Graham TV Saturates Britain

For some time London’s buses had carried the news “Billy’s Back!” The evangelist returned late June to Earls Court for a nine-day crusade, relayed to twenty-five closed-circuit TV centers throughout the country. There were also twenty-five closed-circuit TV centers and 150 hospitals. From the Channel Islands, just ten miles from the French coast, to Wick, at Scotland’s northern tip, audiences gathered in cinemas, auditoriums, a car park converted for the occasion, an ice stadium, and concert halls.

By the seventh night of this most comprehensive of British crusades, more than three-quarters of a million people had been reached. Recorded inquirers totaled 26,662 (nearly 8,000 came on a single evening)—the biggest proportionate response the evangelist has found anywhere in the world.

At Preston in northern England, a power failure plunged the hall into darkness just after the relay began. The local chairman preached in the dark. A few minutes before the appeal at Earls Court, the lighting was restored at Preston, and twenty-five people went forward there.

At Northampton, the cinema was not available for the TV relay one evening because it had booked earlier for a film show. Title: “The Way to Hell.” Graham promptly announced he would preach on the way to heaven.

At Plymouth in the west country, a couple driving to the relay center sustained minor injuries in an auto crash. They were taken to a hospital, where they heard the relay much more comfortably.

A breakfast given at the London Hilton for Graham by Sir Cyril and Lady Black drew a distinguished 350-strong gathering for the second successive year. The Members of Parliament, civic heads, industrialists, and leading churchmen (including the Apostolic Delegate) heard Graham refer to the past glories of Britain (“Has there ever been a people like you?”) but suggest that the Christian faith is in eclipse both there and in America. Commandments are broken today on the erroneous view that the law is relative rather than absolute, he said. Graham always captivates this type of audience in Britain, though many of them were in the general category of the parliamentarian present who made it clear privately that he was “not Christian, but Church of England.”

Nevertheless Graham found bright spots. It was the young people who were responding at Earls Court and elsewhere (some evenings at least 70 per cent of those present were under 25, and there seemed to be at least as many men as women).

Graham appeared on a late-night TV show with James Mason and Leslie Caron, played golf with Bing Crosby, and addressed some 150 show-business personalities most effectively at a reception given a few hours after news reached London of Jayne Mansfield’s sudden death in a Louisiana car accident.

The evangelist’s refusal to make public comment on Viet Nam and the Middle East won influential support from the Daily Telegraph. Finding criticism of Graham’s refusal unjustified, the editorial made pointed allusion to “clergy enough already in the world who do not hesitate to express the strongest views about such matters often in language which suggests an infallibility more absolute than any ever attributed to any pontiff.”

From London, Graham headed for Turin, Italy, for one night. Then he was off to another “first ever” in Yugoslavia, where his two-night meetings in Zagreb marked his first preaching engagement in a Communist country.

J. D. DOUGLAS

Feedback On Evangelical Unity

“The plea for evangelical unity has hit a responsive note all across the country,” reports the widely traveled evangelist Leighton Ford.

“I am delighted to see the favorable response to your suggestion that evangelicals become involved in cooperative action,” writes President Jack McAlister of World Literature Crusade.

Although not all reaction has been so enthusiastically positive, CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S plea for evangelical unity (see editorials, June 9 and July 7 issues) has focused unprecedented attention upon the prospects of evangelical unity.

Even the immediate past president of the National Council of Churches, Bishop Reuben H. Mueller, had a qualified commendation:

“There is much in this editorial with which I am in accord, such as the great need for an evangelical awakening; the need for closer fellowship among dedicated leaders in the churches; and the need for a biblically oriented message and program. In all these, and more, I can agree. But I cannot escape the constantly recurring emphasis on separating ‘evangelicals’ from those who are in the conciliar movement and in the ecumenical developments in Christianity around the world.”

Mueller, a bishop of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, regards himself as an evangelical. He says he has tried to carry the biblical thrust into his ecumenical activities and to uphold evangelical emphases.

General Secretary Morgan Derham of the Evangelical Alliance in London said: “A great deal of what you are asking for in the American scene already exists in the British scene, in the form of the Evangelical Alliance. That is to say, if we were to do a diagram of the British scene, comparable with that which you have done for America, although the figures and proportions of the different groups would be very unlike, the EA would, in fact, comprehend members in all the groups, including the major denominations. In fact, the greater part of the strength of the EA lies in the Anglican and Baptist denominations. This doesn’t mean that we have anything like all evangelicals in membership with us, or affiliated to us, but it does mean that we are, at the moment, spanning the total area of evangelical life from the extreme independent and Pentecostal churches through to the mainline denominational ones.”

Affiliates of the World Evangelical Fellowship, according to International Secretary Dennis E. Clark, welcome denominations, single congregations, organizations, and individuals into “a very meaningful fellowship.” Clark says that in the Evangelical Fellowship of India—an affiliate of WEF—“it is irrelevant to raise the question of other affiliation such as to the World Council of Churches, because the sweetness of love and fellowship in Christ predominates. An Episcopalian chairs a prayer meeting with a Pentecostal speaker. A Presbyterian gives leadership to a literature program in which [Plymouth] Christian Brethren are active participants.”

Clark contends that “a number of U. S. evangelicals tend to equate the Christian world issues with those of their own country. Others of us are working towards an evangelical internationalism, in the mainstream of biblical Christianity. This calls for mutual respect and love in the body of Christ by all members for all other members. It will particularly call for humility and servanthood among the more affluent and dominant Christian centers, and a readiness to listen to the voice of God through Asian, African, and South American evangelicals.”

From one of the main separatist elements in American Protestantism also came an endorsement of sorts, with reservations. Said Reuel Lemmons, editor of the weekly Firm Foundation, which is highly influential among the more than two million persons belonging to the Churches of Christ: “Few men, if any, share any more fully my agreement with you that the times desperately demand that we somehow get together.”

“Possibly it can be done,” Lemmons wrote in a moving editorial. “At least the time is ripe for a try, and the wind is in our favor.”

He added, however, that “we will have more unity only when we believe the same thing at more points.” In keeping with Churches of Christ thinking he declared that “we need to completely remove party lines so that there would be no party lines to cross.”

Lemmons concluded, “Possibly, we can get together. But it will be when each of us is willing to give up any error he may possess to walk in the light of the more noble truth his neighbor may possess, or that the Bible most surely teaches.”

Editor Russell Hitt of Eternity reported that the plea for evangelical unity provoked a thorough discussion in a staff meeting that may result in an editorial. He declared he is sympathetic with the idea of evangelical cooperation but asserted, “I think you are stumped, and so am I, when it comes to implementing pan-evangelical unity.… Does this mean we try to absorb the oil of the American Council of Christian Churches with the water of the National Association of Evangelicals?”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S proposal got its biggest airing so far at the Southern Baptist Convention in Miami Beach (see editorial, July 7 issue, and news, June 23). The Southern Baptist Executive Committee is now committed to bringing back a recommendation on cooperation with other evangelicals.

Tongues A Status Symbol?

The appeal of the Pentecostal movement is not limited to “the discontented, the deprived, or the deviant,” according to a report based on a three-year study at the University of Minnesota.

“We’ve found a wide range of types, so it’s presumptuous to call them all oddballs,” said Luther P. Gerlach, associate professor of anthropology, who headed the study. “Our own judgment is that most of them are understandingly stable individuals.”

Gerlach cited several explanations for the popularity of the Pentecostal movement:

“An effective system of recruitment, usually through friends or relatives.”

“A simple master plan for the world, found in the Bible, which gives its members a high degree of confidence.”

A flexible organization “with no master bishop or national headquarters issuing directives.”

Opposition—an essential ingredient of a rising social movement.

An experience—speaking in tongues—that produces “a fervent commitment to the cause.”

“We don’t see speaking in tongues as the important characteristic of the movement,” Gerlach said. “It’s just one of many. The significant feature of it is its function as a status symbol, a mark of identification.”

From Union To Union

At about the time of the Civil War, a young Congregationalist took leave of his studies at Union Theological Seminary, New York, to spend the summer abroad. The ship carrying him across the Atlantic survived a collision with an iceberg, and Payson Hammond never returned to the seminary. He became perhaps the first evangelist to children in Britain and inspired the founding by Josiah Spiers of the far-flung Children’s Special Service Mission and Scripture Union.

The union, which now boasts more than 1,500,000 members from Iceland to New Guinea, commemorates its centennial this year. Its main thrust today is encouragement of Bible study, and it publishes graded helps in about 150 languages for adults as well as children.

At a week-long conference at Lausanne, Switzerland, in May, sixty union leaders were challenged by one of their own trustees, Arthur F. Glasser, to be “truly relevant” in communicating the Gospel. Glasser’s studies apparently helped to heighten a desire among the leaders to attain what Calvin called “the secret of exegesis”—making the centuries between biblical truth and the present fade away until the Word comes alive with the same power it had when originally spoken.

Union leaders say their daily devotional guides strive to involve Christians in the Word for themselves, rather than just to provide soothing commentary. That is a worthy goal they don’t always achieve. They take about ten verses a day and supply an average of 250 words of expository material. This week’s “Daily Notes,” covering First Samuel 7–10, observe on Monday that “just as the people were about their daily business in the fields when the ark appeared in their midst, so should we be ready for God to come to us in our work.” Wednesday’s thought is more challenging: “For the Christian there is no such thing as a coincidence. It is God Who makes things coincide.

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