's a connector of people.
Richard Andrews
For a season Richard led worship while Gary preached.
Gary would preach a message on Sunday. By Tuesday, Richard would have a new song written out of it.
None of it was planned that way. The songs came out of whatever was actually happening to the people in that church — the victories, the tragedies, the struggles, the successes, the dark days and the bright ones.
Through it all I wrote a series of songs, and they were all inspired from heaven, based on that season of us ministering together.
Richard Andrews
The first time Richard heard Gary's voice it was a cold call. Gary had an arsenal of bands from years of running street outreaches, and one number led to another until somebody handed over Richard's.
He came and ministered to the youth. A few weeks later Gary took him and his wife to dinner and asked him to pray about becoming the worship leader.
Richard laughed. He was already in full-time ministry with a schedule he couldn't control, and this was a church plant growing fast. He had no business saying yes.
They prayed on it for two weeks. Then his wife asked what the Lord was saying.
I hate to say it, but I think He's saying yes. — What's He saying to you? — Yeah, I hate it too. But He's saying yes.
They committed to three years. They stayed eleven or twelve.
You ain't seen nothing until you've unloaded a trailer every Sunday morning, set up all the chairs and the sound system, and then after service is over you pack it all up in the trailer and you do it all again the next week. That's how the River's Edge was birthed.
There was an earlier piece to it that Gary wanted told. When they first met, Richard had said God spoke to him during a time of music ministry and told him to come alongside Gary and support and encourage him.
Gary had heard that before.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard that. Somebody's under the influence of the Holy Ghost, they want to be supportive and encouraging — and then a week later they lose your number and you never hear from them.
So he nodded politely and said, well, praise God, brother.
Richard called back three days later and did exactly what he'd said God led him to do. He has been doing it ever since — and became the first spiritual son Gary ever had.
Billy, with his wife Melissa
Billy met Gary through a phone call he didn't want. He worked for a rock, sand and gravel company — "Fred Flintstone, that's kind of what I do" — and this pastor kept calling, clearly angling for a donation, with a persistence that would not quit.
Eventually he drove out to see what the man actually had. It was a men's recovery home, down a dirt road, out in Lucerne.
I'm thinking — this guy's name should be Moses. Who would ever even think that they could do something like this out here?
Getting convicts sober in the desert. "There's no way I would have got sober out there. But Gary always has a vision."
They became friends, and over the years Gary answered the phone whenever Billy needed him. "I'm wired to self-destruct. There's been many times Gary has been there for me."
Then he said why he almost hadn't come.
The previous month had been the darkest of his life. Driving home after taking his mother-in-law to the hospital, a homeless woman stepped out in front of their truck at ten at night, and he hit and killed her. Two weeks later his mother-in-law passed away. A week after that a friend died by suicide. And that day he had come straight from a celebration of life for his boss's thirteen-year-old daughter, who died of cancer.
Gary and Kristin kept calling and texting. Are you coming? Are you coming? His voice was going. He pushed through it and came because Gary had always been there for him.
I came here to celebrate Gary's birthday. But I was ministered to here today in a big way.
"I don't know how you do that stuff, bro. Your timing is perfect." Then he corrected himself. "It's His timing."
Gary Hornsby
When somebody crosses your mind for no reason, pay attention. Our steps are ordered.
He was driving once when the Lord told him to call a man. He said he'd call when he got home. The Lord said no — call him now.
So he called, and asked what he was doing.
I just pulled the .357 out of my mouth to answer your phone call.
"You never know what God's trying to do in somebody else's life. And you're that vessel that's going to make a difference."
Robert Jimenez — Bill Glass Behind the Walls
Robert and his wife Rachel lost their daughter Brittany not long after her birth, in January of 1987. He had grown up in Catholic schools and graduated Catholic high school, and by thirty he still didn't have a clue who God was. Brittany is what sent him looking, and a friend led him to the Lord.
By 1989 he was working with Bill Glass Behind the Walls out of Dallas — the ministry founded by the former NFL player — training volunteers in evangelism one day and walking them into a prison the next.
Around 2005, as Southern California director, he was staring at an enormous open door. More than ten thousand inmates across CIM, CIW, the San Bernardino County jails and youth facilities in Riverside County. All of it in one weekend. The problem was volunteers.
It's not real easy to get people to sign up to go to prison. It's just not the most exciting little trip to go on.
Somebody connected him to Gary. Before long people from River's Edge were signing up in numbers — close to a hundred of the eventual eight hundred and fifty came out of that one church.
Then Gary mentioned he had done time himself. Robert's platform guests were often ex-felons with a story, and Gary had one. He also had a quality Robert valued highly.
He was affordable. — Yeah, I was a freebie. — So I took all the freebies I could get.
Gary holds Robert's record for the most he ever made one man preach: fifteen times in a single day.
No altar calls. Just tell them your story, Gary, and let the Holy Spirit do the rest.
Robert also had a Freightliner with a problem, and discovered his platform guest was a very good diesel mechanic. The tractor went to Rialto.
Gary Hornsby
He brought Kristin up near the end and kept it short.
The Lord spoke to me a while back and said, your best is yet to come. And then He sent Kristin into my life. So she's the best part of me.
He thanked her for being flexible, for allowing all of it, and for putting up with him — then said he was excited to spend the rest of his life with her.
Pat
Pat sobered up at thirty-four, and his life took off once he did. He'd believed in God since he was seventeen, but from seventeen to thirty-four he was on drugs and alcohol, "and when you're on drugs and alcohol you're not always doing the right things."
He was never much for church. He'll still tell you he doesn't go regularly.
But his fiftieth birthday landed on a Sunday, and sixteen years of sobriety had made his life so good that he felt he had to go and thank God for it. A friend had told him about a church called River's Edge.
I went to some other churches where they were screaming, yelling and loud. Pastor Gary's always real patient. He just has a way of bringing the message that I could really relate to.
He found the men's group there — Band of Brothers — and through it a set of friendships he still counts on.
"Men that I'm proud to say I know. Men that if I needed something, they'd all help. I don't want to need anything from anybody, but I know these men will always help me if I need them."
Gary Hornsby
People had been telling him for years that he needed to write a book. He'd put it off long enough that he'd started to wonder whether he was being disobedient about it.
What broke it loose was a song. God gave him one this year, and a line in it was cross of purpose. That phrase got him thinking about the fact that everyone carries one, and he started meditating on purpose itself.
Out of that came five Greek words he had never noticed were tied directly to how a person finds their calling.
They're like fingerprints. When you discover these, it really reveals so much of God's hand of purpose on your life.
He put it on a whiteboard first, thinking it would make good leadership training. Then he felt the Lord tell him to write a book about it, and to do it in the month of May.
He wrote it in May — the first book of his life. It is called The Hand of Purpose. The bookmark on the tables that night was a teaser for it.
The shape of it is a trail: five markers, five words, a journey you walk rather than a doctrine you agree with.
So many people say — yeah, I love God, I serve God, I just don't know what my purpose is.
Gary Hornsby
There's something about turning sixty, he said, where the natural instinct is that this is the part where you start letting off the gas. This is where you're supposed to start slowing down.
And then it clicked. I've never been more wise. I've never had more clarity. I've never known as much as I know. I think I'm just going to floor it.
A young man from the Wayward Outreach
He had taken on a twenty-one day fast at his church and carried it to forty, seeking a breakthrough.
He had known of Gary his whole life. His parents went to River's Edge, and Gary had marked them.
At the tail end of the fast he ran into Gary at an outreach and introduced himself.
It was like I already knew him.
Gary invited him to the Bible study on the spot. He has been going for months.
He's been talking about purpose. And from all these Bible studies I've been going to — I've been finding my purpose.
Miller — neighbor, friend, business partner
In 2006 he was, in his own words, "an agnostic slash really atheist type guy." He studied history, and a friend invited him to a Bible study that looked at history from the perspective of Jesus. It met at the Spaghetti Factory in Rancho Cucamonga.
He went, deeply suspicious, but listening. At some point the man up front asked whether anybody wanted to know Jesus, and he raised his hand — because he wanted to know. That was the question, wasn't it?
I didn't realize that when a pastor says that, it means it's time for you to come up and he's going to pray for you and you're accepting Jesus. So he started to pray for me and I'm like — oh man, this is not what I had in mind.
Walking out, his friend said: whoa — you got saved?
He didn't see the man again for about fifteen years.
Six years ago he had a strong pull to buy land, and ended up buying a house on the other side of the hill from where he'd been living. While he was still in escrow he was walking the back of the property when a neighbor popped up with a howdy ho, neighbor.
They got talking, and the neighbor mentioned he had been a pastor at River's Edge. He said — hey, I used to know a pastor at River's Edge. Tall. Bald.
And Gary took off his hat.
No way. You're that guy.
He is saved now, and has been in Gary's Bible study a year and a half.
A man in the Bible study since 2018
He met Gary in 2018 through an invitation to a Bible study, and he is still in the same one. He's fifty-eight, and had assumed for years that Gary was much older than him — purely on the basis of the wisdom.
The habit he took from it is a question he now asks walking into any room at all.
Holy Spirit — what is my responsibility in this place?
He'd become a grandfather that Saturday, and asked it there too. It changes what you notice: who to pray for, who needs a word, where you're actually meant to be standing.
Together we are better.
A neighbor
The study Gary runs now started with a neighbor asking one question: would you teach it if I host it?
Gary said sure. Timmy came, then Sean, then others from the neighborhood.
Which leaves him with the shortest commute in ministry. "I just walk next door."
A customer, from the GNS Diesel days
He'd bought a truck he didn't have the license to drive, found a driver for it, and then watched it start leaking oil badly.
He went through the Yellow Pages — "if that tells you how long ago it was" — and found GNS Diesel on Valley. He set out from Rancho Cucamonga and drove, and kept driving. "I'm like, oh man, this is getting far."
Gary fixed the truck. Somewhere in there he asked whether the man went to church. Not really. Gary handed him a business card, and he entered a raffle for a TV that was raising money for Jacob's mission trip to Mexico.
The card went into a box with hundreds of other business cards and sat there a couple of years.
Then he got married. Things were good, but something was missing, and his wife suggested they find a church. He dug through the box, found Gary's card, and called. Gary was in the middle of remodelling his house and told him to come Sunday morning.
The message that day happened to be about reading a chapter of Proverbs a day, matched to the date. He started doing it. And Gary said something offhand from the front that turned out to be the reason he's still telling this story:
For those of you that are worried about who's not here with you — just keep showing up, and they will.
It worked. His wife came. Then the rest of the family. They were a major part of River's Edge and the ranch for years.
It wasn't an immediate thing. But two years later, the seed that you had planted was so strong that I was like — well, if I'm gonna go to church, I'm going to that Jesus church.
The Room
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Gary's Closing Prayer
Lord, it's your grace that has done everything that they talked about tonight — because your grace all my life, that you looked at a young dope-fiend kid in prison and you showed me your love.
The day I believed that you loved me changed everything. And I thank you for that time in prison that turned out to be a Bible college for me.
I thank you for every mountaintop experience and every valley that I went through. You've never promised me that following you would be easy. But you've always promised that it would be worth it.
You've sustained us when we've had to bury our children. You've bailed us out when our finances were upside down.
You're just the hero of my story. But I know you're the hero of every one of our stories.
Amen