Reflections on a Crusader

I have seen Billy Graham in action many times: in the tent with the sawdust floor in Los Angeles; in the Coliseum in the same city where the largest number of people ever to watch an event assembled in that ampitheatre; in New York at Madison Square Garden and in Shea Stadium; in Dortmund, Germany as he preached through an interpreter; and now at the second of his Chicago crusades, held in the new McCormick Place in a hall that seats more than 35,000. I’ve also listened to him on the worldwide radio network and watched him on TV crusades and innumerable personal appearances. How does one take the measure of this man after more than a quarter of a century of extensive and intensive evangelistic outreach?

God ordained that the Gospel is to be preached by men, not by angels. Billy Graham is a man with all the explosive potential that the image of God in man makes possible. He’s subject to the human frailties all of us experience. He has come into his mature years transparent in his life, charismatic, open, highly likable. Those who oppose him for one reason or another cannot deny that he is a gentleman, and that he is a Christian imbued with a radiant spirit of the love of Christ. He is a veteran crusader—unflappable, very much at home in his role of evangelist.

In twenty-five years Graham’s basic message hasn’t changed one iota: Men need to be born again. Wherever he starts in his sermons and however far afield he may roam, he always brings his listeners to the place where they must answer the question: What will you do with Jesus? Graham’s social conscience has been educated, strengthened, and deepened across the years, but he remains convinced that the most effective agents of social change are born-again Christians. He knows that conversion does not guarantee instant political enlightenment or an end to prejudice. But he realizes that though converted sinners may not succeed in perfecting society, unregenerate sinners cannot. He starts by seeking to remake the heart, for out of it are the issues of life.

Billy Graham senses and seizes opportunities. He has bridged the generation gap; half or more of those in his crusade audiences are under twenty-five. He loves young people, understands their problems, addresses himself to their search for meaning, hope, community, and love. But he does not spare the rod and spoil the child; he calls children to honor parents—and parents to care for and love their children. He thoroughly appreciates the value of modern communications and uses radio and TV to great advantage. He has been seen and heard by more people than any other evangelist in history.

Graham is part of a team, one that has been carefully built up and nurtured over the years. His mission could not be fulfilled without an organization and the dedicated people who staff it. Harmony, commitment, and loyalty have characterized this inter-racial, ecumenical combine—a community of saints generally free from bitterness and dissidence. Graham has the capacity to enlist and retain gifted men and women in support of a vision that is neither underwritten nor endowed but is dependent on the financial gifts and prayer support of God’s people from week to week.

Graham moves in circles to which few evangelicals have access and exerts a strong moral influence in high places. He is at home with the press, a hard-bitten and cynical fraternity of men who can spot and expose a phony in short order. Graham has a remarkable ability to handle sensitive questions and sidestep booby traps. He has been wined and dined by presidents and royalty. But public prominence has left him seemingly unchanged and humble. His wife, Ruth, China-born daughter of a medical missionary, offers sound counsel and provides a stabilizing counterbalance. His close friends have concluded that half of what Billy Graham is has come through his wife.

A question often asked is: Do the converts really stick? If they don’t, Graham’s ministry has failed. To claim that all who come forward at his crusades are genuinely converted and persevere in their newfound faith would be very naïve. But the record of twenty-five years clearly shows that multiplied thousands who made decisions stuck by them. Many of the counselors in the last crusades in New York and Chicago were converts from earlier crusades.

What is the magnet that draws people to Graham’s crusades? Why did more than 30,000 people come to McCormick Place nightly to hear him while the Chicago Fundamentalist Crusade, meeting in another hall in the same building and at the same time as an opposition movement, drew fewer than twenty-five people a night? Probably no one can answer that question except to say that God the Holy Spirit is at work.

Graham has his faults; so did Elijah. His methods are perhaps different from yours and mine; so were John the Baptist’s different from those of Jesus, and Paul’s from Peter’s. But as for me, I’ll continue to pray for Billy Graham, support him, and accept him as a man anointed by God for the work of mass evangelism.

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