A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  After more than a decade of holding revivals throughout the world, the 1954 Harringay crusade still stood out as the highest peak in a career that was coming more and more to resemble a mountain range. Understandably, the lure of a return visit was strong, but in London interest in another Billy Graham crusade was decidedly tepid. In 1963, when Maurice Rowlandson, who headed BGEA’s London operation, approached the leaders of the Evangelical Alliance to see if they wanted to invite Billy back for another go, they surprised him with a unanimous and categorical rejection. By rounding up a group of Evangelical laymen, however, Rowlandson cobbled together an invitation that Graham agreed to accept, at which point Evangelical Alliance leaders changed their minds and agreed to become the official sponsors.

  By early 1964 most of the major committees were in place, often headed and manned by the same people who staffed them in 1954. But this was not 1954. A decade earlier, Britain had still been crawling out of the ruins of war and seemed more willing to listen to a message of solace in a world still short on earthly satisfactions. Now, prosperity and self-confidence had returned, and spiritual hunger seemed to have abated. Major denominations were suffering severe losses in membership and attendance, all denominations were short of ministers, and secularism was ascendant. John A. T. Robinson, bishop of Woolwich, had just written a book called Honest to God, in which he confessed that like many of his fellow clergymen, he no longer found much meaning in the old formulations of the faith. As the renowned Evangelical scholar and rector of All Souls, Langham Place, John R. W. Stott, put it, “The church is simply not cutting any ice in our country.” In an attempt to pierce this shield of indifference, Graham directed his team to organize the most thorough preparation ever undertaken for one of his crusades. Charlie Riggs oversaw the training of 30,000 would-be counselors. Thousands of additional volunteers attempted to distribute advertising leaflets to every household in the city. And for two solid years, Lane Adams and Robert Ferm visited with more than 4,000 British clergymen, mostly Anglicans, listening to their questions and complaints, patiently explaining the approach and rationale of the Graham crusades, and trying to enlist their support. Both men recalled that it was a hard two years. Adams felt frequent frustration at having to convince ministers that Billy Graham had any real concern for the British people. Adams himself had no doubts on that score. The night before they had left for England, he and Ferm had met with Graham, who led them in prayer. “We all three knelt down,” he recalled, “and I have often thought that if I could have had a copy or a recording of that ad-lib prayer, it would have broken the heart of Great Britain to realize that an American citizen had Britain so much in his heart, cared so much, longed so much for the best of God to come to those people.”

  Robert Ferm also believed in Billy Graham; had he not, he would probably never have agreed to transfer his family to London just five days after they moved into a new home in Atlanta. Still, his correspondence from this period and his recollections years later make it clear that collaring diffident clergymen and wrestling with them like Jacob with the angel, determined not to give up until he wrested a blessing from them, had often left him weary and limping. Resistance began as soon as he hit the ground at Heathrow Airport. When he explained to the customs official who he was and why he had come to England, the man snapped, “We don’t need you in Britain. We don’t want you.” As the officer launched into a virtual harangue, threatening to prohibit the Ferms from entering the country, Maurice Rowlandson appeared to meet them and on hearing the story, drew Ferm aside and began to pray for guidance. When they finished, Rowlandson told Ferm, “The London crusade just started.” Ferm went back to the customs desk and began telling the officer of his own Christian experience and recommending that he let Jesus come into his heart. The man softened a bit and agreed to let the Ferms enter, but on one condition. “I’ll let you stay if you’ll find me one thug who was converted [during the Harringay crusade]. I want to meet him. If you can’t find one, you can stay only six months.” Rowlandson, who had done evangelistic work in prisons, was able to find a young man who almost fit the officer’s requirements. The man had not attended Harringay but had been moved by hearing Bev Shea sing “Softly and Tenderly” in a film Rowlandson had shown in Dartmoor Prison, and by the time Billy Graham finished preaching in the film, he had decided to become a Christian. He subsequently organized Bible classes among his fellow inmates. When Lois Ferm produced the young ex-thug to the customs officer, the officer initially accused him of lying, then spilled out the reason behind his own sense of spiritual alienation. During World War II, he had killed eighty-seven men and could not believe God would ever forgive such a transgression. The former convict told the story of his own crimes, suggesting that since the man had been serving His Majesty’s government at the time, God would surely not regard him as a murderer but in any case would forgive whatever sins he might have committed. Not long afterward, Bob Ferm took the man to dinner, and “right there in the airport, he accepted Christ as his savior.”

  Men whose souls are stained with guilt and remorse often make better subjects for conversion than do clergymen, who are likely to be afflicted with more amiable agonies. In their thousands of conversations with ministers, Ferm and Adams had to deal less with defiant hostility than with lukewarm languor. Liberal and High Church Anglicans, including the arch bishop of Canterbury, generally remained aloof from crusade preparations. On the right, strict Fundamentalists followed their American brethren in refusing fellowship with those of impure doctrine, and doctrinaire Calvinists regarded evangelism as a kind of heresy, since it implied that free will and human effort could play some role in salvation. In the great middle, those who resisted the crusade did so out of disillusion, doubt, and disinterest. Many felt that Billy Graham was old hat. People had already caught his act and would not go see it again. In 1954, one journalist observed, Billy had been an attractive, winsome young man with “a simple [message] for simple people in simple times. His message has not changed, but the times have.” Some Britishers frankly admitted that the problem was cultural. “We don’t specially like an evangelistic organization which presents to us a face clouded with executives, experts, and mailing lists,” a Baptist paper noted. “There is a genuine difficulty of communication across an Atlantic full of differing temperament and mental habits.” To be sure, Graham was not without his defenders. The Christian, the only conservative journalistic voice in the Church of England, noted that much of the criticism of the evangelist’s organization stemmed “from that odd British notion that only the second best does for religion” and ventured that “Billy Graham’s real offense is that he has disproved one of modern churchmen’s most firmly held beliefs: that it is still possible to get crowds of people to come hear the preaching of the gospel. . . . This cannot fail to antagonize those who no longer have any gospel to preach.” The impact of that defense, however, was blunted by the fact that since 1962 The Christian had been owned and operated by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

  Graham, of course, was aware of the tepid response he was receiving but handled it in his usual trusting manner. Before leaving for England, he mused that the London crusade “may be the biggest disaster of my entire life. In my heart I’m ready to be laughed at. But I do feel that in Britain there are hearts whom God has prepared. I’ve prayed about going to England; I felt ‘this is of God,’ and I haven’t any doubts that we’ve made the right decision. I can do no more than just put myself in God’s hands.” Laughter, however, was not as much a problem as indifference. In sharp contrast to 1954, the secular press gave Graham and his crusade little more than obligatory coverage, and what little hostility reporters and other critics manifested was easily defused with a bit of wit or openhanded ingenuousess. When a professor asked Grady Wilson why, when Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on an ass, Billy Graham found it necessary to book a first-class cabin on the Queen Mary, Grady replied, “Well, brother, if you’ll find us an ass that can swim the Atlantic, he’ll b
e glad to try it.” When another man wondered if the humble Savior would go on television, Graham earnestly responded that “since He went as far as He could by foot and spoke to as many as He could by every means available because He wanted everyone to hear the message of salvation, I believe that if there had been any other way to reach more people, He would have used it.” When he was asked, as he always was, why he found it necessary to advertise himself and his campaigns so extensively, he said, as if the matter were out of his hands, “I’ve wondered about that many times. I don’t have the answer.” And when David Frost asked him during a television interview, “How do you know you’re not wrong [about the essentials of your message]?” he gave an answer that defied the usual canons of criticism: “Because I’ve had a personal experience with Christ. Because my faith is grounded in a relationship with God that has been proved in the laboratory of personal experience through these years.”

  On the lone occasion when the opposition mounted a sharper attack, Graham still managed to escape with only minor wounds. Under the impression that he would be discussing and promoting John Pollock’s newly released and unfailingly flattering authorized biography, the evangelist agreed to appear on a BBC television program, Twenty-four Hours. When he arrived at the studio, he found himself facing two of his most virulent public critics, a psychiatrist who had described him as “psychologically sick . . . a man on the run from an ever-threatening sense of depression,” and George W. Target, a clever novelist who subsequently wrote an acerbic broadside in which he sought to portray every aspect of Graham’s operation as a calculated and self-serving assault on human emotions and gullibility. Though he arrived in plenty of time, Graham was offered no makeup and, in contrast to his antagonists, was described by Pollock as looking “rather unhealthy and a trifle wild.” The program’s host never mentioned Pollock’s biography but, after introductory remarks about “the great Billy Graham and his Evangelical roadshow,” turned his other two guests loose on the unsuspecting evangelist. Target criticized Graham’s heavy reliance on publicity and accused him and his team of telling “sanctified lies” to enlist volunteers and draw crowds. The psychiatrist revealed that he had gone forward at Harringay for the wrong reason—“It was you I wanted, it wasn’t the Christ behind you”—and had been emotionally damaged when he was unable to have any personal contact with Graham in the counseling room. Graham remained courteous and even-tempered in the face of the assault, and his associates ventured gamely that he had gained more than he had lost, since the public would doubtless be offended by the unfair treatment he had received, but old hands on the team still remember the program as a low point in five decades of media exposure. Its aftershocks probably had some role in stimulating Ruth Graham to dream a night or two before the crusade opened that no more than thirty people would be present for the inaugural service.

  Ruth’s dream proved unprophetic. From the beginning, the crowds were quite good. Princeton Rhodes scholar Bill Bradley, later a professional basketball player and U.S. senator from New Jersey, inspired crowds by telling of his personal faith in Jesus Christ, and British pop-music and movie star Cliff Richard’s testimony was the widely covered highlight of a Youth Night that packed 30,000 people into the arena, despite the opinion of some young people that it was not really a youth night but “middle-aged people’s idea of a youth night.” On another evening, during the invitation, a sizable group of antiwar demonstrators began chanting “Pray for the souls in Vietnam,” while a contingent of their fellows dropped leaflets through ventilation holes in the ceiling, but an ensuing scuffle between the protesters and ushers was quickly brought under control by bobbies from the Christian Police Association, several dozen of whom worked as volunteer security guards each evening.

  Graham made a strong effort to overcome what had been perceived as weaknesses in the Harringay campaign. Even before the crusade began, the team underlined its commitment to racial justice. When a landlady asked Howard Jones to vacate the flat BGEA had booked for him, two other team members also left in protest. Graham personally ordered that all the leases in the block be canceled and that all team members relocate to an area that would accept Jones and other black members of the team. He also paid a long visit to the mostly black Brixton neighborhood, where he visited with residents in their homes and on the street before preaching to them from the back of a coal truck. Threats of hostile disruptions by neighborhood toughs proved groundless, and while Billy sped away to tea at Lambeth Palace with the archbishop of Canterbury, counselors worked with 136 people who had made decisions at the conclusion of his sermon.

  Graham had been criticized during the Harringay crusade for his ostensible lack of concern for the workingman. To offset that image, team members visited dozens of factories, where they spoke with the joint approval of management and trade-union shop stewards. Graham appeared at few of these, but when he did, he reminded workers of the contributions revivalists had made to the welfare of working people. He also addressed a crowd of approximately 12,000 East Enders at a rally in Victoria Park, where hecklers gave him a hard time for a while but eventually quieted during the heart of his sermon. Other efforts to crack London’s shell yielded little result. Graham’s Indian associate Akbar Abdul-Haqq and John Wesley White, an Oxford-educated evangelist who had joined the team to help Graham with sermon preparation, found little success when they attempted to stem the tide of ridicule and abuse that greets most presentations of the gospel at Hyde Park’s famed Speakers’ Corner. Team evangelists suffered less abuse but won few more souls during repeated forays into Trafalgar Square. In one of the most widely reported sorties against Satan, Billy Graham himself made an abortive run into the garish Soho district, where what reporters described as a “200-second sermon” came to an abrupt end when he leapt down from a car hood to avoid being photographed with a local stripper who had flounced up beside him.

  However their success or failure might be judged, factory meetings and street preaching were time-honored revivalist tactics. The 1966 London crusade, however, began a new chapter in Billy Graham’s ministry in that it marked his first use of closed-circuit television to carry crusade services to audiences far from the central arena. He had, of course, pioneered the use of landline audio relays during the Harringay crusade, and his sermons had been broadcast regularly on television since the 1957 Madison Square Garden campaign, but this was his first use of television technology to beam his message into auditoriums and stadiums in cities where the ground had been prepared as if he were going to be present for a full-scale live crusade. By using all of the Eidophor projection equipment available in Britain, the team’s electronic engineers were able to supply a television feed to ten cities at a time, usually for three days running. Crowds were surprisingly good in virtually every city, often filling whatever arenas or meeting halls were available, with the largest averaging well over 5,000 souls a night. In Manchester demand for tickets was so heavy that local organizers decided to charge admission—a unique occurrence in the annals of Graham’s ministry—and still drew SRO crowds. Inevitably, technical glitches marred some of the transmissions, but the closed-circuit services displayed some singular strengths. Most notable was the heightened impact of Billy Graham’s preaching. In the absence of distracting echoes and inevitable visual diversions and in the presence of a fourteen-foot image of Graham’s head and shoulders, viewers were able to see and hear the evangelist—and thus to concentrate on his message and absorb the full impact of his rhetorical skills—far better than his live audience in London could. It was, one team member observed, as if they were “locked in with the gospel.” As a consequence, the proportion of inquirers in the satellite services consistently ran higher than at Earls Court. Other factors, of course, may have figured into this welcome result, but it was immediately and abundantly clear that apart from the understandable desire to see the famous evangelist in the flesh, closed-circuit television could provide the basis for an effective out reach in cities too small to justify an
in-person crusade. From that time onward, television relays became yet another standard weapon in Billy Graham’s evangelistic arsenal.

  By all the usual measures, London ’66 was a success. Total attendance (1,055,368) was only half that of the 1954 meeting, but the crusade itself was only one third as long, so that average attendance was higher. More important, 42,000 people made decisions for Christ at Earls Court, 4,000 more than at Harringay. And whereas 90 percent of the inquirers at Harringay had reported at least some connection to a church, only 76 percent of the Earls Court inquirers did so, indicating that this crusade had a greater impact among the unchurched, always a closely watched barometer of evangelistic effectiveness. As for recognition of Graham’s eminence, he was entertained by the American ambassador, honored at a luncheon hosted by the lord mayor of London, treated as a guest of honor by Princess Margaret at a charity affair attended by a thousand lords and ladies of the realm, and invited for a quiet lunch with the queen at Buckingham Palace. Against the possibility that a steady diet of royal food might cause him to forget his roots, a planeload of Nashville supporters entertained him at the Hilton Hotel with a traditional southern breakfast of Tennessee ham, gravy, sorghum molasses, and biscuits brought from home.