This article originally appeared in the November 13, 1995 issue of Christianity Today.
If the record-breaking accomplishment of Baltimore Orioles’ shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., seems incomprehensible, then Billy Graham’s lifelong ministry appears even more so. For 50 years, since he officially began his evangelistic ministry with Youth for Christ International in 1945—37 more years in action than Ripken—Billy Graham has preached the gospel and pastored the world.
To pay tribute to this man and his achievements, William Martin, author of the biography “A Prophet with Honor,” assesses the impact of Graham’s work on the world. In addition, Garth Rosell, professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, identifies one secret of Graham’s success—how he handled conflicts and controversies—in “Grace Under Fire” (in this issue). And scattered through these articles, you’ll find the golden anniversary congratulations and observations of presidents, pundits, close colleagues, and friends.
No other religious figure has had such a streak, evangelizing more people or attaining Billy Graham’s level of public admiration, and it seems unlikely that anyone will ever surpass Graham’s accomplishments. Then again, that’s what they said about Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game record before Cal Ripken. As the adage goes, records are made to be broken, and as Christians know, with God, nothing is impossible. Billy Graham, we believe, would be the first to agree.
The litany of accomplishments is familiar. Billy Graham has preached the gospel of Christ in person to 80 million people and has seen nearly 3 million respond to the invitation. He has spoken to countless millions over the airwaves and in films, and his recent Global Mission from Puerto Rico was the most ambitious feat of electronic evangelism ever attempted. He was the first Christian, eastern or western, to preach in public behind the Iron Curtain after World War II, culminating in giant gatherings in Budapest (1989) and Moscow (1992) and complemented by unprecedented invitations to Beijing (1988) and Pyongyang (1992). He has been a friend to the pope, Queen Elizabeth II, several prime ministers, and at least eight U.S. Presidents. When the nation needs a chaplain or pastor to help inaugurate or bury a President or to bring comfort in times of terrible tragedy, it turns, more often than not, to him. For virtually every year since the 1950s, he has been a fixture on lists of the ten most-admired people in America or the world. And these are but a sampling. It can hardly surprise us, then, that a “Ladies’ Home Journal” survey once ranked the famed evangelist second only to God in the category “achievements in religion.”
As Billy Graham’s most recent biographer, I am frequently asked to summarize, assess, and account for his achievements. In the five years I spent on the project, I learned that this is no simple task. Still, I suspect certain peaks in his mountain range of accomplishments will continue to be visible for decades, and certain explanations continue to make sense to me.
Any responsible account of Graham’s long career will give substantial place to the mutual benefit he and Youth for Christ provided each other during the mid-1940s and beyond. Appointed 50 years ago as the first field representative for the fledgling organization, Graham toured the U.S. and much of Great Britain and Europe, teaching local church leaders how to organize rallies that offered young people a blend of wholesome entertainment, patriotic fervor, and revivalist exhortation. In the process, he enhanced his reputation as a dynamic speaker, effective organizer, and creative crowd-puller. Equally important, he forged scores of friendships with men who would later fill the ranks of his organization or provide critical assistance to his crusades when he visited their cities throughout the world.
THE NEW EVANGELICALISM
The exposure and stature Graham gained through Youth for Christ and such nationally publicized early crusades as those in Los Angeles, Boston, Columbia, Portland, Atlanta, and Washington in 1949-52 enabled him to become a key leader and the most prominent public figure in a young movement that called itself “The New Evangelicalism.” The term, coined by Harold John Ockenga, signified a form of conservative Christianity that consciously marked itself off from old-line fundamentalism by its tolerance of minor theological differences among essentially like-minded believers, a conviction that evangelical faith could and should be set forth and defended in an intellectually rigorous manner rather than simply asserted dogmatically, and with a more positive attitude toward social reform than fundamentalists had held during the previous 25 years. The movement’s formal beginning dated to the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, before Billy Graham was widely known. But by the early 1950s, its leaders began to sense they might have some chance of regaining a kind of cultural hegemony evangelicals had not known, outside the South at least, since the Civil War.
A signal ingredient in this growing confidence was Billy Graham’s ever-increasing prominence. The Hour of Decision radio broadcast, begun in 1950, quickly became the most widely heard religious broadcast in the world. A stunningly successful 12-week crusade in London in 1954, followed by triumphant tours of Europe and the Far East, firmly established Graham as the acknowledged standard-bearer for evangelical Christianity, a charismatic and catalytic figure who was able to gain the confidence and cooperation of a wide range of church leaders almost everywhere he went, often overcoming considerable initial resistance.
Perhaps even more important to evangelical hopes of shaping the culture were Graham’s ties to the White House. After famously bungling an audience with Harry Truman (naively reiterating to the press all that had happened inside the Oval Office), he helped persuade Dwight Eisenhower to return from his military post in Europe and seek the Republican nomination for the presidency. Though stopping short of an outright endorsement, the evangelist did little to mask his admiration for the general, leaving little doubt as to how he intended to vote. When Eisenhower was elected, Billy Graham helped plan the inauguration, personally baptized the new President shortly after he was sworn into office, and remained in frequent touch with him throughout his two terms in office. Graham also forged a close and fateful friendship with Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon.
As he came to appreciate the opportunities his reputation and influence afforded, Graham began to dream of a way to present the beliefs and concerns of the New Evangelicalism to America’s pastors, who could then communicate them to their parishioners. In the service of that dream, he established CHRISTIANITY TODAY in 1956. In keeping with the irenic spirit that has characterized most of his endeavors, he announced that the new publication would eschew the theological liberalism of the World and National Councils of Churches and their allied denominations, but it would do so by attempting “to lead and love rather than vilify, criticize, and beat. Fundamentalism has failed miserably with the big stick approach; now it is time to take the big love approach.”
That approach was successful. By the time the ninth issue appeared in February 1957, the paid subscription list was equal to that of its liberal counterpart, the “Christian Century,” and CT was soon the nation’s most widely read serious religious publication.
Graham’s explicit renunciation of “the big stick” approach reflected a growing chasm between the New Evangelicals and the “Old Fundamentalists,” led by such crusty stalwarts as Carl McIntire, Bob Jones, Sr., and John R. Rice. The two camps differed little on matters of doctrine. What distinguished them was their strategy regarding what to do with that doctrine. Those who preferred to be known as evangelicals felt it imperative to proclaim the gospel to as wide an audience as ability, opportunity, resources, and technology allowed, and to regain a place for orthodox belief within “mainline” denominations.
Fundamentalists paid lip service to evangelism, but proclaiming their faith was never as important to them as protecting it and themselves from error. Their strategy of protection involved meticulous attention to the jots and tittles of Christian teaching and obsessive concern with contamination by those who were not pure. To them, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” should always be interpreted in light of the directive, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” Any attempt to preach the gospel, they insisted, would be undermined and ultimately turned into a victory for Satan if it involved fellowship with those whose minds had been clouded by modernism and whose hearts had been cooled by compromise. The differences between the two parties had been papered over to some extent by their mutual admiration for Billy Graham. It was fitting, or at least historically symmetrical, that when they finally separated into distinct and warring camps, Billy Graham stood at the center of the fray.
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
Graham found it difficult to repudiate people who appeared to be sincere, professed to believe at least some of the same things he believed, and treated him with courtesy and kindness. As nonevangelicals watched the streams of people who responded to his invitation and saw it was possible to cooperate with his crusades without having him attack their beliefs from the pulpit, they began to join in inviting him to their cities and, when he came, to volunteer for committees. At first, Graham was uneasy with nonevangelical support, but as he saw that it did not require him to alter his message, he came to accept, then to welcome, then virtually to insist upon the cooperation of all but the most flagrantly modernist Protestant groups—such as Unitarians—or such bodies as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose teachings excluded them from both evangelical and mainline circles and who seldom showed any interest in taking part in his crusades.
Fundamentalists were loathe to repudiate Graham, since he was bringing conservative Christianity a kind of positive attention it had not enjoyed for decades, but he did not make it easy for them. While they railed against the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible, published under the auspices of the National Council of Churches, he endorsed it and encouraged his supporters to give it a try. As a further sign he was veering to the left, he began to accept invitations to speak at liberal seminaries such as Colgate-Rochester and Union in New York, where he explained to reporters, “The ecumenical movement has broadened my viewpoint and I recognize now that God has his people in all churches.”
Such statements stunned hard-shell fundamentalists, and when Graham accepted an invitation from the Protestant Council of New York, an affiliate of the National Council of Churches, to hold a crusade in Madison Square Garden during the late spring of 1957, muted criticism gave way to strident attack. Graham resisted lashing back, but he did not change course. However much he wanted the support of fundamentalists, he realized he could do without them. Their numbers were relatively small, and their exclusiveness would always keep them out of the cultural mainstream in which he was determined to swim. He was ready to make the break. At a meeting of the NAE, he called his critics “extremists” and said flatly, “I would like to make myself clear. I intend to go anywhere, sponsored by anybody, to preach the gospel of Christ, if there are no strings attached to my message. I am sponsored by civic clubs, universities, ministerial associations, and councils of churches all over the world. I intend to continue.” In other settings, he observed, “The one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy, but love. … Christians are not limited to any church. The only question is: are you committed to Christ?”
The 1957 New York Crusade, which packed Madison Square Garden for 16 weeks, did not cause the division between the Old Fundamentalists and the New Evangelicals, but it forced the two groups to define themselves more clearly. Many outsiders would be unaware of what was happening within the ranks of this segment of conservative Christianity, and many would never fully recognize or understand their differences, but after 1957, the terms fundamentalism and evangelicalism referred to two different movements.
The New York crusade marked another significant development in Graham’s ministry. In 1953, convinced that racial segregation was wrong, he had personally removed the ropes separating the white and colored sections at a Chattanooga crusade. After a few compromises later that year, he never again permitted a segregated crusade. Still, his meetings had a distinctly white character, and he seldom drew substantial black audiences. That was true in New York as well. As racial tension mounted in the South during that summer of sit-ins and boycotts, Graham decided he needed to send a clearer signal.
His first move was to integrate his own organization by inviting Howard O. Jones, a young black pastor from Cleveland, to join his team. Then, he took an unexpectedly bold step by inviting Martin Luther King, Jr., to discuss the racial situation with him and his team and to lead the Garden congregation in prayer. In his introduction of the controversial preacher, Graham said, “A great social revolution is going on in the United States today. Dr. King is one of its leaders, and we appreciate his taking time out of his busy schedule to come and share this service with us tonight.” The words did not explicitly condone either the revolution or King’s part in it, and King’s prayer called for nothing more revolutionary than “a brotherhood that transcends color,” but the implication was unmistakable: Billy Graham was letting both whites and blacks know that he was willing to be identified with the revolution and its foremost leader, and Martin Luther King was telling blacks that Billy Graham was their ally.
Graham would never feel comfortable with King’s confrontational tactics, and he would never satisfy critics who thought he ought to take a more prominent role in the struggle for civil rights for blacks and other minorities. Still, in the years that followed, Graham was consistently ahead of most of his constituency, and his voice was important in declaring that a Christian racist was an oxymoron.
A key reason Graham’s critics thought he ought to be bolder in supporting the civil-rights movement and, later, in opposing the war in Vietnam, was that the evangelist had uncommon access to the highest levels of power, particularly during the decade that spanned the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. To his supporters, Graham’s frequent presence at the right hand of the leader of the free world was a tangible symbol of the social and political legitimation they had worked for and won in the years following World War II. Furthermore, they tended to share his socially moderate, generally progovernment views. To his critics, he seemed more like Zedekiah, the feckless prophet who won a place at court by telling King Ahab what he wanted to hear.
This is not the place for a detailed look at Billy Graham’s remarkable relationship with U.S. Presidents over more than four decades, but it is unmistakably true that Presidents and other political luminaries have regarded their friendship with Graham as a valuable political asset. After the Watergate scandal revealed Richard Nixon to be something other than the deeply spiritual man Graham had always managed to see when others could not, the evangelist drew back a bit. While remaining on friendly terms with subsequent Presidents, he has sounded repeated warnings against the temptations and pitfalls that lie in wait for religious leaders who enter the political arena.
A THIRD ECUMENICAL FORCE
After two decades of public ministry, even Graham’s sharpest critics acknowledged he was playing a major role in revivifying and reshaping evangelicalism, helping it to become an increasingly dynamic and self-confident movement. And as he came to sense the breadth of his influence, he grew ever more determined to use it not just to build his own ministry, but to change the fundamental direction of contemporary Christianity. That determination showed itself in a new and momentous way in late 1966, with the convening of the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin.
Graham had attended the major meetings of the World Council of Churches (WCC) since its formation in 1948 and professed to be “thrilled at the whole process of seeing world churchmen sitting down together, praying together, discussing together.” Even so, he felt their lack of interest in evangelism was a grievous error. The Berlin Conference, officially sponsored by CT but underwritten by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), was his attempt to provide a corrective.
The 1,200 leaders invited to the Berlin Congress included evangelists, theologians, scholars concerned with evangelism, and denominational and parachurch leaders from 104 nations. To face the overwhelming magnitude of the task before them, Graham urged a spirit of openness toward every possible avenue of evangelism, including the mass media and computers, “on a scale the church has never known before.” To stick with old-fashioned methods, he warned, would be to invite the wrath of God upon their heads. Finally, he emphasized the need for cooperative action, a unity based not on a desire not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but a unity that grows out of working together on a common task. He pointed to his own crusades as models for cooperation, making it clear that he was not only aiming the troops in the right direction, he was ready to lead the way.
One participant observed that the congress “shaped a mood in which evangelicals sensed their larger need of each other and of mutual encouragement and enrichment.” Western delegates, long accustomed to furnishing the impetus for mission efforts in non-Western countries, seemed particularly surprised and affected by what another observer called “the dynamic surge of evangelistic emphasis coming from the newer churches of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.” The Berlin Congress proved to be a pivotal event for evangelical Christianity, helping to create a kind of third worldwide ecumenical force, alongside Vatican II and the WCC, and establishing evangelicalism as an international movement capable of accomplishing more than its constituents had dreamed possible.
Graham was responsible for another, probably even more important conference in 1974, the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. In the words of “Time” magazine, this ten-day meeting, attended by some 2,400 evangelical leaders from 150 countries, “served notice of the vigor of conservative, resolutely biblical, fervently mission-minded Christianity” and “constituted a considerable challenge to the prevailing philosophy in the World Council of Churches” by laying the groundwork “for a post-congress ‘fellowship’ that could eventually develop into a rival international body.”
By 1970, the WCC and its member denominations had begun to speak openly of a “moratorium on missions,” a shutting down of traditional attempts to win people to Christ through proclamation or other forms of explicit evangelism. Cultural relativity and the pressure of the problems of poverty, war, and racism had pushed evangelism off the agenda. All this, of course, seemed egregiously wrongheaded to evangelicals, whose churches were growing all over the world. Still missing, however, was a firm sense in their ranks that they were part of a coherent worldwide movement. The Lausanne Congress helped overcome that lack.
In what has been called the most carefully crafted presentation of his entire ministry, Graham called for a biblical declaration on evangelism that would rally evangelicals and challenge the WCC, and for a working out of the proper relationship between evangelism and social responsibility. He warned, however, against identifying the Christian gospel with any particular political program or culture. He also encouraged delegates to think of themselves as part of a worldwide movement and to examine ways to identify and pool their resources to accomplish the awesome task of world evangelization.
The most notable artifact to emerge from the congress was the Lausanne Covenant, a 15-paragraph document that covered the major bases of evangelical belief and strongly affirmed the need for both a renewed commitment to world evangelization and unselfish cooperation between churches and parachurch agencies engaged in the task. In subsequent conferences and myriad extensions of what has come to be called “The Spirit of Lausanne,” the Lausanne Covenant has played a major unifying role—particularly in the Third World, where it provided a formal basis on which evangelicals of varying stripes could work together.
“It’s a coalescence of the spirit of evangelism as exemplified by Billy Graham,” one missionary explained to me. “It is not so well known in America or in some parts of Europe, but it’s a household word in Third World churches. If we want to organize a meeting in Africa, we can say, ‘This is what we believe,’ and that is all we need. It is a very, very significant document.”
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