Mass Evangelism: Billy Graham: Back to Boston

Billy Graham and his evangelistic team were in Boston again fifteen years after his first and greatly blessed campaign of 1949. It was the same Boston that has experienced marked and dramatic religious changes along its almost 350-year history.

In the campaign of fifteen years ago many churches worked together cooperatively, and the results were dramatic. An estimated 50,000 people jammed the Boston Common to hear Graham preach the Gospel. A drenching rain stopped before he started to preach and resumed when the service was over. Thousands of men and women came to Christ.

In 1964, just 224 years after Whitefield had established an evangelistic beachhead in Boston, Billy Graham was back.Graham came to Boston fresh from a ten-day crusade in Omaha, where he preached to an aggregate of 183,170 persons, 10,724 of whom stepped forward to record commitments to Christ (the inquirers represented 5.8 per cent of attendance compared with an international average of 2.6 per cent for Graham crusades, the Crusade News Bureau reported). This time Boston Garden, seating 14,000 people, was the main scene of his operations. A ten-day crusade was planned, with a grand finale on the Boston Common, Sunday, September 27. This time the Graham team had greater support than ever before. Richard Cardinal Cushing, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, assured Billy Graham that Boston area Catholics were praying for the success of his crusade. The Cardinal said: “Although we Catholics do not join with them in body, yet in spirit and heart we unite with them in praying God’s blessings upon this Christian and Christ-like experience in our community.”

The Cardinal was joined by other leading Boston prelates. The Rt. Rev. John M. Burgess, Suffragan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and the only Negro Episcopal bishop in the United States, was backing the crusade vigorously, as was Methodist Bishop James K. Mathews, son-in-law of E. Stanley Jones. As usual, Park Street Church, Tremont Temple, and some 300 other local congregations were solidly behind the Graham effort.

On opening night Boston Garden was filled with some 14,000 people who listened in rapt silence as Mr. Graham spoke on the New Birth from John 3 and the story of Nicodemus. Six hundred twenty-five people came forward as inquirers. On the following evening the house was filled again as Mr. Graham spoke on “Manasseh, the wickedest man who ever lived.” When he concluded his stirring sermon 863 people crowded the podium, and scores of seekers were backed up into the aisles.

Boston papers gave extensive coverage. The Globe followed and reported on Mr. Graham and team members who went forth on foot Saturday night into the nightclubs and sin-infested areas of Boston with the message of Christ. There were hostile comments and resistance; but Mr. Graham spoke in one prominent nightclub, following his own notion that if the people won’t come to the meetings, the evangelist will seek out the people where they are and bring the message of Christ to them in the highways and byways.

The only Sunday crusade meeting at the Garden was scheduled for 3 P.M. Ten minutes before the meeting was to commence fire inspectors closed the doors, and hundreds of people were unable to gain admission. Mr. Graham left the meeting and addressed the crowds assembled outside. Then he returned to the platform to speak of salvation by the blood of Christ. An estimated 725 people pressed forward to receive Christ.

Graham spoke nightly despite an apparent virus attack which, during one sermon, almost caused him to black out.

In 1740, when the Great Awakening was moving forward under the dynamic leadership of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, George Whitefield came to the Boston Common. He was well received by the clergy with the exception of Charles Chauncey of the First Church, who upon meeting Whitefield said, “I am sorry to see you here.” To this Whitefield replied: “And so is the devil.” Whitefield spoke to 4,000 people and the following Sunday addressed 15,000, many of whom were converted under his Spirit-inspired preaching.

Between the time of the Great Awakening in the 1740s and the appearance of Finney a hundred years later, New England was overtaken by the blight of Unitarianism, from which it has never fully recovered. Hundreds of Congregational churches defected from trinitarianism and raised the banner of a “new theology” that in the twentieth century was to become sheer humanism. Between the advent of Finney and the work of Torrey, Smith, and Sunday, the rise of Christian Science under Mary Baker Eddy further embarrassed New England religion.

Charles Grandison Finney came to Boston in 1831. He too experienced some clerical disapproval. Lyman Beecher, pastor of the famous Park Street Church of Boston, along with Asabel Nettleton and others, attacked Finney for his evangelistic methods, but to no avail. One historian stated that “opposition on the part of a disaffected clergy could not diminish Finney’s popularity.” Elder Jacob Knapp, a Baptist, also came to Boston and was subjected to intense opposition by the clergy. Wholly different from Whitefield and Finney, he nevertheless moved Boston for Christ. And from his ministry there emerged the well-known Tremont Temple.

Dwight Lyman Moody, R. A. Torrey, and Gypsy Smith came to Boston, too. After the 1906 meetings of Gypsy Smith it was stated that 2,550 people made decisions for Christ. During the First World War Billy Sunday came to Boston, and under his fiery and spectacular preaching thousands came to the knowledge of God in Christ. The chairman of his crusade was Allan C. Emery, Sr., whose son, Allan Jr., was chairman of last month’s Billy Graham crusade. Sunday preached against civic sins and was a strong opponent of the liquor traffic. His sermons to men were extraordinarily effective, just as Graham’s sermons to young people and their parents have produced a rich harvest of righteousness.

Boston needs what Mr. Graham had to offer. And Mr. Graham was speaking to the needs of Boston—in power and under the inspiration of the Spirit of God.

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