The Coral Ridge Story
For the past four years the fastest-growing congregation in the Presbyterian Church in the United States has been Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Its record includes the largest number of professions of faith in the denomination, a congregation of 1,600, and an annual budget of $629,000. It sponsors a Christian day school through the eighth grade, supports twenty missionaries, has fathered a daughter congregation nearby, and employs five ministers.
The most notable aspect of the church’s program, however, is its highly successful program of evangelism, responsible in 1967 for 800 decisions for Christ. Evangelism is deliberately central to the whole outreach of the church.
Coral Ridge’s success grew out of apparent failure eight years ago. The Rev. James Kennedy came straight to Fort Lauderdale after graduating from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. He had been the director of an Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Tampa and was converted when Donald Grey Barnhouse asked this question over the radio: “Suppose you were to die tonight and stand before God, and he were to say to you, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ What would you say?” Today that very question is employed in Coral Ridge’s personal-evangelism technique.
Through ads in a newspaper Kennedy drew fifty people to his initial sermon in a schoolhouse in 1959. By 1961 the church, now chartered, had dwindled to seventeen members.
Then came a ten-day experience in which Kennedy was forced by circumstances to accompany an evangelist on home visitations and witness himself. Very shy, he regarded himself “fearfully ill equipped to speak to people person to person about Christ.” But he found that people could be won anyway. “This was the turning point of my life, and an experience that transformed my ministry.”
He returned to Florida, determined to put his discoveries into action. But three sessions of intensive training for his congregation failed to produce any converts. “I conducted six weeks of training and sent the people out to convert Fort Lauderdale. Instead they went home. Then God hit me on the head with the realization that I had had three years of classes in the seminary but that it was only when I received on-the-job training in the living room that I learned how to do it.” So Kennedy began to take laymen with him on visitations, and it caught on.
THE 10,852ND INQUIRER
Sally was the last person to step forward. Billy Graham had already finished speaking to the mass of inquirers standing in front of the platform. They were filing into an adjoining room for counseling when Sally came down the aisle. She was a dimpled teen-ager with blond hair drawn back in a ponytail, and she wore sandals and a peace pendant.
Sally had come to the closing service of Graham’s New York crusade at the encouragement of her mother, who said it was a chance to hear a good speaker. Sally is a confirmed Presbyterian who lives in a New York suburb. She said she had become an agnostic in direct reaction to the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.
Why had she come forward? Why had she waited? “My first thought was that I didn’t want to be saved. I didn’t want to have to stop sinning.” But as the others started moving down the aisles, she said, she thought further and recalled the effect of a commitment to Christ upon a girl-friend the night before. Now she was saying, “I want to see whether the questions in my mind will gradually be cleared up.”
Sally’s decision for Christ was the 10,852nd recorded at Madison Square Garden last month. Additional thousands were made throughout the eastern half of the United States as a result of the crusade’s television outreach. An hour’s portion of each of the ten services was telecast over seventeen stations later the same evening (see News, July 4 issue).
Graham is holding only two American crusades this year, but these two cover the nation’s biggest metropolitan centers, New York and Los Angeles.A ten-day crusade in the new 45,000-seat stadium in Anaheim, California, is scheduled to begin September 26. Next year he plans a campaign in the third-largest urban area, Chicago.
The June 13–22 effort in New York drew a total crowd of 234,000. Only one service drew less than a capacity crowd: the day had been rainy, and a few seats were vacant high in the stands under the roof. On all the other nights, nearby auditoriums with closed-circuit TV had to be pressed into service to handle the overflow, even though a New York station was televising each service three times.
A big question that hung over the meetings was whether black militant James Forman would show up. There were reports that he or his followers would stage a disruption. Reporters questioned Graham about his views on Forman’s demands for “reparations” from religious groups, but the evangelist declined comment. Forman apparently decided that he didn’t have anything to say about Graham, either, because nothing ever happened.
Some speculated that Forman was too preoccupied at the Interchurch Center in Manhattan to concern himself with the crusade. There Forman and his friends were occupying offices of the National Council of Churches. A number of denominational agencies were affected also, which may have been one reason why few of the numerous New York-based ecclesiastical elite came to any of the crusade.
Was the New York crusade worth all the time, effort, and money? Graham addressed himself to that question in the printed program distributed at the closing service. Cynics, he said, “pass it off as a carnival of emotion, as a conclave where evangelicals reconfirm their beliefs, and as a fellowship-fest.” These three aspects are present, he admitted, but all are worthwhile. And “much more has happened.… Lives are changed.”
Graham declared, “The Scripture, ‘I give unto them eternal life, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand,’ has no terminal date on it, and what has started in many hearts will outlive the stars and outshine the sun.” On this point Graham got support from Religion Editor Edward B. Fiske of the New York Times, whose coverage of the crusade showed something less than enthusiastic abandon. Fiske’s publicized analysis included recognition that if past experience is indicative, “numerous individuals will have had their lives changed significantly.”
DAVID E. KUCHARSKY
This, the evangelist-preacher claims, is the key to success. “Our training is not limited to lectures. This is not the way Christ did it. The missing element in most evangelism programs is on-the-job training.”
Today 300 Coral Ridge members go out weekly on visitation. In yearly four-month sessions these witnesses are given both well-organized textbook training and the all-important on-the-job training. New converts are themselves given four months of instruction and are told that they are, in the words of the late Dawson Trotman, “born to reproduce.” Says Kennedy, “We are shooting for a goal of 1,000 trained people here in our own church.”
Other churches have been quick to adapt Coral Ridge’s program to their own needs, and Kennedy encourages this by sponsoring annual five-day intensive-training clinics, especially geared to ministers. The most recent was held this past February and included more than eighty ministers and a dozen laymen, who were required to learn the course material, memorize verses, and accompany Coral Ridge’s experienced lay evangelists on visitations. Each delegate memorized a gospel outline (Grace, Man, God, Christ, Faith) and a gospel presentation method (Introduction, Gospel, Commitment.)
“This is our strategy,” explains Kennedy. “Our results are shown to other ministers. They train their own people. Then they start their own clinics for other ministers. There have been two daughter clinics so far, with a third coming in the fall.”
Other Presbyterian churches, Lutheran churches, Baptist churches, independent churches, and the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society are initiating their own Coral Ridge-inspired on-the-job training programs. Recently the General Synod of Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church voted unanimously to adopt the Coral Ridge plan of evangelism for the coming three years.
A typical reaction to the clinic is that of a Reformed Presbyterian pastor. “The greatest and most thrilling experience of my ministry came at the Coral Ridge Church during the clinic. It has transformed my life, and I hope to see it transform my denomination.”
The most tangible result of the successful evangelism program is the fact that Coral Ridge has outgrown its facilities and is forced to conduct three morning services and one evening service every Sunday.
Pictured here is the proposed new building, scheduled to be started late this year. At a cost of $6 million, it will provide a large array of facilities. The high carillon steeple, visible for miles, and a cascading fountain will ornament the structure. The sanctuary, making use of angled side wings and six balconies, will seat 2,500 people.
Two educational wings are to contain rooms for Sunday school and midweek Bible-training school as well as a gymnasium, library, and bookstore.
ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.
Merger Gives Houghton An Urban Campus
Houghton College, one of America’s better-known evangelical liberal-arts schools, is merging with Buffalo Bible Institute. The surprise move gives Houghton an urban campus.
BBI, much smaller than 1,200-student Houghton, had already been engaged in a cooperative degree program for ministerial students with the older institution, while maintaining its own practical Christian-service training and Bible-study curriculum.
Wesleyan-oriented Houghton will keep its rural campus in western New York State while continuing the Bible institute’s cooperative program and a three-year English Bible curriculum on the Buffalo campus. A new two-year curriculum in liberal arts is being designed to provide students with most of the basic courses required for enrollment in programs on the main campus. Fifty freshmen will be accepted on this basis in September.
Half of BBI’s faculty is being retained. The new liberal-arts courses will be taught by Houghton professors.
BBI was founded in 1938 as a missionary-training center with emphasis on medical programs. It is denominationally independent, and its declaration of faith has reflected a dispensational view of Scripture.
Exit Cascade College
Cascade College in Portland, Oregon, is closing its doors for lack of funds. Its demise sounds a somber warning in view of the precarious financial state of many similar evangelical schools.
“The very frank reason is money,” said Cascade president Melvin Olson. “In the last several years there has been a deficit.” As a result, the Northwest Association of Secondary and Higher Schools revoked Cascade’s accreditation a year ago.
Olson elaborated on the problem: “We serve an evangelical student body, and these are not wealthy people.” Nor are the alumni a source of enough funds, for most are engaged in low-paying church occupations. He attributes much of the financial failure to fiscal unawareness on the part of administration and trustees, “still living in a pre-war economy.”
What will become of the remains of C.C.? The physical plant is being parceled up and sold to various public institutions, and Seattle Pacific College has agreed to perpetuate 51-year-old Cascade’s records. The 300-plus students (most of whom remained loyal to the end) are going elsewhere, many to Seattle Pacific and Westmont. All full-time professors have new jobs.
