A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  In late summer of 1948, Graham attended (as an official observer, not a delegate) the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC). He was uncomfortable with the liberal theology dominating the WCC and the ecumenical movement it represented, but he remembered that two of the movement’s most important spiritual ancestors had been D. L. Moody and one of Moody’s close friends, John R. Mott, and he felt Evangelicals had been partly to blame for the direction it had taken, since they had pulled out to maintain their separatist purity instead of remaining involved and trying to check the movement’s drift to the left. The vision of a unified Christian community so captured his expansive nature that he later characterized his attendance at these meetings as “one of the most thrilling experiences of my life up to that moment.”

  In the fall of that year, Graham and Barrows took a leave of absence from YFC to devote full time to their own campaigns. For Graham, the move to a wider and independent ministry had come to seem inevitable. He had emerged from the pack as the most successful YFC evangelist, his meetings garnering more space in Evangelical publications than any other young preacher, including Chuck Templeton and Jack Shuler, his only real competitors. For Cliff Barrows, however, becoming the second member of the Graham/Barrows Campaign team meant the subordination of his own ministry to Graham’s. Such a subordination was not easy. When he and Billie were not traveling with Graham in Europe, they were enjoying considerable success with their own revivals, mostly on the West Coast. Cliff was a gifted preacher, and he and Billie combined talent, enthusiasm, transparent sincerity, and a remarkable lack of egotism into a highly winsome package. They clearly had the option to remain in a leading role with YFC or to establish their own independent evangelistic ministry, or to get off the road and serve as a pastor or minister of music. Yet Cliff not only recognized that he would probably never quite equal Graham’s success as an evangelist; he also saw that their most notable abilities were complementary rather than competitive and that they could accomplish far more together than either could alone or, for that matter, in tandem with anyone else they knew. One evening in Philadelphia, Cliff and Billie came to Graham’s hotel room to give him their decision. “Bill,” Cliff said, using that address to distinguish his friend from his wife, “God has given us peace in our hearts. As long as you want us to, from now till the Lord returns, or whenever, I’ll be content to be your song leader, carry your bag, go anywhere, do anything you want me to do.” It was a notable surrender of self, all the more so because it was volunteered rather than demanded. Forty years later, in a nearly empty cafeteria near his home in Greenville, South Carolina, Barrows reflected on the sacrifice of ego he had made and said in a quiet tone, utterly free of dissimulation, “I still have that same peace of mind and heart. I think Bill knows that.”

  Graham remained on YFC’s board of directors and still actively promoted and encouraged its activities, but he was now largely on his own, receiving his primary support from love offerings collected in crusade services. At this point he still took no salary from the Northwestern Schools, which he continued to direct by telephone and proxy. His fame was confined mainly to the Evangelical world, and when he hit the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and magazines a year later, he appeared to be an overnight sensation, an inexplicable meteor. In fact, much of the success he would shortly enjoy could be traced directly to his four years with Youth for Christ. In that brief but critical period, he obtained preaching opportunities and experience few free-lance evangelists could have matched, and they had their effect. In keeping with YFC’s pledge to be “Geared to the Times,” Billy made it a standard aspect of his preaching to proclaim the “good news” against a contrasting background of bad news from contemporary events and circumstances, leading numerous observers to say that he preached as if he had “a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” He spoke of “how sleek Russian bombers are poised to drop death upon American cities; how Communism and Catholicism are taking over in Europe; how Mohammedanism is sweeping across Africa and into Southern Europe.” And in good dispensationalist fashion, he interpreted these dreadful portents, particularly when coupled with the imminent establishment of the state of Israel, as indisputable signs that the second coming of Christ lay but a short time in the future.

  As important as becoming a more competent practitioner of his craft, Graham also established strong bonds with the small handful of men who would remain at his side for the rest of their lives, and he built a network of contacts with ministers and leading laymen who trusted him and would welcome the opportunity to work with him in his own citywide crusades. He learned that Charles Finney had been justified in commending “the right use of the constituted means,” and that revivals and successful evangelistic efforts are more likely to be “prayed down” when they have also been “worked up” by meticulous organization and copious publicity. Finally, in his role as college president, he was continuing to become aware of his strengths and, not insignificantly, his weaknesses as a leader. At age thirty, a precedented point at which to begin a wider ministry, Billy Graham was ready for higher ground.

  7

  The Canvas Cathedral

  On countless occasions over the past forty years, usually at a press conference preceding a major crusade, Billy Graham has declared that he sensed religious revival was breaking out and about to sweep over the land. In 1948 he happened to be right. During the 1940s church membership in America rose by nearly 40 percent, with most of the growth coming after the end of the war, when the nation tried to reconstruct normalcy on the most dependable foundation it knew. Church building reached an all-time high, seminaries were packed, and secular colleges added programs in religious studies. Religious books outsold all other categories of nonfiction, and Bible sales doubled between 1947 and 1952—the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible sold two million copies in 1950 alone. While Graham and his colleagues in Youth for Christ and the Southern Baptist Youth Revival movement were packing civic auditoriums and stadia William Branham, Jack Coe, A. A. Allen, and Oral Roberts were filling stupendous nine-pole circus tents with Pentecostal believers desperate to see afflictions healed, devils cast out, and the dead raised.

  For evangelists it was like being a stockbroker in a runaway bull market. As in other fields, however, the boom attracted some whose motives and methods were less than sanctified, who fell prey to the temptations described in Scripture as “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (I John 2:16), but better known by their street names: sex, money, and power. Despite good intentions and behavior, Graham and his associates occasionally found themselves the objects of suspicion and condescension from ministers and laypeople alike. They learned that Elmer Gantry, whom Sinclair Lewis had assembled from skeletons and scraps found in the closets of real-life evangelists, was a deeply entrenched cultural stereotype. As they contemplated the checkered history and contemporary shortcomings of itinerant evangelism (the term itself had a kind of siding salesman’s rhinestone ring to it) and talked with veteran campaigners, they realized that much of the skepticism was warranted. To prepare his own defenses, Graham called Bev Shea, Grady Wilson, and Cliff Barrows to his hotel room during a campaign in Modesto, California, in November of 1948. “God has brought us to this point,” he said. “Maybe he is preparing us for something that we don’t know. Let’s try to recall all the things that have been a stumbling block and a hindrance to evangelists in years past, and let’s come back together in an hour and talk about it and pray about it and ask God to guard us from them.”

  The assignment was easy. They had all seen enough evangelists rise and fall or leave town in a cloud of disillusionment to be able to pinpoint the key problems readily. When they regrouped in Graham’s room later in the afternoon, each had made essentially the same list, which came to be known in the oral tradition as the Modesto Manifesto. The first problem was money. The most rectitudinous of men could find it difficult not to pull out a few extra flourishes when
the love offering was collected. When he traveled for YFC, Graham turned offerings over to local or national bodies and was paid a straight salary, but no parent body existed to fund his independent revivals, so the group saw no viable alternative to the love-offering system, even though it made them uncomfortable. They did, however, pledge not to emphasize the offering and to try to keep themselves as free as possible of suspicion regarding the way they handled the money by asking members of the sponsoring committee to oversee the payment of all bills and disbursement of funds to the revival team. On one occasion, Bev Shea sent the sponsoring committee a check for thirty dollars, just in case the hotel had levied a charge for extra laundry service for his infant son.

  The second potential problem was immorality. As energetic young men in full bloom, often traveling without their families, charged with the raw excitement of standing before large and admiring crowds, and living in anonymous hotels and tourist courts, all of them knew well the power and possibilities of sexual temptation, and all of them had seen promising ministerial careers shipwrecked by the potent combination of lust and opportunity. They asked God “to guard us, to keep us true, to really help us be sensitive in this area, to keep us even from the appearance of evil,” and they began to follow simple but effective rules to protect themselves. They avoided situations that would put them alone with a woman—lunch, a counseling session, even a ride to an auditorium or an airport. On the road, they roomed in close proximity to each other as an added margin of social control. And always, they prayed for supernatural assistance in keeping them “clean.”

  Two other problems, less imperious in their proddings than money or sex but capable of generating cynicism toward evangelists, were inflated publicity and criticism of local pastors. Because it helped win invitations to bigger churches and cities and thus fed their egos and fattened their pocketbooks, evangelists had grown accustomed to exaggerating their crowds and their results, both in advance publicity and in reports to Evangelical publications. Critics accused them of counting arms and legs instead of heads, and the phrase evangelistically speaking signified that anyone interested in accuracy should discount an itinerant’s reports of his own accomplishments. D. L. Moody refused to keep statistics lest he be drawn into exaggeration or boasting. Billy Graham and his team were too wed to the modern ethos to adopt that approach, but they did begin to use a consistent procedure. Instead of generating their own figures, they usually accepted crowd estimates given by police or the fire department or arena managers, even when they felt the official estimate was too low, and they readily admitted that many who came down the aisles during the invitation were counselors assigned to help inquirers, not inquirers themselves. As for the criticism of pastors, they had heard Mordecai Ham and his ilk attack the local clergy to gain attention and make themselves look good, then leave town while the hapless pastors tried to regain the confidence of their parishioners. Graham was determined to avoid this destructive course. He would gladly meet with pastors who criticized him but would not publicly criticize men who planted the seed and tilled the fields that he swooped in to harvest.

  The next several months passed uneventfully with a return visit to England and respectable but modest outings in Miami and Baltimore. Then came an effort in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Graham and his colleagues remember as the nadir of their public careers. Grady Wilson, given to plain speech, called it “the sorriest crusade we ever had,” adding that “Billy was about ready to give up the ministry after Altoona.” Less bluntly, Cliff Barrows conceded that “several contributing factors combined to keep it from standing out as one of the most blessed of events.” The problems began as soon as Graham hit town and learned that the several invitations he had received to hold a campaign had not been repeated requests from a single body, as he had hoped, but separate inquiries from rival ministerial associations that were at each other’s throats and not about to cooperate in a joint venture. Once the meeting started, a large mentally deranged woman repeatedly interrupted the services by threatening to kill Cliff Barrows if she ever saw him on the street, screaming that Indians were about to attack Billy Graham, and rushing the platform with such determination to cause trouble that it took Grady Wilson and two ushers to restrain her. Overall, Barrows recalled that “we didn’t do much in Altoona but pray and wonder what had happened and wish the meeting would get over with so we could get out of town.”

  Grady’s comment about Billy’s leaving the ministry was intentionally hyperbolic, but the bloom of the YFC triumphs did seem to fade a bit, and Graham’s confidence that God was preparing him for a glorious ministry began to falter. Simple ambition played its part here; Billy had always liked standing out from the crowd, and he must have enjoyed the intoxicating rush that few experiences can provide so fully as drinking in the attention and adoration of a rapt multitude. But there was more, and not to appreciate that would be to misunderstand Billy Graham, who has carried with him since his midteens an obsessive determination to discern and perform the will of God. A small but telling incident shortly after the Altoona meeting offered a glimpse of this compulsion. During a gathering at a Michigan Fundamentalist conference center whose very name, Maranatha (“Come, Lord”), signified its eschatological orientation, Graham and two other featured speakers, including Roy Gustafson, an old friend from Florida Bible Institute, went out into a field one evening after the services to see the aurora borealis. As they contemplated the beauty and mystery of the northern lights, they fell easily to talking of the celestial manifestations that might accompany the Second Coming. None of them doubted that the rapture and the millennium would soon bring the present “dispensation” to an end, and all three assumed they would be in the company of those whisked into the clouds, so the prospect held no terror whatever for them. But Graham raised a lone qualification to his basically joyful anticipation: “I want the Lord to come,” he said, “but I sure would like to do something great for him before he comes.” He knew salvation was by grace, but he aspired to enter God’s presence at the Judgment with a suitable token of gratitude. Typically, the men ended their reflections in prayer. Gustafson, who went first, knelt on his handkerchief to protect his trousers from dampness and grass stains. When Billy’s turn came, his friends heard not his customary clear resonance but a muffled groaning. When Gustafson cocked open an eye to discover the cause of the unusual sounds, he saw that Billy, still wearing his suit and tie and far away from any crowd that might acclaim his piety and humility, had thrown himself face forward onto the ground in abject prostration and was beseeching God for an opportunity to serve him more fully. A second incident at the same conference made it clear that Graham did not view greater service as an avenue for greater gain. When conference leaders gave him a twenty-three-hundred dollar love offering for his efforts, he handed the entire amount to Roy Gustafson, who was about to leave on a Central American mission.

  Graham’s fear that he might fall short in his efforts to serve God had another source that was far more troubling than the mediocrities of Miami and Baltimore and the depressing failure of Altoona. If he had a peer among his YFC colleagues, it was unquestionably Chuck Templeton. Darkly handsome, intelligent, and intellectually curious despite his lack of a high school education, and more worldly wise than most of his colleagues by dint of a troubled homelife that had forced him to fend for himself since his early teens, Templeton was generally acknowledged to be the most versatile of the YFC evangelists, able to preach a soul-winning message or lead a devotional service or emcee a stadium rally with great and equal effectiveness. “He was not an expositor of the Word,” Torrey Johnson recalled. “He did not know his Bible as thoroughly as some others, [but] he loved it and preached it. The only danger with him was that he was so eloquent, you were taken up with his eloquence more than with the substance.” Templeton himself, while deeply fond of Billy Graham, had no doubt his own preaching was superior to Graham’s in both technique and content, though he acknowledged that no one could match Billy’s success
when it came to inviting people to accept Christ. “He got more results than anybody,” Templeton remembered. “We would travel together and preach on consecutive nights. He would get forty-one; I would get thirty-two. In the next town, I would get seventeen, he would get twenty-three, or I would get two hundred and he would get three hundred. Very clearly, he was going to be a well-known figure.” Still, in the early years of YFC, most observers would probably have put their money on Templeton; in 1946, when the National Association of Evangelicals published a pictorial spread of Evangelicals “best used of God” in the organization’s five-year history, it named both Johnson and Templeton but omitted Billy Graham. And a YFC veteran looking back on these exciting days remembered that “this boy Charlie Templeton could just preach fantastically. That was before he went to seminary.”