A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  That burden inevitably detracted from Ford’s work with BGEA and raised fiscal concerns, both because of the expenses he incurred on behalf of the LCWE—“Leighton operates like Billy,” Hoke observed. “He’s not extravagant, but he doesn’t count the cost if something needs to be done.”—-and because he raised money from some of the same sources Graham liked to tap. Eventually, the LCWE set up its permanent headquarters in Charlotte, where Ford lives. Both men minimize any direct conflict between themselves. Ford noted that “I was asked by Billy himself to take over the chairmanship after Bishop Dain resigned. He said, ‘I want you to do it. I’ll stand behind you and we’ll make the funds available. We need you in there to keep it going in the right way.’ He’s always been very supportive.” He acknowledged, however, that “some of the people around Billy have not been supportive. They probably felt that if Billy wasn’t running it, there was no point to being involved in it. You will certainly pick up some ambivalent feelings. I think Lausanne represents Billy. I don’t think it represents his organization, which is centered on actually doing evangelism. Billy’s broad view of evangelism and social issues and theology and churchmanship are not represented as much in the organization as in Billy himself.”

  Graham also insisted in 1989 that he felt no tension with either Ford or the LCWE and believed the Lausanne movement is “on the right track,” though he noted, in his familiar way of raising points for which he preferred not to bear responsibility, that “some feel they spend far too much time on conferences and meetings. Some feel they spend too much money. And some have thought they were sort of turning left from the original positions.” No one denies that real tensions existed, and insiders admit that Graham himself felt more reservations than he was willing to acknowledge for the record. In fact, at one point he grew sufficiently irritated with the expense involved in mounting a 1989 Lausanne II meeting in Manila that he threatened to withdraw from the position of honorary chairman. Further, though other factors were involved, few knowledgeable participants or observers deny that Ford’s decision to leave BGEA in 1986 to found Leighton Ford Ministries was motivated at least in some degree by continuing friction within the Graham organization.

  The evidence indicates that Lausanne’s impact has been greater than its detractors admit. Without question, key leaders among Third World Evangelicals regard it as of historic importance, and its yeast continues to leaven the lump of world Christianity. Choosing another metaphor, John Stott aptly observed that “many a conference has resembled a [display] of fireworks. It has made a loud noise and illumined the night sky for a few brief brilliant seconds, only to fall to the ground with smoke, silence, and darkness. What is exciting about Lausanne, however, is that its fire continues to spark off other fires. [It] refuses to die down.” Less poetically, but with no less conviction, the widely respected Brazilian Evangelical Nilson Fanini stated flatly his belief that Lausanne had, in fact, fulfilled Don Hoke’s vision of a “twentieth-century Pentecost. God has used the Lausanne Committee to revive the spirit of evangelism and missions throughout the world. I have been in eighty-two countries. I have seen the impact of Lausanne all over the world. It is not just theoretical. I saw it!”

  28

  Higher Ground

  Barely one month after Nixon’s resignation left Graham filled with feelings of profound sorrow, confusion, and perhaps betrayal, he returned to Los Angeles for a three-night reprise of the 1949 crusade that had hurled him into the nation’s consciousness twenty-five years earlier. This exercise in nostalgia, however, was no harbinger of a ministry in decline. Two weeks later, Graham headed for Rio de Janeiro to make another run on the continent that had largely resisted his incursions twelve years earlier. Of all the South American countries he visited in 1962, Brazil had been among the friendliest. In the intervening years, the country had experienced impressive growth in its Protestant ranks, particularly among Pentecostals, and the stage seemed set for a satisfying visit. After a shaky start marked by audio problems that contributed to plummeting attendance after the opening service, the crusade gained momentum and wound up with close to 250,000 people jammed into the huge Maracana soccer stadium. The president of Brazil, himself an Evangelical, authorized the largest television station in Rio to carry the service, making it available to over 100 million people; according to Crusade Director Henry Holley, station officials believed perhaps 50 million saw at least part of the unprecedented broadcast. Evangelicals were not the only ones impressed with the crowd. Graham asked the archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who was in Brazil at the time, to bring a brief greeting to the assembly. The British prelate rankled a few feelings when he arrived at the stadium in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce (“There was some insensitivity—-the people are awfully poor”) and violated Graham’s request that he limit his remarks by speaking for nearly twenty minutes. Bemused at the memory, Holley provided a simple explanation for the archbishop’s failure to observe the protocol: Unlike Billy Graham, “the Archbishop had never seen that many people gathered in one place before.”

  The Brazilian campaign burned itself into Graham’s memory not only for triumphs registered at a time when he needed triumph but also because it coincided with one of the most frightening and unsettling events of his life. While visiting daughter GiGi and her family in Milwaukee, where GiGi’s husband, Stephan Tchividjian, was doing graduate work in clinical psychology, Ruth decided to rig up a pipe slide for her grandchildren. The simple device consisted of a strong wire strung at a sharp angle between two trees with a section of pipe threaded onto it. The plan was for the children to climb one tree, grab hold of the pipe, and sail across the yard to the ground. To make sure it was safe, Ruth (age fifty-four but giving that fact no more respect than she felt it deserved) acted as test pilot. She had no trouble scaling the taller tree, but when she grabbed the pipe and launched herself, the wire snapped as she picked up speed and she crashed into the ground from a height of fifteen feet—and did not move. For a split second, GiGi considered the possibility that her mother was faking injury, trying to salvage a laugh from an embarrassing situation, but when the family dog licked Ruth’s face and she did not react, it was clear this was no joke. At the hospital, GiGi learned her mother had shattered her left heel, broken a rib, and crushed a vertebra. More frightening, she had suffered a concussion that left her unconscious for a week, causing her family and physicians to wonder if she would live, and if she lived, whether she had suffered irreparable brain damage.

  Shortly after arriving in Brazil, Billy got a confused and incomplete message that Ruth had been in a serious accident. It was one o’clock in the morning, but he immediately began preparing to return home, directing Grady Wilson to preach in his stead. Grady told his friend, “Buddy, we never know why God allows these things to happen, but Ruth’s unconscious. She’d rather you stay here and preach, and do what God called you to do.” At that moment, Graham’s call to be an evangelist gave way to his covenant to be a husband; he looked at Grady and, feeling utterly helpless, said, “I can’t.” After several abortive efforts with an eccentric telephone system, they made contact with GiGi, who unexpectedly subscribed to Grady’s theology. Her mother was in good hands, she assured her father, and was doing just fine—a diagnosis for which she had no good evidence. He should by all means finish the crusade as scheduled and not worry for a moment.

  Billy did as family and friends urged, but with a fearful aching in his heart. He had always demonstrated a remarkable ability to shut out all distractions when he stepped into the pulpit, but his offstage tendency to anticipate the worst now tormented him terribly, as he suspected—correctly—that his family was protecting him from the full truth. When he returned to America, he learned just how serious Ruth’s injury had been. And then Ruth herself learned. On regaining consciousness, she discovered to her horror that her memory was seriously impaired; among the missing items were hundreds of Bible verses memorized throughout her life. As her faculties returned with vexing slowness, she
prayed, “Lord, take anything from me, but please give me back my Bible verses.” Gradually, the precious memories straggled back into her mind, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes bringing with them companions she did not remember ever having seen before, much less having committed to memory. Visible signs of the accident eventually passed, but it left its mark, including mild impairment to her short-term memory and physical problems that necessitated replacement of her hip, part of a wrist joint, and, possibly related, reconstruction of her esophagus. She also began to suffer from a nerve disorder whose effects she likened to being attacked by swarms of ants, and from a chronic wracking cough that disturbs her sleep and sometimes threatens to expel the life from her small body. She emphatically did not suffer from a delight in talking about her misfortunes. One morning in 1987, while her obviously worried husband talked about her problems, noting that she had been awake most of the night, she came into the room to stir the coals in the giant walk-in fireplace. “Did you ever hear the definition of a bore?” she asked, looking back over one shoulder. “A bore is someone who, when you ask them how they feel, will tell you the truth. Change the subject!” With that, she walked out brightly and began rounding up some lunch. That same afternoon, Graham went into another room to take a call from their daughter, Bunny Dienert. When he came back, he announced that Ted and Bunny would cancel their vacation and go with her to the Mayo Clinic the following Monday. She listened tensely and did not respond directly, but she was clearly irritated that he had taken this action without consulting her. The subject, one sensed, would be discussed in further detail when they were alone. When she left the room, Billy broke the tension by recalling an occasion when she had gone into a severe coughing fit in the midst of receiving an honorary degree. “The papers said she had been greatly moved,” he said with a smile. “She didn’t even want the degree.”

  In the mid-1970s, Graham adopted a conscious policy of holding more crusades in medium-sized cities such as Albuquerque, Lubbock, Jackson, Asheville, and South Bend. This saved money and focused on the television broadcasts as much as on immediate results in the crusade cities themselves. On foreign outings, however, the team still pulled out all the stops, trying always for the largest possible crowds and the greatest possible penetration of the gospel in lands where it was less familiar. Not every foray onto foreign soil met with great success—a ten-day crusade in Brussels produced only 2,557 inquirers—but stronger showings in Taiwan and Hong Kong indicated Graham was in no danger of losing his prowess. The Taiwan crusade had strong official and popular support. Earlier in the year, Graham had presided at a memorial service for Chiang Kai-shek at the National Cathedral in Washington, and Madame Chiang returned the favor by serving as honorary chair of the crusade, which drew more than 250,000 over five days, despite heavy rainfall during each service. Strong anti-American sentiment in Hong Kong made crusade organizers so anxious that they considered taking Graham’s name off the publicity materials, but crowds were large—nearly twice as many as the pope had drawn, team members noted—and the inquirer rate was a whopping 9.4 percent, about twice the standard response.

  In 1977 a five-day crusade in Manila marked another politician’s effort to use Graham to polish a public image. Under heavy fire for what CT called “allegedly repressive politics,” Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos went out of their way to associate themselves with Graham and his mission. They received him in private audience, had him spend the night in the presidential palace when the water system at his hotel broke down, and hosted a state dinner in his honor, the first time a head of state had ever so honored him, despite his many visits with presidents, queens, and chancellors. At a National Prayer Breakfast, which both Marcoses attended, the president declared he had come “to demonstrate to our people and to the whole world my personal belief in prayer. . . . The time has come again to pray.” At the School of Evangelism, where she gave the opening address, Mrs. Marcos proclaimed that “it is only those who are Christ-informed and Christ-conscious who are strong.” Apparently, she counted herself and her husband among those so empowered. “The president and I,” she said, “are fully conscious that our temporal powers are bestowed by God, and we clearly realize that this gift of love can only be used in the purest of motives.”

  On the other side of the world, Graham held two crusades in Scandinavia during 1977 and 1978. The first installment, in Goteburg, Sweden, was modest in the numbers it generated but encouraging in spirit. The second tour, which included visits to Norway and Sweden, was marred by some of the most bitter and concentrated opposition the evangelist had ever faced. In Oslo, a coalition of scientists, psychologists, actors, writers, and miscellaneous humanists opposed the crusade. Voicing some of the same complaints, but with greater vituperation, a group calling itself the Heathen Society loudly vowed to disrupt the services and made good on their pledge. At a meeting for pastors, a young woman barely missed dousing Graham with a mixture of red paint and chemicals. As security men trundled her out of the room, Billy benignly declared, “I love that young woman because Christ loves her,” a statement that contained the requisite cheek turning while making it clear he did not find her intrinsically winsome. At a stadium rally, the same woman slashed the ropes holding a huge crusade banner, then climbed a tall light tower where she unfurled a sign reading WHEN CHRISTIANS GET POWER, THEEY WILL KILL. A female companion on another light tower loosed a long blast from a powerful air horn and showered the crowd with anti-Graham leaflets, while other heathens chanted, “Billy, go home!” Police hustled the demonstrators away, allowing Graham to finish the service, but as he left, still more hecklers hurled rotten fruit, cream-filled cakes, and small bags of garbage at him, none of which scored a direct hit. In Stockholm protesters pelted Billy with tomatoes, this time hitting their mark, and criticized him for terrorizing children with the fear of hell. Faculty and students at a Lutheran seminary in Uppsala so opposed his coming to Sweden that they released a paperback book subjecting his theology and approach to severe criticism, leveling charges of unreasonable expense and psychological manipulation of crowds (his use of the invitation, they said, was “spiritual rape”) and criticizing the evangelist for his association with Nixon, his support of the war in Vietnam, and his strong opposition to communism. The attacks had their effect. The inquirer rate for all services was less than 1 percent, the lowest ever recorded in forty years of crusades.

  Most of Graham’s foreign crusades during this period met with far better results. Repeatedly—in Singapore 1978, Australia 1979, Japan 1980, and Mexico City 1981—participants and team members reported larger-than-expected crowds, high percentages of first-timer responses to the invitation, and occasional doubling and tripling of church membership. Repeatedly, they delighted in generous and even-handed treatment by the media and government officials and at ecumenical cooperation that crossed virtually all barriers, except those protecting McIntire-type Fundamentalists from contamination by compromise and those insulating liberals from people who believed more fervently than they deemed appropriate.

  Back in America, Graham continued to demonstrate increasing openness to Roman Catholics, and they returned the favor. In a crusade in Asheville early in 1977, a Catholic church opened its doors to allow overflow crowds to view the crusade on closed-circuit television. And in May Graham held a five-day crusade on the campus of Notre Dame University. Though he altered his sermons mainly by adding references to Bishop Fulton Sheen and Mother Teresa, Christianity Today aptly observed that this remarkable event showed that Graham “is not afraid to go deep into Roman Catholic territory. It also showed that many elements in the once-hostile Catholic community are now receptive to Graham’s type of ministry.” CT reported that one priest had taken off his collar as he came forward, telling a counselor he was accepting Christ for the first time, but Graham required no such renunciation of past allegiance. On the contrary, he assured Catholics that he was not asking them either to break or to form a relationship with a particular denomin
ation. And as one measure of the impact of his ecumenism on his own team, Robert Ferm, who had often assured anxious supporters that Mr. Graham would never compromise the gospel by consorting with Catholics, addressed the faculty and students at the Notre Dame seminary prior to the crusade. It was, Ferm admitted ten years later, in a bit of charming understatement, “significant.”

  Graham acknowledged continuing differences between Catholic and Evangelical theology. “From my point of view,” he noted, “the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes Mary too much, but I think Protestants have gone the other direction in denying the greatness of Mary. The Scripture says she was the most blessed of women. Also, the infallibility of the pope is something Protestants can never accept, but I have a great deal of admiration for the pope, even though I don’t accept all of his theology. I don’t think the differences are important as far as personal salvation is concerned.” In a similar vein, T. W. Wilson observed that television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart was “absolutely wrong” in his insistence that Catholics are not Christians in the eyes of God. “A number of doctrines they teach,” Wilson said, “we don’t subscribe to, nor would we ever. But to say that they are not Christians—-man alive! Anybody that receives Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is converted! They’re born again! I believe the pope is a converted man. I believe a lot of these wonderful Catholics are Christians. I’d like to shake them and turn them around and tell them, ‘You don’t need all this. You don’t need to go to the confession booth and confess all your sins to that priest. He’s just a man.’ So there are differences, but that doesn’t mean they’re not converted.”