A crowd of 38,708 filed through the turnstiles at Los Angeles Coliseum for the opening service August 15 of Billy Graham’s Southern California crusade. Spokesmen said it was the largest crowd ever to attend a weeknight opening of a Graham campaign. Some 2,000 stepped forward at the invitation to indicate a commitment to Christ.
The service was recorded on video tape and will be one of a series from Los Angeles to be shown over more than 200 television stations across the United States and Canada during September.
Graham preached on Jeremiah and judgment. He called for national repentance if Americans hope to escape the judgment of God.
The evangelist’s appeal noted that Los Angeles is where Khrushchev had made his famous rebuke of American morals. Graham issued a challenge that the United States aptly demonstrate its moral and spiritual strength to the Soviets.
A close associate of Graham reported that the evangelist appeared to be in good physical condition, and Graham himself said he had never felt better at the start of a crusade. Earlier this year he had suffered from a series of maladies that kept him from a scheduled Far Eastern crusade and left him in a weakened state for many weeks.
The Los Angeles meetings got under way after months of intensive preparation. Crusade leaders were deeply gratified at the response of ministers and laymen in the area. There appeared to be a profound commitment among thousands to try and reach the huge metropolitan area with the claims of Christ.
Decision, published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, noted that it “looks to be the most intensely organized evangelistic crusade in human history.”
“Nothing in the annals of Christendom can quite compare with it.”
“When did 20,000 church workers ever go out at one time to call in a million and a half homes for the purpose of inviting people to a worship service?” the publication asked.
“When did 80,000 women ever gather in 10,000 homes all through a metropolitan area to unite in a common prayer to God in behalf of their neighbors?”
The crusade choir will probably be the biggest ever for musical director Cliff Barrows. Nearly 10,000 names have been registered. A choir with as many as 5,000 voices is singing during the crusade services.
The crusade will last for three weeks, concluding on Sunday afternoon, September 8.
There is a nostalgic note to the Los Angeles meetings for Graham, for it is one of the first cities where he began to attract national attention. The Graham team considers the meetings held in a tent at Washington and Hill Streets 14 years ago as their first major crusade.
‘Sermons’ At The Fair
Ground was broken this month for a “Sermons from Science” pavilion at the New York 1964–1965 World’s Fair, bringing to six the total number of religious exhibit centers now under construction. The “Sermons from Science” pavilion (see photograph) will use Moody Institute’s highly regarded science films as well as live demonstrations to present the Gospel to many of the expected seventy million fairgoers. Through a similar venture at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 more than 1,000 decisions were made for Christ.
Outstanding among the features of the science pavilion is a 500-seat auditorium where visitors will hear film narrations through earphones in any of six languages.
Indications are that there will be a strong evangelical witness at the fair. Among other pavilions now under construction is one for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. A number of evangelical groups are also renting space in the interdenominational Protestant Center.
Latin American Enterprise
Peruvian Christians decided to “go it alone” and will join forces for an all-out, nation-wide evangelistic effort during 1964. This determination on the part of nearly 250 Christian leaders assembled for a workshop on evangelism at Huampani, Peru, came after they had learned that the Latin America Mission could not coordinate any evangelism-in-depth movements in 1964 other than those already scheduled for Honduras, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
The nation-wide Honduras effort is already under way. Kick-off came at an evangelism-in-depth pastors’ conference held in San Pedro Sula in July. Prayer cells are being organized in 200 Protestant churches of the country, sponsored by some sixteen denominations. With Protestants forming only 1.5 per cent of its population of less than two million, Honduras is the neediest field in Central America.
Venezuela expects to launch its nation-wide movement on New Year’s Eve, and evangelism-in-depth will start in Bolivia in about June of 1964, according to Dr. R. Kenneth Strachan, general director of LAM. Plans were to be crystallized and publicized following a highly significant conference on evangelism scheduled for San Jose, Costa Rica, during the last two weeks of August. The gathering was sponsored jointly by LAM and an autonomous Latin American group known as CLASE (Comite Latino-Americano de Evangelismo).
W.D.R.
