From Wesley to Graham

A criticism in Britain at the time of the Billy Graham Crusades suggested that such efforts were outside the stream of national religious development and therefore suspect. This view takes no account of history. For over two hundred years, since large populations first arose, mass evangelism has played a leading part in the growth of Christianity in the British Isles.

A Venerable Tradition

The memory of John Wesley and George Whitefield is now held in high honor. Their names, Wesley’s especially, have that aura of respectability which is given to the prophets of the past and which was accorded to neither during his lifetime by national religious leaders.

Both men—Whitefield following somewhat gingerly at first in Wesley’s footsteps—addressed vast crowds in the only large auditoriums available, the open air. For preaching in unconsecrated buildings or in the open and for making mass appeals for decision they were berated by their contemporaries. A new class, however, a proletariat, had been created in Britain by the Industrial Revolution, and organized religion had passed it by. The two evangelists, working for the greater part independently and at times in doctrinal conflict, brought to this new class the knowledge of the holiness and love of God. They went fearlessly among rough and almost savage miners and sought out the factory and mill workers while also, like the Lollards before them, preaching at the market crosses of great country towns. The “classes” they founded and the congregations they built up brought a new awareness of Christ to many of every level, Whitefield especially reaching the aristocracy.

But it was the proletariat who most felt the power of Wesley and Whitefield. Without the two evangelists and their followers those exploited myriads, unleavened by the Gospel of Christ, might have exploded in a revolution more terrible than that of France. And this was recognized, once the passing of time permitted the building of the sepulchres of persecuted prophets.

Generations Of Silence

After Wesley’s death in 1791 no evangelist of like caliber arose for two generations. The stream of the Evangelical Revival flowed on, Wesley’s branch mainly through the church which bore his name, Whitefield’s more directly affecting the Church of England. Evangelicalism grew, but its great names were now those of pastors and teachers, such as Charles Simeon of Cambridge, or social reformers, such as Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury. As the nineteenth century passed into its fifties the movement became stilted, its impetus dying, choked with the respectability born of its own victory, and its energies increasingly absorbed by controversy rather than evangelism.

In 1857 occurred the revival in New York. In 1859 this revival reached Northern Ireland from where, in the early sixties it spread through the length and breadth of England and Scotland, more quietly than in the first evangelical revival, but as surely. No name to be placed beside that of Wesley is associated with these years, but during them arose great missions operating today at home or abroad. A new spirit of devotion, of faith in God’s power, and of willingness to proclaim the Christian gospel with conviction was sensed in churches, chapels, and meeting houses, preparing the way for the great advance to follow.

Moody’S Visit To Britain

In 1873, at the age of thirty-eight, Dwight Lyman Moody reached England. He had made a short visit before but had been unknown beyond a small circle. From 1873 to 1875, Moody undertook a campaign throughout the British Isles, and in a short time this genial, burly New Englander with a large black beard became, with the singer Ira D. Sankey, an important force in British religious life. He addressed, night after night, crowded meetings in London, Edinburgh and the provinces; he touched the lives of princesses and flower girls, cabinet ministers and cabbies and gave the churches a new vision of the need and the possibilities of evangelism. His second long visit, from 1882 to 1884, ensured that whatever the caustic comments of the ill-disposed, D. L. Moody would be reckoned among the formative figures in the development of modern Britain.

At first sight it seems strange that such a man should have so influenced mid-Victorian England, when the upper classes were stiff with convention and an excessive regard for birth and rank and the masses inclined to despise Americans as heartily as they despised Colonials. Unlike Wesley, Moody had little academic background. He made up for it by voracious reading and a native shrewdness which made him the type of the self-made man on whom depended the new wealth, if not the political leadership, of the age. He had no obvious breeding (and his accent was at first a source of mirth) but he offset this handicap by an innate courtesy developed no doubt as much from his New England background as from the influence of God’s grace on his character. And this, with his patience and expansive good humor, helped him to win the respect and affection of men and women of all levels without pandering to their artificialities. And his profound learning in those two great books—the Bible and human nature—enabled him to penetrate to the root of the troubles of those who sought his help.

The strength of British religion in the last quarter of the nineteenth century owed much to Moody. He did not initiate revival, as Wesley and Whitefield, but he caught the rising tide and swept it on until it reached the furthest recesses of the land. Every Protestant mission and ministry, even the Tractarians, drew strength from his work, epitomized by a remark of the Vice-Principal of a Cambridge theological college two years after Moody’s mission in the University. “I think there is not one man here whose life was not influenced more or less by Moody’s mission.”

In the social sphere he was not a pioneer, for the social consciousness was already alert before he came. But his campaigns increased the impetus provided by Lord Shaftesbury and others, and renewed the hope of the Gospel to the underprivileged who might have been led into materialistic exasperation by the agnosticism of Darwin and Huxley. That the British working-class movement developed more in the spirit of Methodism than of Marx is not a little due to Moody.

The Arrival Of Torrey

Nineteen years after Moody’s second campaign, another American evangelist landed in England. For two years it seemed as if the great days were back. R. A. Torrey, the failed suicide who had been converted to Christ, the brilliant Bible student who had run after Higher Criticism and found it wanting, the abrupt and rather forbidding white-bearded, white-haired prophet of forty-eight, reached London with Charles Alexander in 1903 after a triumphant evangelistic tour in Australia and New Zealand.

In the providence of God Great Britain has often learned more from American evangelists than from the native-born. Perhaps it is the freshness of their approach and the pleasing unfamiliarity of their accent which enables them to deal more faithfully with us than we would accept from one of ourselves.

R. A. Torrey was no exception. He filled the great halls of London and the chief cities of the land. He reached men and women of all classes. His severity seemed more apposite to the careless Edwardian age than Moody’s geniality, his inside knowledge of the strident liberalism of the contemporary theological leaders and his reasoned faith in “the Bible, the whole Bible, as the word of God; an altogether reliable revelation from God himself” was more effective for his generation than would have been Moody’s more rough-hewn presentation of biblical truth.

When Torrey left Great Britain in 1905, the sponsors said, “We know that tens of thousands have opened their hearts to Christ … and there have been blessings that cannot be counted, a spiritual force and influence and awakening which is immeasurable.” Yet no lasting national revival occurred. The churches turned again to their theological and ritualistic controversies, popular agnostic science gained further ground (despite the faith of many leading scientists), literary men continued to proclaim a Christian ethic divorced from Christian dogma and nine years later the outbreak of the First World War shattered the brittle fabric of national church-going.

The Barren Decades

In the barren years between the wars, the twenties and thirties, with the tide flowing strongly against any vigorous or authoritative Christianity, evangelism was at a discount. Such attempts as there were at mass evangelism on more than a strictly local level were associated with unfortunate characters, some from across the Atlantic, whose odd methods or travesties of doctrine left a legacy of suspicion to shadow the work of those who trod sounder paths in recent days; or else were devoted to the propagation of teaching attuned more to the spirit of the age than of the Scriptures, such as Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group.

In the late forties, in the fresher atmosphere generated by the sufferings and achievements of the Second World War, the usefulness and potentialities of great meetings began to be demonstrated again. The name of Mr. Tom Rees should be honored for his faith in reopening tracks which had become overgrown with the weeds of the interwar years.

The Graham Impetus

When Dr. Billy Graham came to London early in 1954, he arrived at a time, as the Archbishop of Canterbury commented in his sympathetic appraisal at the close of the Crusade, when “a fairly widespread beginning of a return to the Christian religion had already set in.… Many things had combined to make people desire to find an escape from moral indifference, disillusionment and despair. Many were ready to be recalled to their faith in Christ or to discover afresh his claim upon them.” Thus, like Moody and unlike Wesley, Dr. Graham did not, under God, initiate a recovery of faith but was used to lift forward the incoming surge. For, as the Archbishop also wrote in June, 1954, the London Crusade “beyond doubt brought new strength and hope in Christ to multitudes, and won many to him.… It has given an impetus to evangelism for which all churches may be thankful to God.”

It is too soon to appraise Dr. Graham’s position in the story of British Christianity. But his London and his Glasgow Crusades can never be forgotten. And if the signs of the times are sure and if, as is to be hoped, he returns to conduct a Crusade in the Industrial North of England, it would certainly seem that he will be regarded by the later twentieth century as significantly as Moody the century before.

Evangelism And The Nation

These five evangelists—Wesley, Whitefield, Moody, Torrey, Graham—with varying backgrounds and characters and, apart from their different historical environments, varying methods, have characteristics in common, which might be called the marks of the great evangelist. Each has the awareness of a definite, dated conversion, though not necessarily preceded by intense spiritual conflict. Each has an unhesitating dependence on the Bible as the Word of God, to be used as the Sword of the Spirit; no liberal has ever been a great evangelist. All the five possess great energy and resilience, an ability to continue for prolonged periods without proper leisure and to seize their relaxation in odd moments—Wesley did most of his reading on horseback as he traveled to his next engagement.

They exhibit strict discipline of body and mind and know that their ability to preach effectively depends on their willingness to absorb Bible knowledge and to read widely. They have faith, continually renewed. They have a passionate, unforced love for the souls for whom Christ died and, above all, a deep and abiding sense of the presence beside them of their Lord and Saviour.

Pastors, teachers and administrators each have their part to play. But without the evangelist God’s will for a nation cannot be fulfilled. And without these men, from Wesley to Graham, England would not be what it is.

J. C. Pollock, Editor of the Anglican quarterly The Churchman, is Rector of Horsington, Somerset, England. Author of several books, his most recent work, The Road to Glory, the story of Havelock of Lucknow, the distinguished Christian general, is scheduled for publication this year.

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