Billy Graham was the honored prophet in his own country last month when he conducted a five-day crusade in Asheville, North Carolina, the city nearest to his mountaintop Montreat home. Area residents packed the new Civic Center arena for each of the services, the Catholic church across the street was opened for overflow crowds, and the senior Jewish rabbi sent a word of welcome. On the last day the mayor presented a key to the city, and the crowd spontaneously stood and applauded the favorite son. A few churches did not cooperate, but there was virtually none of the vocal opposition that Graham finds in some other places.
It was a happy homecoming in many ways for Graham and members of his team. He has lived in the western North Carolina mountains over thirty years, but he has conducted only one other crusade (1953) in the city. Asheville (population: 55,000-plus) was where the evangelist first met and worked with his music director and master of ceremonies, Cliff Barrows. Willis Haymaker, the dean of crusade preparation men, lives in nearby Lenoir in retirement, but he came to the closing service to lend his support. Graham’s wife, Ruth, was at each service, bringing along neighbors. Relatives and friends came up from the queen city of Piedmont Carolina, Charlotte, Graham’s native town.
The five services attracted capacity crowds (7,500) to the arena, and additional thousands saw them on closed circuit television in the church and four other gathering places in the Civic Center complex. Cumulative attendance was estimated to total 51,200. Counselors talked with 1,342 people who responded to Graham’s invitation to make decisions for Christ. Over 40 per cent of the inquirers registered initial professions of faith.
The multi-purpose arena (used the week before the crusade for a rodeo) was considered by some western North Carolinians to have been built just for the occasion. When its construction was a political issue during the sixties, Graham lent his name to the project, and voters approved it by narrow margins in local referenda. The evangelist promised then that he would return to preach when the Civic Center opened. He finally agreed to a full-fledged crusade when a committee of black ministers in the county pressed an invitation. He said it was the first time he had gone to conduct an evangelistic campaign in a southern city at the invitation of a black group.
At the opening service he admitted that there was “moisture in my eyes” as he looked over the crowd of neighbors. In another message he said it was harder to preach in his hometown than anywhere else. But no other crusade, Graham said, has “meant more to me” than the one in western North Carolina.
Veteran crusade director Charles Riggs, a member of the team for twenty-five years, was under instructions to plan as thoroughly as he would for a campaign in New York City, he told a reporter. The result was the training of more than 2,000 counselors, recruitment of a choir of 1,000, the launching of a new discipleship plan involving more than 1,000, and a week-long school of evangelism for more than 1,200 pastors and other Christian workers. Before the crusade started, $105,000 of a $165,000 budget had been raised; the remainder came in through crusade offerings.
In addition to the new discipleship followup program (directed by Texas evangelist Billy Hanks), the Asheville campaign featured an intensive visitation program aimed at area schools, colleges, hospitals, and prisons. In several area jails every prisoner was visited. Another innovation for the western Carolina crusade was the plan to show all five services on local television on consecutive nights three weeks after the meetings. Telephone counseling will be provided for the viewers. The national telecast is scheduled weeks later.
Graham told the hometown audience that he had no intention of retiring from preaching despite some health problems. He got daily hospital blood tests during the week of the services. He is continuing to experience blood pressure problems while recovering from phlebitis.
The crusade was held as newspapers across the nation were picking up a long series of articles on Graham that appeared originally a month earlier in the Charlotte Observer and other papers in the Knight chain. The four-part series, beginning every day on page one of the Observer, is considered the most thorough investigative reporting ever done by the daily press on the evangelist and his organization. A team of reporters, led by religion writer Mary Bishop, worked for over a year on the series. They pored over reports in Graham’s Minneapolis headquarters, over records in several North Carolina courthouses, and over volumes of criticism. They interviewed the evangelist, members of his family and team, and neighbors. In one article on the financial aspects of the minstry, the Observer concluded, “Unlike some nationally known religious leaders, Graham’s group has shunned displays of wealth. For instance, the fanciest of the BGEA’s eighteen cars is a 1976 Mercury station wagon.… And unlike many other well-known evangelists, Graham’s organization and Graham himself have avoided even the hint of scandal.”
The series revealed that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is classified as a church by the Internal Revenue Service and therefore is not required to make public reports of its income and expenditures. Because the BGEA has not done so, it does not appear on the list of “charitable organizations” that have met the standards of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. A spokesman for the association did tell the Knight reporters that letters to Graham brought in $23 million in 1975, 90 per cent of that year’s $26 million budget.
Figures provided to the Observer showed $8.8 million was spent for radio, television, and films, $2.6 million for Decision magazine, $3.7 million for various overseas ministries (including relief), $7.9 million for evangelism ministries including literature and work through other organizations, $1.6 million for fund raising, and $1.3 million for other administrative expense.
Graham emphasized in the crusade and in his interview with the Observer that he accepts no gifts or honoraria for preaching. He gets a salary of $39,500 annually from the association. Income from some of his books have been designated for various Christian causes. All of his income goes to a bank trust officer who pays his bills for him. Much of his wealth grew from a family inheritance. The Observer figured his land holdings are worth about $640,000.
“Graham’s name has stayed clean” while those of other religious leaders have been tarnished, the Observer noted. The precautions he has taken to avoid any appearance of evil were detailed. Miss Bishop wrote, “Graham is never alone, even in a car, with a secretary or any woman other than his wife or a female relative because ‘the Bible says to avoid the appearance of evil’.… He will not see a woman journalist alone at his home atop a mountain at Montreat, and when he sees one at his office down the mountain, he leaves his door open, with secretaries clacking away at typewriters nearby.”
The series ends with testimonies of well-known people who met Christ in Graham crusades.
The Word At Word
Evangelist Billy Graham is changing publishers, and he expects his first book by Word Incorporated to have the largest initial press run of any non-fiction volume ever published.
How To Be Born Again will be Word’s first title by Graham. It is scheduled to appear in June. A Word official declined to confirm that the run will be unprecedented, stating that the quantity will not be decided until all orders are received. It is expected to run more than 500,000, however.
Graham’s last book, Angels, was a runaway best-seller for Doubleday, his publisher for several years. Doubleday had no comment on the evangelist’s switch to Word. Based in Waco, Texas, Word is headed by Jarrell F. McCracken and is a subsidiary of American Broadcasting Companies. Graham reportedly turned down other contract offers from ABC.
A second book with Word, on the subject of the Holy Spirit, is planned by the evangelist in 1978.
Trouble in Africa
Four days after Congo president Marien Ngouabi was assassinated (March 18), Roman Catholic archbishop Emile Biayenda of Brazzaville was kidnapped and murdered. Government spokesmen at first said the deaths were related, but at month’s end there was still confusion about the details.
Biayenda, 50, one of eight black African cardinals, had visited with Ngouabi less than an hour before four gunmen burst into the president’s house and killed him in a shootout. Early radio reports said three members of Ngouabi’s family or tribe had killed the prelate (Biayenda belonged to a rival tribe), but according to later accounts the persons behind the president’s death were responsible for the cardinal’s murder also.
Former president Alphonse Massamba-Debat was convicted of plotting Ngouabi’s death and was executed, according to the military committee ruling the west African nation. Others, including the actual assassins, were being sought. Massamba-Debat, chief assassin Barthelemey Kikadidi, and Biayenda were all members of the Lari tribe.
Spokesmen said relations between the archbishop and Ngouabi had been good and that Biayenda had expressed public approval of the president’s Marxist and pro-Soviet policies. The sources credited Ngouabi, a Catholic, with improving church-state relations during the nine years he held power. “Every Congolese remembers the harassment to which the Congolese church was subjected throughout the rule of [Massamba-Debat], this wretched figure,” commented Radio Brazzaville. Under Massamba-Debat, mainland China and Cuba had a strong presence in the country.
Of the Congo’s 1.3 million people, about 40 per cent are nominally Christian, most of them Catholics.
In other stories from Africa there were these highlights.
• Ugandan president Idi Amin accused the American CIA of using Christian denominations as a cover for subversion, and he threatened to bar all foreign aid to churches in his country. (Christian leaders in Africa accuse Amin of murdering large numbers of Christians, including Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum in February. Bishop Silvanus GiWani, 61, was elected to succeed Luwum.)
• Catholic bishop Donal Lamont was stripped of his citizenship and deported from Rhodesia (he had been given a jail sentence for failing to report the presence of terrorists in his diocese).
• Security police raided the offices of several Catholic and student organizations in three of South Africa’s main cities, including Johannesburg, seizing a number of pamphlets commemorating blacks killed in anti-government riots.
Ethiopian Casualties
Just outside Addis Ababa, nine of the eleven transmitters of Radio Voice of the Gospel stand silent. The Marxist-leaning military government of Ethiopia has taken over the powerful station, and foreign staff members have left. Programming has been reduced to only four hours a day, and many former listeners in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East can no longer tune in their favorite station.
When Ethiopia’s current rulers nationalized RVOG and renamed it “Radio Voice of the Revolution in Ethiopia” (see April 1 issue, page 58), they proved again what missionary radio administrators have known all along: selecting a site for a station is a risky business. In this case it was the Lutheran World Federation that thought it had a very stable government as host when former Emperor Haile Selassie granted permission to build nearly two decades ago. The station went on the air with his blessing February 26, 1963. Original construction cost about $1.7 million, but facilities have been expanded to the point that current replacement cost is estimated at $12 million. Staff was increased from 65 at the station’s inauguration to about 225 at nationalization, and large loyal audiences had been identified among Arabs, among Chinese (on the mainland as well as overseas), among Indians, as well as in many African nations. With the toppling of the emperor in 1974, the situation became anything but stable, and Ethiopia is currently experiencing widespread civil strife.
RVOG broadcasts were allowed to continue by the new military government, however. Occasionally troops were sent to surround the station compound and the transmitters, but personnel there thought they were being protected rather than threatened. Censorship was imposed on news about Ethiopia. Otherwise, there were few restrictions on programming. At the request of Ethiopian Lutherans, programs were being added in four additional languages to serve listeners in that country. The long-standing agreement under which the government regulated station operations had just been reaffirmed.
Matters took a turn for the worse in February, however, when the cabinet member responsible for liaison with RVOG was killed in a high-level shootout that put the present strongman in office. The “revolutionary” radio station announced as soon as it came on the air that the former government’s agreement with the Lutheran World Federation was “abrogated as of today.” The first broadcast, monitored by the British Broadcasting Corporation, also attacked RVOG for having broadcast “bourgeois ideology” and charged that it had been “strongly opposed by religious denominations” (without identifying the opponents).
In response to the attack, LWF general secretary Carl Mau said the station was used by many Christian denominations, including the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He added, “It has been a voice for justice, peace, and human rights. Understanding the Gospel as serving the whole human being, this voice has been involved in the issues and concerns of daily life. It has sought to address the needs of health, food, sanitation, literacy, education, information, development, and nation-building.…”
The turning over of the facilities is proceeding smoothly, Mau reported on his return to Geneva after four days in Addis Ababa. He held out the possibility that LWF will claim compensation.
The international broadcasting facility is not the only casualty of the tense situation in the country. A variety of missions and churches have been hampered by new regulations and the strife. A prominent United Presbyterian missionary officially retired but continuing to work in Ethiopia, Donald McClure, Sr., was killed by bandits in the eastern part of the country last month. McClure, 70, and his son, Presbyterian missionary Don McClure, Jr., were attempting to close a station at Godi. The elder McClure had spent forty-six years in Ethiopia and Sudan.
News reports indicate that lawlessness throughout the nation make travel unsafe, and American citizens have been warned not to go to the country.
The Gospel According to …
Is speaking at a major corporation’s stockholder meeting the equivalent of preaching the Gospel? Social activists in mainline denominations have long held that this kind of attempt at changing the structures of society is, indeed, proclamation of the Good News to the “captives of capitalism.”
The fact that those who go to stockholder meetings as church representatives seldom get their resolutions approved has not discouraged them. Sometimes they get results simply by threatening to introduce resolutions or by other approaches to corporation managements. Last month the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, an agency related to the National Council of Churches, announced another victory. Two U.S. producers of powdered-milk formulas for babies agreed to change their Third World marketing practices under pressure from the center. Church agencies in the center then announced that they were withdrawing stockholder resolutions they had filed with Abbott Laboratories (the maker of Similac) and Borden (manufacturer of a formula sold abroad as “Klim”).
The center had charged that their sales techniques resulted in an increased incidence of malnutrition and death among infants when mothers switched from breast feeding to bottle formulas. Opponents of the widespread distribution of the preparations in developing nations also suggested that unsanitary conditions in homes made mother’s milk safer for the babies than a mixture including the powdered product.
According to the NCC’s announcement, the two companies entered into extensive agreements about their overseas promotion, and Borden even promised to destroy some advertising materials already in the field. While applauding the concessions, a worker in the project complained that the companies were still planning to spend too much on promotion.
The baby-feeding issue is only one of many scraps in which the NCC agency has involved itself lately. One it lost was at the annual meeting of shareholders of the textile giant, J. P. Stevens and Company. Resolutions were filed there to force disclosure of labor policies in a firm that has long fought unionization.
Best known of the fights is the long battle by church proxies to get corporations to withdraw their business from southern Africa or to change operating policies in that region. It is in this arena that the NCC representatives have encountered clergyman-journalist Lester Kinsolving (see March 18 issue, page 57), who has gone to stockholder meetings to counter the NCC’s arguments. Tim Smith, the director of the Interfaith Center, was the writer of the original letter that led to Kinsolving’s difficulties with accreditation as a congressional correspondent.
At a hearing before the standing committee of correspondents last month, Kinsolving denied that he was an agent or employee of the South African government, as Smith had suggested in his original letter to the Justice Department. He acknowledged that he was paid to go to the meetings by a law firm handling South African interests, but he maintained that he went to the meetings uninstructed.
Kinsolving likened his appearances at the corporation’s annual meetings to his occasional pulpit engagements. He said that he was a believer in freedom of the pulpit and that he no more took instruction on what to say at stockholder meetings than he did when he accepted preaching engagements. He also insisted that the fees of about $200 per meeting were, in his opinion, like any other honoraria for speaking. His main purpose at the meetings was to “expose the hypocrisy” of the NCC in its African policies, Kinsolving told the journalists on the committee.
The Episcopal priest-writer said before the three-hour hearing that he was appearing under protest since the committee did not allow him to “confront his accusers.” Committee members maintained that the proceeding was not judicial and was only a search for information to determine whether he was entitled to continued accreditation.
Kinsolving entered into the hearing record a letter he’d received that day from the Justice Department declaring that it was not necessary for him to register as an agent of a foreign government. He also brought into the discussion the name of ex-NCC staff member and ex-congressman Andrew Young, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. One questioner had asked if Kinsolving thought it proper to go to a meeting “as a stockholder” and then to dispose of the stock immediately after speaking. He said he saw nothing wrong with the practice since the NCC did the same thing and also since Young had once acquired Gulf Oil stock so that he could speak on African policy at a Gulf meeting. He pointedly noted that Young participated as a clergyman, declaring his convictions on what he considered to be a moral issue.
After a recess to study the evidence and the hearing transcript, the committee reconvened and voted 3 to 2 to take away Kinsolving’s gallery pass. The columnist then filed an appeal with the Senate Rules Committee and the Speaker of the House. He now expects them to give him a hearing, but until they do he is without credentials on Capitol Hill.
High Finance
A much publicized federal charge against Tulsa evangelist James Roy Whitby, Sr., a former Youth for Christ executive and Southern Baptist pastor, has been dismissed at the request of federal authorities, who are still investigating the case. Whitby, 48, was arrested by FBI agents several months ago on a complaint alleging that he defrauded a Swiss bank through a $5 million bond issue in the name of Gospel Outreach, a Whitby organization, and that he had received a partial payment of $100,000 on the transaction. He was freed under a $10,000 bond pending a California court date.
Oklahoma officials say Whitby did not register the bonds there or with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the FBI complaint, Whitby arranged for proceeds from the bonds to be deposited in a trust account for Gospel Outreach, and the trust indenture had been backed with California real estate owned by the Arkansas Valley Development Corporation. The head of that company, however, said she never gave Whitby permission to use the property to issue bonds.
Although Whitby signed a contract to buy the California property in 1975, he failed to raise enough money, and the land was sold to other buyers, according to an account published by Religious News Service. The Swiss bank failed that year, and Swiss authorities discovered that several million dollars of allegedly worthless Gospel Outreach bonds were among the bank’s supposed assets. The federal complaint alleged that Whitby admitted the bonds were worthless, but he denied that fraud was involved, according to press accounts.
In 1974, it is alleged, Whitby was told by Oklahoma authorities that his $5 million worth of bonds could not be sold in that state unless they were registered there. He then contacted an old friend, Tillman Jackson, who was in prison in California on conspiracy charges in connection with fraudulent transactions of the now defunct Baptist Foundation of America. Jackson had been president of the independent enterprise, which had defrauded victims of about $4 million by selling worthless paper.
Whitby had visited Jackson in prison several times, and he told the California parole board he believed Jackson had been rehabilitated. As a result, the rest of Jackson’s sentence was suspended.
Jackson reportedly directed Whitby to two Chicago men allegedly associated with the late Mafia figure Sam Giacana. They told Whitby (he later said he thought they were brokers) that they could arrange a loan through a Swiss bank for a fee. He traveled to Switzerland several times and once to Italy to negotiate the loan. During that period he became president of a firm called Euro-Brazil, which reportedly sold commodities from Brazil to European countries.
Whitby, it is charged, finally arranged a loan with Swiss financier Serge Rochat, under which the evangelist was to get 40 per cent of the face value of the bonds with an option to get another loan for 40 per cent more. The bonds were placed in a trust account at the bank in Rochat’s name. Later the bank failed, in part because Rochat defaulted on a large loan.
Another enterprise Whitby has been involved in is a mission operation known as Ethiopian Call, organized by several Oklahoma physicians. The group proposed to raise money by striking a silver medallion with the likeness of the late Emperor Haile Selassie. Whitby supposedly obtained permission from the emperor, and 250 of the medallions were struck in Switzerland, to be sold for $50 each, according to Religious News Service. Securities investigators were said to be searching for those medallions recently, and several members of Ethiopian Call have filed suit against Whitby.
Ways And Means
The 4,500-member Mennonite Conference of Ontario, which condemns lotteries on moral and religious grounds, recently accepted a $250,000 grant from Wintario, a Canadian lottery. Conference delegates approved acceptance after they were told that rejecting it could delay the building of a $3.4 million senior citizens’ community center at a Mennonite retirement complex. They agreed to take the money on condition that the conference look into ways of repaying it.
Chairman Clayton Cressman of the retirement community’s board argued that he saw no difference between accepting Wintario money and other government funds (whose sources might be tobacco and liquor taxes). And, rationalized one delegate, “If we don’t accept the money, someone else will get it and not spend it responsibly. We as Christians have a responsibility to see that the money is spent properly.”
Religion in Transit
The Federal Communications Commission is not empowered to ban obscene language from radio and television, even in those hours when children would be listening or watching, according to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. The ruling reversed a 1976 FCC decision against radio station WBAI in New York, which broadcast a record by comedian George Carlin containing some obscene words. The court said such decisions amount to illegal censorship.
California Baptist College in Riverside, California, is engulfed in a controversy over a new policy that bars the hiring of divorced persons or their spouses as teachers or administrators. The board said the action was taken because of the “alarming” rise of broken homes among the faculty and the belief that the situation is a bad example for students. Critics argue that the ruling is too stringent and unjustly excludes academically qualified persons who are “innocent bystanders” of a divorce. Divorced persons now serving the school (there are four) could remain under the new rule, but there are to be no other exceptions. Because of the furor, the board will reconsider in May but no basic change of policy is expected, say sources.
Deaths: W. R. White, 84, Southern Baptist clergyman and educator, former president of Baylor University; Jewish social philosopher Will Herberg, 75, author of religious books (among them: Protestant-Catholic-Jew), whose own odyssey included conversion from Communism to political conservatism.
World Scene
Canadian evangelist Barry Moore, his associate Alf Rees, and executive director Jim Wilson of Youth for Christ International recently teamed up for a nine-city evangelistic effort in the Philippines. More than 5,500 decisions for Christ were recorded.
India’s new prime minister, 81-year-old Morarji Ranchhodji Desai, is a devout Hindu and an anti-Communist dedicated to the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, the late Hindu religious and political leader and social reformer.
Some 1,000 Pentecostals in the Soviet Union have appealed to President Carter as their “brother in Christ” to help them emigrate from the Soviet Union. Leader Nikolai Gorotai said the people had applied for exit visas because of repression and harassment.
Islamic law permits execution by the sword when there is no high building or cliff from which to drop certain sexual offenders to their death. Yemen once borrowed an Egyptian helicopter for the purpose. But last month a small village near Jidda, Saudi Arabia, resorted to the sword and beheaded two men who had sexually assaulted a young boy.
