Evangelist Billy Graham in Las Vegas?
This month Graham conducted a five-day crusade there and attracted the largest crowds in Las Vegas history. Attendance ranged from about 10,000 to more than 13,000, and several hundred walked forward at the conclusion of every service to register their decisions for Christ.
The evangelist won a special place in the hearts of many Las Vegans. “I did not come here to condemn Las Vegas,” Graham announced at the outset of the meetings. “I came here to preach the Gospel.” The audience appreciatively applauded his statement.
Many of the city’s residents—including evangelical church leaders—feel that Las Vegas undeservedly has a bad image in the eyes of the rest of the country, and they react defensively when outsiders come through and refer to it as Sin City.
Las Vegas is currently a boom town. In 1960 its population was less than 60,000. Today it exceeds 350,000 and is still growing rapidly. The well-manicured newer neighborhoods that sprawl eastward from the Strip (the main north-south boulevard of hotels and casinos) look much like their counterparts in cities in other states. The school system is known for its excellence, and the city’s government is considered clean.
Northeast of the city is Nellis Air Force Base, the largest fighter-training base in the country. Dependents included, more than 15,000 live there. (Delegations of hundreds attended the Graham meetings, which were held in the exhibition hall of the Las Vegas convention center.)
To the west is the city’s black neighborhood, where 50,000 or so live, and to the south is Henderson with its chemical plants.
Tourism and gambling are the city’s main industries. Thirty conventions per month hit town. Millions of people come in the summer to enjoy the water sports in the area. An estimated 50,000 couples per year come to the city to get married. Some come to end their marriages. Many single parents, mostly women, live in Las Vegas.
“We are a microcosm of all the ills in America,” comments Pastor Melvin Pekrul of the 700-member First Baptist Church, who served as counseling chairman for the Graham crusade. Many people who fail elsewhere in their marriage or employment come to Las Vegas. “They are losers, but they are open about it,” says Pekrul, who has been in Las Vegas for seventeen years. The glitter and big money attract criminal elements, too, and crime rates are keeping pace with the population growth. All of this serves to keep a greater number of leadership-level people from moving to Las Vegas, and as a result, says Pekrul, “the leadership in our churches is stretched thin.”
The area’s population is divided about evenly among Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons. Nearly 200 Protestant churches cooperated in the Graham crusade. A number of them are well attended, and some have multiple services on Sunday in order to accommodate the crowds. There is a fairly large community of Catholic charismatics, and they were active in the crusade, with some serving as counselors and choir members.
For years there was little interchange between the churches. “We were all doing our own thing,” said one pastor. But the Graham crusade has changed all of that, he added. For months members from a variety of churches worked in preparation for the crusade. “If the crusade had been canceled, the preparation itself would have been worth it,” commented a lay leader. Kenneth Forshee, a Disciples of Christ pastor, served as crusade chairman.
Many people credit Dick and Carole Shine and Jack French for helping to lay the groundwork that got enough people together to start planning for a Graham crusade. The Shines were new Christians when they arrived in Las Vegas from California about fifteen years ago. When Mrs. Shine sought to purchase a Bible she discovered there was no Christian bookstore in town. She decided to open one herself, and the business has grown so well that last year her husband quit his engineering job at a nuclear test site to join her full-time. Mrs. Shine was the only woman on the crusade’s executive committee.
French came from Family Radio Network in San Francisco and opened KILA-FM, a twenty-four-hour Christian radio station. Through the bookstore and the radio station, the evangelicals of Las Vegas began discovering each other.
A number of pastors and other church leaders say that Las Vegas began to experience spiritual stirrings about four years ago. Some pastors, including Pekrul, reported that they had experienced in-depth encounters with the Holy Spirit, not necessarily of the charismatic kind, and that their lives and ministries had become more productive spiritually.
The stirrings were not limited to the churches. A number of hotel and casino employees and people attached to the lavish Las Vegas show world began turning to Christ—often apart from church contact. (Work schedules of many of these people prevent them from attending church.)
One casino employee who got converted is Larry Trimber, 37, a “21” dealer at the Showboat Hotel. From Pittsburgh originally, he had lived in Las Vegas for ten years working as a dealer when he decided to leave because of family, alcohol, and drug problems. He and his wife drifted to Colorado where things only got worse. An old friend who recently had become a Christian began witnessing to him. Once, while drunk, Trimber remembers pushing himself off a bar stool and praying, “God, I need help. If you’re there, you’ve got to help me.” There followed a period of calm, “but something was still missing,” says Trimber. He and his family moved back to Las Vegas, to within half a block of a Baptist church. Trimber visited the church, where Pastor Carlisle Sanford preached about Christ’s death. “Jesus died for me—that was the missing ingredient,” says Trimber. In June, 1976, he became a follower of Christ. In succeeding months his wife and two teen-age daughters became Christians. “We have a real home now,” he affirms.
Trimber says the gambling business is the only one he knows, and he insists that God wants him there for now. “The people I work with don’t go to church,” he said. “God sent me there to be a witness.” In recent months he has led several fellow employees and a supervisor to Christ. “This whole town of losers is reaching out to God,” says Trimber earnestly.
He asked for a week off from work in order to work as a counselor at the Graham crusade. “Look at them, they’re hurting, they’re crying out for the Good News,” he commented as people walked to the front of the auditorium in response to Graham’s invitation to turn to Christ. “I don’t condemn them; they need Christ real bad.” Trimber counseled a couple that first night. The wife, crying, tugged at his arm and said. “I need help.” Trimber brushed away a tear and replied: “I know you do. I know about that.”
Scores of employees scattered in casinos around Las Vegas are Christians. For most of them, the “gaming industry” is just another job, and they see no moral conflict. Most, however, agree that they would never visit a casino as a customer. “The odds are too great—you always lose,” said Trimber.
John Hughes, 32, was a card dealer when he “met the Lord” four years ago. His marriage was in deep trouble at the time, and both he and his wife Sherry—a casino Keno runner—began a spiritual search. Neither one knew any Christians. They bought a number of Christian books, and both turned to Christ on the same day, though in different places. Their marriage got turned around, and today Hughes is a lay assistant pastor of a Disciples of Christ church with plans to go to seminary. He remained a dealer for more than a year after becoming a Christian, then felt God wanted him to get out of casino work. “It appeals to base instincts,” he explains. At the same time, he is open to the possibility that God may want some people to stay on the inside in order to show others the way to life.
Several ministers work among the casino employees and show-business people. Jim Reid, formerly a Southern Baptist pastor in town, is known as the Chaplain to the Strip. A charismatic, he is partly supported by his denomination. He holds Sunday services in two hotels, counsels Strip people who need help, and tries to keep several “floating Bible studies” going for hotel and casino employees (the large hotels in Las Vegas employ 1,500 or more people).
Another such worker is Bob DeVilbiss, who founded People’s Church and its Help House counseling ministry in 1973. A third of his volunteer workers are converts from the ministry, he says, and they include people from the “subculture” world of gambling. He agrees that many people in Las Vegas tend to be more honest than their peers elsewhere. “They’re doing in the open what people back East are doing in secret,” he said. Loneliness characterizes much of Las Vegas, he indicated.
Because the people in Las Vegas tend to be more open, they also tend to be more caring, says Dave Noonan, 38, a pit boss who supervises dealers at the Four Queens hotel. Noonan’s third marriage was coming apart when both he and his wife Elsie turned to Christ a year ago. Neither was attending a church at the time. Noonan, like Trimber, sees no heavy moral reason for Christians to leave casino employment (“many are using it to witness”), and he says that groups of Christians working in the casinos gather regularly for prayer and Bible study. He does not see himself remaining in the gaming business all his life: he is toying with the idea of trying to start a church just for people who work on the Strip. They have special hours and special needs, he suggests.
Most pastors and church boards in town try to keep an open attitude toward Christians who work in the casinos, but some churches exclude such persons from holding office, and a few exclude them from membership.
In the crusade, Graham avoided getting bogged down on the issue of gambling. He said the Bible is rather silent on the subject and that he does not gamble himself because of the personal-example aspect. He said that the same practice on Wall Street is called investing, prompting laughter and applause.
The evangelist held a meeting at three o’clock Saturday morning for the Strip people, and about 1,000 attended, including some show headliners. Among those who responded to the invitation were a belly dancer, several showgirls, cocktail waitresses, Keno runners, a bartender, and a craps dealer. Graham said the service was unprecedented in his thirty-year ministry.
Graham brought his own headliners along to Las Vegas: Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter, singer B. J. Thomas (“Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”), Norma Zimmer, and others. Thomas gave one of the most moving testimonies of the crusade. He said that he was a loser on a $3,000-a-week dope habit and had nearly died when he accepted Christ in January, 1976.
Graham says he’d like to return to Las Vegas every year.
Errata
A news story in the January 27 issue mistakenly reported that President Carter asked evangelist Billy Graham for a donation to the building fund of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Instead, it was presidential cousin Hugh Carter, a state senator, who asked. Graham pledged $10,000, but his board reportedly reduced the figure to $5,000. The evangelist said the gift was intended to identify with the integration policy of Maranatha, which was formed as a result of controversy over discrimination and other issues in Plains Baptist Church.
The current governor of Bermuda is Peter Ramsbotham, not the person who through an editing error was listed in the February 10 issue.
