Just three decades ago, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the verge of nuclear confrontation over the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Billy Graham, in Argentina at the time, preached on the topic “The End of the World.”
Today, the unimaginable has happened. Russians and Americans have become friends. And Graham has just been to the center of what was the communist empire with a message of hope and love. On this crusade, he preached about the cross of Christ, and not the end times, because, according to one observer, “The world is just beginning for the Russian people. Here you don’t have to scare people into heaven.”
For the veteran evangelist, it was truly a “Miracle in Moscow” as he conducted a historic crusade (which ended on Sunday, October 25) in Moscow’s huge, indoor Olympic Stadium during his two-week visit to the Russian capital.
Crowds averaging over 45,000 packed into the stadium, breaking the previous attendance record of 38,000 for the 1988 Goodwill Games. Thousands more were locked out of each meeting.
At the final meeting on Sunday, according to stadium officials, 50,000 people jammed the stadium, standing shoulder to shoulder around the arena floor and then up the aisles to the ceiling. The police estimated an additional 20,000 were unable to gain admittance and watched on a large screen outside, making this the largest crowd to hear the gospel at one time in the former Soviet Union. This confirmed an observation of one Moscow academic, who said, “People are tired of history and want to personally experience the presence of God in their lives.”
A Spiritual Hunger
Reflecting on his visit, Graham said, “I’ve never seen such a hunger in people for spiritual things. Over here there’s been a spiritual starvation for many years. I seriously doubt that there is a place in the world so open to the gospel.”
Said one church leader, “We are living in a new era. For the last 70 years we have lived under a totalitarian regime where we were given recipes for complete and absolute happiness. Now instead of quoting Marx and Lenin, we are able to quote the Bible. Instead of [Communist] party meetings, we are able to hold religious services.”
Ironically, Graham conducted the crusade at one of the sites of the 1980 Summer Olympics, which the United States boycotted in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
At the stadium each night, Graham preached a straightforward gospel message of hope from the Bible, saying on one occasion, “Here, in your country, you have the opportunity to start afresh with Christ in your heart. That is the answer to any problem we face.”
On the first night, 42,000 people crowded the stadium, spilling down from the seats and standing reverently in a large semicircle formed by Russian members of the Moscow Salvation Army. Graham preached on the topic “Why?” which had been the theme of a huge advertising campaign in the Russian capital.
During the services, music director Cliff Barrows led one of the largest choirs ever assembled for a Graham crusade, numbering over 7,000 from many parts of the former Soviet Union. Each night there were special Russian musical guests and testimonies.
On one night, a large contingent of Russian military, including army, navy, and air force, attended the meeting wearing their uniforms, and many responded to Graham’s invitation. The former Red Army Choir—now the Russian Army Choir—accompanied by their band, sang a selection of religious songs.
Meeting The Military
Before that service, Graham was visited by Gen. Nikolai Stolyarov, a top leader of the Russian Army and the man who brought Mikhail Gorbachev back from Crimea after the abortive coup last year.
Four soldiers who attended were asked why they had come. “A lot of our comrades talk about God, and we wanted to hear what Billy Graham had to say about him,” one of them replied.
When Graham invited people to make a commitment to Christ, an average of over 27 percent of the densely packed crowd made their way to the front of the platform. Unlike most Billy Graham crusades, no music was used during the invitation. Still, the evangelist had to appeal to the inquirers surging forward to walk and not run. The only sound was the muffled beat of thousands of feet making their way to the front. At each service, Graham later noted, he made a special effort to point out that it was hard to be a Christian, and not a decision to be made lightly.
Graham revealed that people had told him that Moscow was not the place to hold a crusade because it is “cynical and hard; but we prayed about it and felt this is the time to go to Moscow, which has been regarded as a center of atheism, and to declare that Jesus Christ saves.
“Here in Moscow, I find people are searching for something, and so they are grabbing at anything,” he said. “There is an emptiness in their hearts and a confusion in their minds due to the recent changes, and they don’t know where to turn. There is a struggle going on as to what they should put their faith in.”
The Orthodox Connection
The crusade has been an answer to Graham’s long-standing prayer. During his first visit to Moscow in 1959 as a tourist with his late, long-time associate Grady Wilson, the evangelist prayed aloud that one day God would enable him to hold stadium meetings in that city.
In 1982, he was invited by Patriarch Pimen, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to address an international peace conference of world religious leaders. At that time, Graham received an invitation from Pimen to return to preach in this vast land. Though he has had several preaching tours in churches here since then, due to restrictions on religion he was not able to accept that invitation to hold public meetings until this year.
The stadium meetings were the culmination of a year-long “spiritual joint-venture” between Christians from all over the former Soviet Union and those in the West. It was unprecedented in scale, geography, church involvement, depth of preparation, and scope of denominational support.
Although Moscow has only a handful of churches to serve its population of almost ten million, they united behind this evangelistic outreach. A larger number scattered throughout the former USSR, representing all denominations, also joined the invitation to Graham to hold these meetings as part of a year-long outreach called Vozrozhdeniye [Renewal] ’92. Individuals and churches have been involved from Riga in the West to Magadan, 11 time zones away in the East, and from Archangel, near the Arctic Circle in the North, to Tblisi, Georgia, in the South.
Peter Deyneka, Jr., former head of the Slavic Gospel Association and now president of Russian Ministries, Inc., said of the year-long mission, “This mission has done more than anything other than the pressures of communism to unite the church.”
There also was tremendous press interest in the evangelist’s visit, particularly in the Russian media. Izvestia, which is the most influential paper in the former Soviet Union, ran an in-depth interview with Graham, and he appeared on several national television programs. He also gave lengthy interviews to ABC, NBC, and CNN news organizations.
Graham also met with the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, who told the evangelist, “We welcome you. Until last year, religious leaders were not guests in this building, but the situation has changed, and the opinion of our newspaper has changed.”
Some 300 young people ages 16 to 25, from across the former USSR, attended an intensive conference to learn the principles of evangelism and put them into practice through participation in the mission. Each afternoon they took to the streets of Moscow to invite people to the meetings, where many also worked as counselors.
While in Moscow, Graham met with church leaders from all over the former Soviet Union. One Methodist church leader from Estonia told Graham, “Our first acquaintance with you was through your book Peace with God, which was translated into Estonian, laboriously typed on pages that became a textbook for many Estonian pastors and evangelists. We believe that the problems in Estonia will be solved when Estonian Christians meet at the foot of the cross.”
Graham also met privately for more than an hour in “frank and open, yet Christian” discussions on the spiritual roots and needs of Russia at the Danilov Monastery with Patriarch Alexei II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, whom he has known for a number of years.
“The Russian Orthodox Church is unhappy about people proselytizing, but they don’t mind preaching,” said Graham. “The thing lacking in some Orthodox churches and teaching is a personal, daily relationship with Christ. This is what we’d like to do—not bring people out of the Orthodox church but bring revival to it.”
By Dan Wooding in Moscow.
Politics
Does 1992 Signal The Rising Or Falling Of Evangelical Activists?
They may be powerful now, but how influential will Christian political activists be in the future? A number of scholars, authors, and political activists tackled that question last month at a conference on Christian political activism sponsored by the Calvin [College] Center for Christian Scholarship in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Journalist James Castelli, who has followed the Religious Right closely since the late seventies, said he expects over the coming years “to see a decrease in influence by religious political activists.” Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, disagreed. “Christian activism and Christian political influence have increased in the nineties,” he said, “and they will continue to increase dramatically.”
Debate over whether and how evangelicals will remain a vital force on the political scene became heated at times during the three-day conference.
Castelli, coauthor with George Gallup, Jr., of The People’s Religion, said Christian social activism will have less of an impact in coming years because of “a general decline of confidence in organized religion.” He also said that “churches do not have a monopoly on identifying moral issues,” since, rather than offering unique perspectives on such issues as war, homelessness, AIDS, poverty, and several others, they too often offer “divisive judgments based on claims to purely religious authority.”
Reed disagreed. The Religious Right’s influence will increase, he said, because it has begun to focus almost exclusively on issues rather than candidates and is beginning to emphasize permanent, rather than cyclical, organization. He also listed several reasons why he believes the Right’s Republican party involvement is crucial to its continued influence, notably, “It is a laboratory of hardball politics,” and it “credentials people to a broader audience.”
The Right is also developing a broader issues agenda, he said, “no longer focused exclusively on abortion, pornography, prayer in school, [but also] issues like the balanced-budget amendment.”
Out Of Touch?
Several participants indicated that future evangelical political vitality will depend largely on activists adequately reflecting the views and beliefs of a wide number of constituents. According to a study conducted at the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, some evangelical groups may be better positioned to do that than others.
The results of the study, presented by Wheaton College professor Lyman Kellstedt, show where the members of eight different activist groups stand on a number of social, political, and theological questions. The groups are: Bread for the World, Evangelicals for Social Action, JustLife, National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Prison Fellowship (PF), Focus on the Family (FF), Americans for the Republic (the now-inactive political action committee for Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign and forerunner to the Christian Coalition), and Concerned Women for America.
Steven Monsma of Pepperdine University noted that several of those groups’ members fall either to the far Right or far Left on many issues. “If evangelicals are to have an impact in the future,” he said, “the three most moderate organizations, NAE, PF, and FF, will have to take the lead.” Those groups, he asserted, are more in tune with mainstream evangelicals and are better positioned to influence both political parties.
But some experts questioned whether that could be said of any of the groups.
Ralph Reed acknowledged that in some ways the Christian Right is out of step with mainstream evangelicals. The leadership of the Christian Right “is more interested in being politically involved and more conservative than a lot of the people in the pews,” he said. That is why they tend to be more politically aggressive than, say, pastors or typical laypersons. “But I don’t think it’s so much a question of issues as it is a question of style and level and form of involvement,” he added.
Ruth Tucker of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School said that many of today’s prominent women activists have also drifted from their historical political roots. In a discussion of the history of Christian women’s activism, she cited examples of how, in the past, activism typically involved both evangelical outreach and social reform. By way of contrast, “Today women whose faith is associated with their politics are typically on the far right of the political spectrum,” she said. “They focus on such issues as prayer in school and the nuclear family with little apparent concern for broader social problems.”
The problem with that, she argued, is that it presents “Christianity as a conservative consortium in collusion with an elite establishment” and Christian activism as “very narrow and unaffected with the real needs of society.”
A Look Ahead
Is there hope for the future of evangelical activism? Yes, many participants said, but some groups may first need to make some changes.
Castelli said activists should learn how and when to use religious and moral language appropriately; while it is appropriate for anyone to make public-policy arguments on the basis of broad moral principles, he said, “no one has to believe Religious Right groups when they say a Bible verse is the reason you’re supposed to take a specific political position.” He also said groups should broaden participation, organize ongoing grassroots groups, and build coalitions.
James Skillen, executive director of the Washington D.C.—based Association for Public Justice, said citizens should push for reform of the electoral system that would ultimately result in proportional representation.
Bruce Buursma, Calvin College’s director of media relations, advocated yet a different approach. He likened the relationship between the Religious Right and the Reagan and Bush administrations to “a long and passionate courtship” in which one party “was more a flirt than a full participant.” He also said that Christian activists’ concern “is first of all with the integrity and effectiveness of the witness of Christianity to the political order.” And being faithful to the letter and spirit of the gospel, he said, is “a more important crusade than momentary political success.”
By Thomas S. Giles in Grand Rapids.
