Memorial Day, 1945. Some 70,000 people had gathered in Chicago’s Soldier Field to witness an open-air holiday pageant. Like other ceremonies on that day, this one remembered fallen servicemen and rededicated a nation still at war to its global mission.
It also celebrated something else: the first anniversary of the Chicago-area chapter of Youth for Christ (YFC), and the rapidly growing Youth for Christ movement from which the high-school ministry took its name.
The Soldier Field rally was a suitably spectacular event. Its musical program featured a 300-piece band, a choir of 5,000, and several well-known gospel singers, including George Beverly Shea. On the field, the pageantry included high school cadets, 400 marching nurses, and, signaling the call to evangelize the world, missionary volunteers in national costumes. Representing the summons to revival was a young evangelist named Billy Graham.
On the platform, war heroes shared their faith, as did intercollegiate boxing titlist Bob Finley. Trackman Gil Dodds, the record holder for the indoor mile, ran an exhibition lap before giving his testimony. And the evening’s preacher was Percy Crawford, director of the nationally broadcast “Young People’s Church of the Air.” At his gospel invitation, hundreds signed decision cards. As the meeting drew to a close, a great spotlight circled the darkened stadium, while a huge neon sign blazed “Jesus Saves,” and the choir sang “We Shall Shine as Stars in the Morning.”
Indeed they did, for this extravaganza attracted major news coverage. The Chicago papers, the wire services, and Newsweek carried stories; and a few weeks later, William Randolph Hearst editorially blessed the youth movement and ordered his 22 newspapers to feature the rallies. Not since the Scopes trial had evangelical Christianity received such coverage, and this time, most of it was friendly.
In the three years following the Memorial Day rally, a great flurry of new initiatives came spinning out of young people’s ministries. Six young evangelists, led by Billy Graham, helped organize and preached at Youth for Christ rallies throughout the United States and Canada in 1945–46. By mid-1946, the movement grew to some 900 rallies, with perhaps a million young people involved.
The youth rally leaders possessed an intense missionary impulse, prompted in part by the new global awareness and triumphalism Americans had assumed during the Second World War. Youth for Christ “invasion teams” made a flurry of preaching tours, establishing “beachheads,” as they put it, in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. By 1948, they had reached 46 countries, and that year held the first postwar evangelical missions congress, in Beatenberg, Switzerland.
Primed, as evangelist Merv Rosell put it, to make “new conquests for Christ,” bobby-soxers and veterans volunteered by the thousands for the mission fields.
A Global Impact
According to missiologist Ralph Winter, the Youth for Christ movement helped produce the greatest generation of missionary recruits in the history of the church. In the Philippine Islands and later Japan, Youth for Christ-styled rallies sponsored by servicemen eventually developed into a full-fledged missionary organization, the Far Eastern Gospel Crusade (now Send, Inc.), with Bible schools, a seminary, over 150 missionaries, and radio programs. Dick Hillis, a former missionary to China, helped start the Los Angeles YFC rally, but the Orient beckoned him after the war. While leading a Youth for Christ evangelistic team in Formosa in 1950, he was challenged to begin a training program in Bible and evangelism for converts. Organized as Overseas Crusades, this mission now sponsors a variety of programs in support of Asian churches.
Youth for Christ’s European “invasions” established enduring works as well. Robert Evans, the first executive director of Youth for Christ International, led an evangelistic team to Europe soon after the war. While preaching and doing advance preparation for other evangelists, he became concerned for the educational needs of young European believers. Beginning with the European Bible Institute near Paris in 1949, Evans developed the Greater Europe Mission, which now supports 316 missionaries and operates nine Bible schools and two graduate seminaries, radio broadcasts, and publishing ventures.
Paul Freed, director of the Greensboro, North Carolina, Youth for Christ rally, established Trans World Radio in 1954 as a result of his overseas evangelistic tours. This giant of evangelical broadcasting now has stations around the globe: in Monaco, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands Antilles, Guam, and South Africa.
This new “world vision” for missions, however, had no more able promoter than Bob Pierce. Once the rally director for Seattle, Pierce led Youth for Christ preaching teams through India and China in the late 1940s. Astonished by the thousands of converts made by these efforts, Pierce felt compelled to return to the Far East in 1950. The ravages of war in Korea prompted him to organize scores of “World Vision” rallies, sponsored by Youth for Christ. From these and Pierce’s relief work in Korea came World Vision, Incorporated, an evangelical relief and development ministry. Today, with a total budget of over $150 million, World Vision is one of the largest and best-known mission agencies.
A Revolutionary Method
As they reflected recently on the influence of the Youth for Christ movement, both Billy Graham and Ted Engstrom, a former president of YFCI who now heads World Vision, stressed the movement’s “revolutionary method.” Indeed, Youth for Christ’s motto has been “Geared to the Times, but Anchored to the Rock.” Through its powerful example and its alumni’s leadership, the youth rally movement’s innovative communications and marketing methods—and its remarkable sensitivity to popular tastes and concerns—have permeated contemporary evangelicalism.
Youth for Christ’s “revolutionary method” was most explicitly spelled out in Reaching Youth for Christ, written in 1944 by Chicagoland rally leaders Torrey Johnson and Bob Cook, to help others set up meetings in their cities. This little book insisted that evangelism be “geared to the times.” Young people wanted to be “part of something big, live, and vital,” and their standard of comparison was the news and entertainment world. Johnson and Cook laid out four essential ingredients for a successful rally: radio coverage, a streamlined and entertaining program, slick promotion, and pungent preaching laced with current events.
This new approach had an electrifying effect. Thousands of younger evangelicals who had grown up with the radio (if not the movies) picked up the new format, and those with media tallents led the way.
The rallies themselves resembled radio variety shows and Kate Smith’s patriotic revues. They featured gospel music attuned to the “swing” and “sweet” styles then popular. Testimonies from war heroes, sports stars, and other “personalities” punctuated the programs. Rally publicists created mountains of advertisements, press releases, cards, posters, and tracts. Friendly contacts with a network of “born-again” journalists brought favorable coverage in newspapers, national magazines, and on the wire services. And the young preachers shaped their style after radio stars.
The adoption of the tools, tastes, and values of the marketplace by these pioneers prompted questions. These questions persist even today. Can the gospel be better packaged through market analysis and mass mailing? Do management efficiency and slick promotion aid spiritual growth? Are truth and leadership defined by popular appeal? And are the mass media adequate channels of grace to the lost?
Such questions epitomize the ongoing tensions faced by parachurch ministries in the multimedia eighties. With all the latest hardware (and software) for conveying their message, evangelicals are more tempted than ever to adopt secular attitudes in formulating their ministry’s “plan of attack.”
Thus there is the ongoing need for spiritual discipline. The parachurch pioneers spent much time on their knees—seeking God’s will and waiting upon him to show them their next step and give them new vision.” “What people often forget about us,” said Torrey Johnson, “was that we lived on prayer. We expected God to perform miracles.”
A Re-Engagement With America
But there was another side to Youth for Christ’s widespread appeal. During the war, and in the tension-filled years following, Americans seemed more hungry for religion than they had been for decades. In this changed climate, evangelicals found that their calls for religious and moral revival fell on sympathetic ears.
A major current of public worry in the war years was for morality, especially among the youth. When the country’s hopes and fears were already focused on its young adults off at war, it was plagued by reports of increased teenage crime and vice at home. Youth rallies took their place alongside other community efforts to channel young people’s restlessness and desire to do something important. Young people “want something that challenges the heroic,” Torrey Johnson insisted. “They want something that demands sacrifice, … that is worth living for and dying for.” Youth for Christ met these needs, he believed.
The movement’s publicity featured many accounts of teen rebels turned around by the gospel. This aspect of the movement prompted the praise of many civic leaders. Police chiefs, governors, newspaper editors, and reportedly, President Truman—all applauded the rallies’ wholesome contributions to community life. Such positive response encouraged evangelicals to shed some of their cultural isolation and to see what they could do to serve the American public. Their goal, as Torrey Johnson told a Time reporter, was to seek “the spiritual revitalization of America,” and “the complete evangelization of the world in our generation.”
These objectives were by then traditional ones for American evangelicals. But they took on a new significance during the war and in the postwar confrontations with the Soviet Union. Global intervention and victory reawakened Americans’ ideas of a divinely directed national destiny and faith in their own cultural and technological prowess. The United States, many now believed, was the free world’s leader in the struggle against totalitarianism. If America was to fulfill this role, her people must be rededicated to freedom and reformed in morals.
During the early stages of the Cold War, American political leaders echoed these warnings. The day after he heard Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, President Truman told a group of churchmen that without “a moral and spiritual awakening,” America would be lost. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower echoed him, suggesting that there was no hope of avoiding disaster “except through moral regeneration.” Likewise Gen. Douglas MacArthur, invoking the theme of Americans’ divinely ordained duty, invited Youth for Christ and other missionaries to Japan to “provide the surest foundation for the firm establishment of democracy.”
Such invitations made evangelicals feel more welcome to contribute to the mainstream of American public affairs than ever in their memory. A new generation of evangelical leaders, many inspired by the Youth for Christ movement, looked forward to a fresh start for conservative Christianity. University-trained scholars began to rechart the movement’s intellectual life. Preachers, publicists, and business managers, filled with hope for revival and world evangelization, built a massive web of publications, broadcast enterprises, and specialized ministries. And this parachurch network soon became the major source of identity and action for the “new evangelicalism” of our time.
Unfortunately, evangelicals’ vision for righteousness and spiritual renewal often became colored by the values of the “American Way of Life.” The American public’s welcome depended quite heavily on evangelicals’ tuning their message to what the audience wanted to hear. Thus the mandate for preaching the gospel and making disciples throughout the world became tinged with calls for saving Europe and the emerging nations for the “free world.” And the gospel’s promise of peace with God, self, and others often carried overtones of self-help, personal comfort, and national security.
As evangelicalism prospered, then, some began to notice that it had paid a price for success. Billy Graham revealed the painful chastening he and many of his generation experienced when at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 he warned that: “To tie the gospel to any political system, secular program, or society is dangerous, and will only serve to divert the gospel. The gospel transcends the goals and methods of any political system or any society.” Graham now insists that “our gospel is not Americanism; our gospel is not America.” As a global ambassador of the gospel, Graham says that he asks himself: “How is this going to sound in India?… to my friends in Hungary or Poland?”
A Spiritual Resolve
For all their periodically naïve exuberance and uncritical adoption of new techniques, the early Youth for Christ campaigners were committed to remaining “Anchored to the Rock”: a spiritual resolve forged in the countless prayer meetings often lasting well into the night. Reflecting upon this legacy and its impact, Torrey Johnson said recently that “we were constantly humbled and amazed and surprised by what he [God] was doing.”
Indeed, Johnson and his colleagues seemed to understand a truth that is too often hidden these days, but that was a mainstay in the transformation of the late forties and early fifties: the Spirit blows where he wills.
