A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  The next Communist country to allow Graham to preach was perhaps the most repressive of all: Romania. Alex Haraszti had been working to obtain an invitation since 1978. The Ceaus¸escu government, badly in need of gestures to mask its true character, agreed to permit a visit as early as 1983, but the Orthodox patriarch resisted for two more years, fearing a Graham tour would boost the fortunes of the large Hungarian Catholic minority and the smaller but vigorous Protestant sects, particularly Baptists and Pentecostals. Despite, or more likely, in direct response to, strict government controls on religion, Romania has been one of the world’s revival hot spots during the 1970s and 1980s, and when Graham finally got permission to enter the country in 1985, he was met by the largest crowds he had faced anywhere in Eastern Europe, even though Romanian media gave no advance notice of his visit. In Timisoara, an estimated 150,000 who had gathered on a large square around an Orthodox cathedral grew so frustrated at the government’s refusal to allow Graham to address them over loudspeakers that only a strong show of potential force by the state police averted a riot. At one point, as the Orthodox metropolitan led Graham and his party through a dense crowd, the sheer pressure of thousands of people struggling to get close to him caused the evangelist to list to his left at almost a forty-five-degree angle. “What a telling way to die,” he gasped, “dying by the crowds which did not hear the gospel.” Though he later admitted he had feared for his life, Dr. Haraszti did not count the appearance a failure. “These people,” he said, “will speak about what they did not hear.”

  In Sibiu police averted a repeat of the scene in Timisoara by cordoning Graham off so that no crowds were allowed to form anywhere close to him, but throngs estimated as high as 40,000 heard him in Voronet, Arad, and Oradea. In Bucharest, where he preached at several sites, the government reneged on a promise to allow overflow crowds to hear him by loudspeakers, but at one location, a Baptist minister successfully bluffed a Securitate officer into leaving the loudspeakers in place, warning him that the crowd would kill him if he tried to take them down. Overall, according to Haraszti, approximately 150,000 people heard Graham in Romania; another 150,000 to 250,000 saw but did not hear him because of the lack of loudspeakers. Without question, these were the largest religious gatherings in Romanian history.

  As in his first visit to the Soviet Union, Graham baffled and upset many Romanian Christians by expressing his “gratitude to the leadership of their country, which gives full and genuine freedom to all religious denominations,” a description they found quite at variance with the true situation, even with respect to his visit.

  Interestingly, government officials made little effort to mask their cynicism. Every sermon was introduced with long, self-serving paeans to the Ceaus¸escu regime, and host churches not only were required to provide expensive gifts to Securitate officials traveling with Graham but were charged exorbitant sums to cover travel and accommodations for the evangelist’s party (expenses BGEA had already covered) and for accompanying Romanian officials, apparently including the hundreds of Securitate personnel whose major role was to frustrate efforts of church people to see and hear the evangelist preach. Still, even one Romanian Baptist who reported these disappointments, which he shared, acknowledged that Graham’s visit had been “a blessing” and “the greatest public miracle I have experienced” under Communist rule.

  Graham followed the Romanian trip with yet another visit, in 1985, to Hungary, whose government demonstrated its cordiality by extending privileges he had received in no other Communist country. In Pecs a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral not only heard Graham speak from the cathedral steps but were able to see his face on a twelve-by-eight-meter Diamond Vision screen brought in from Great Britain. This was the first outdoor public religious meeting since World War II. In Budapest he chalked up another postwar first when he was permitted to speak in a state-owned sports arena that normally seated 12,500 people. When authorities saw that the crowd was a model of deportment, they allowed over 2,000 more to enter, to sit on steps and stand in walkways. At both services and in four other cities where John Akers and Franklin Graham preached, Bibles and copies of Peace with God and The Holy Spirit were given away or sold at reduced prices at open bookstalls.

  After taking note of Graham’s two appearances, Cardinal Lékai, Catholic primate of Hungary, told the evangelist in the presence of U.S. ambassador Nicholas Salgo, “There are three people who are great manipulators of crowds in the present world: President Reagan, a former actor; Pope John Paul II, a former actor; and Billy Graham.” Haraszti noted with a wry smile that the cardinal “did not add any qualifications after Dr. Graham’s name.” These men, the cardinal noted, could influence crowds both large and small. They know how to hold attention, how to get people to do what they want them to do, even how to manipulate them. They know what people want to hear and do not want to hear, what causes negative sentiments and what causes positive sentiments. “To be perfectly honest, Dr. Graham,” he said, “and please don’t be offended, but I call you one of the greatest actors on the human scene. Without all the resources that the President has, or the built-in influential factors that the pope has, you have built yourself up and gone further than either one.” Graham, recalled Haraszti, did not respond. “He was very friendly, like always, but he was not taken with it. He has thought of it many times, of course.”

  Graham felt he achieved a measure of success in the iron curtain countries. He understood that the Communist governments had their own agendas, and that preaching the Christian gospel was not one of them. “People ask us all the time,” Walter Smyth observed,” ‘Don’t you realize they are using you?’ Of course, they are using us. But we are using them as well, to get the gospel out to their people. And we have an element on our side with which they are not familiar, and that’s the Holy Spirit, who continues his work after we are gone. We feel it is worth whatever advantage it is to them to gain prestige out of Billy Graham’s visit or to prove that there is greater religious freedom than many Westerners think.” Often echoing this “our-propaganda-is-greater-than-theirs” line, Graham insisted only that he not be asked to criticize the American government or its foreign policy, and that no attempt be made to influence what he would say, either in the pulpit or at any other public gathering. If granted these freedoms, he felt he had little to fear from efforts of his hosts to turn his visits to their advantage. While he may have overestimated his own ability to resist manipulation, he was not so naive as to imagine manipulation would not be tried, and he accepted as a given that his every move was under careful surveillance. “I always go with the assumption that we are being recorded,” he said, “in bedrooms, at tables, even in automobiles. But I have felt that in Korea and the Philippines, and in some Western countries, too.” Rather than view this as oppressive, he chose to use it as an opportunity for evangelism. “In several countries,” he recalled with a chuckle, “Ruth would read the Bible, and then I would read the Bible, and when she prayed, she would pray real loud for the people who were listening to our conversation. And we explained the gospel to each other over and over, so that whoever recorded that would have the gospel message. We have done that everywhere.”

  After more than a decade of experience, Graham and his associates are convinced they have accomplished real evangelism in Eastern Europe. In most places it was not feasible for inquirers to respond to the invitation as in a Western crusade, but Billy regularly asked those who wished to make a decision for Christ to stand or raise their hands, and uncounted thousands complied. As in American crusades, many were doubtless simply renewing their Christian commitment. Others, quite likely, were making firm a resolution toward which they had been moving for some time. Still others may have been taken by surprise by their own positive response to what the evangelist had to say. Ed Plowman told of a government official in Moscow who confided to him that “when Billy Graham asked people to raise their hands, it touched my heart. And in my heart, I raised my
hand.” Graham and his men also felt their visits have improved the situation for Eastern European believers. In the spring of 1989, John Akers observed, “We found that political leaders in that part of the world had very little sensitivity to the American religious scene or to the sensitivity American Christians felt about the persecution of their fellow Christians in other parts of the world. I think the Jewish people have done a much better job than Christians have of bringing pressure to bear, being noisy about the treatment of Jews in other parts of the world, specifically in Eastern Europe. We have tried to get the Eastern European governments to understand that people in this part of the world feel strongly about how churches are treated.” A primary concern has been to elevate the standing of Evangelical churches and to improve their relations with Orthodox and Catholic bodies. Haraszti noted that Baptists were prominently involved in every Socialist country the evangelist visited. By appearing in Orthodox and Catholic cathedrals, flanked always by a Baptist minister who served as his interpreter, Graham gave “credibility, visibility, and respectability to Baptists, and also to Pentecostals and other small churches.” But concern was not limited to Evangelicals. One quite self-conscious tactic the Graham team used was to win concessions for themselves that could then be passed on to native Christians. Repeatedly, Alex Haraszti urged local religious leaders to press the team’s case for greater freedom by asking the minister of religious affairs, “If Billy Graham, an American, can appear on our television and preach in stadiums with loudspeakers and Diamond Vision screens, why can’t our bishop or patriarch do the same? Why can’t Protestants have a mass meeting? If he can sell religious books, why can’t we?” “I gave them this argument,” Haraszti said, “and they are using it.” Graham undergirded this approach by his consistent exhortation to Christians to be good workers and loyal citizens, and thus to reduce their governments’ perception of them as real or potential enemies. “We are bringing new images of believers and churches,” Haraszti noted. “They are seeing us as an honest Church, a nonpowerful Church, a loyal Church.” He was not implying, however, that the Church simply bend itself to the will of the State. Drawing on an image Jesus had used, he asserted that the churches would also wield a transforming influence. “We penetrate these societies and change them like leaven.”

  As part of this leavening process, Graham has been quick to take advantage of any opportunity. After the devastating earthquake in Soviet Armenia in 1988, BGEA donated $50,000 in relief money, channeling $30,000 through the Orthodox Church and $20,000 through the All-Union Evangelical Council. “One reason we did that,” Akers acknowledged, “was because the churches are now being permitted in small ways to do some social work. And quite frankly, a gift like this is a way to help that process continue. We are concerned about the earthquake victims, of course. It’s not just a gimmick, by any means, but it was an opportunity for us to hit the wedge and open that crack a bit more—a way to strengthen the position of the churches. We are also exploring the possibility of assisting in the printing of some religious literature. We have informal permission to print perhaps 200,000 copies of Billy’s books in the Soviet Union. There is virtually no religious literature of any kind in the churches, so that would be a real breakthrough. Here, our book would be just one of 15,000 or 16,000 titles. Over there, it may be one of only fifteen or sixteen, so it’s enormously significant.

  “No one can estimate,” Akers continued, “how much [Graham’s visits] have done to bring about the changes we have seen in the last year or two, particularly in the Soviet Union, but it is interesting that virtually every point Mr. Graham made [in his 1984 meeting with Ponomarev] has become a reality, point by point, little by little. That’s not to say that everything is just rosy, but it is to say that a number of points [on which] there has been substantial progress are precisely the points that Mr. Graham did raise. I am not trying to claim we are the catalyst, and we will probably never know exactly what our role has been, but it is true that Billy is alone among Western churchmen at having had a unique kind of access to Eastern European leadership.”

  Again without claiming many specific victories, Graham’s associates clearly feel that, criticisms of his early visits notwithstanding, he has served his country well as an unofficial ambassador. “There is a lot of artificial, government-nurtured anti-Americanism in these countries,” Haraszti pointed out. “And here a great and famous American comes, and he behaves humbly and shakes hands and deals with people on all levels. People were able to get acquainted with a nonugly American who was equally at home in government limousines and simple family homes. He was a magnificent goodwill ambassador.”

  Graham enjoyed White House support throughout the Reagan years, and clearly expected similar encouragement from old friends George Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker. “I have known Jim Baker for several years,” he explained, “and Susan [his wife] is a really committed Christian. She is all-out for Christ. I can’t evaluate what his position would be about any particular visit I might make, but I know that if he found it within the scope of policies he approved, he would be very warm to me. He believes in what we are doing.” When Gorbachev visited the United States in 1988, Graham was the lone Protestant clergyman invited to the White House for the full round of celebrations. At one gathering, the two men sat directly across from each other. “I have read that he has cold eyes,” the evangelist recalled. “I never saw those cold eyes. His eyes were always warm or they were dancing. He has a tremendous sense of charisma about him.” Graham clearly doubted that the Soviet leader was a committed atheist, pointing out that “when he got off the plane, if you remember, he said, ‘May God help us.’ And then in his talk to that group at the embassy, an hour and a half where I was sitting right in front of him, he used the word spiritual three times.”

  In July 1991 Billy Graham and his associates conducted a five-day School of Evangelism in Moscow. More than 4,900 Protestant pastors, evangelists, and other church workers from throughout the Soviet Union attended the school. The event was held in a state-owned sports arena, and participants were housed at Moscow State University at BGEA’s expense. While he was in Moscow, Graham had long conversations with Boris Yeltsin, newly inaugurated president of the Russian Republic, and with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. The visit with Gorbachev was given prominent coverage on a top-rated Soviet TV news show aired nationwide. Declaring that “it is harvest time” in the USSR, Graham revealed that he was considering an invitation to return to Moscow in 1992 to conduct a crusade in Lenin Stadium.

  32

  Amsterdam

  Billy Graham knew why men and women needed to be saved, and he knew how to show them the way. As he saw his own life and ministry moving inexorably toward the end, what he wanted more than anything else was to share that quite simple, quite practical knowledge with others who like himself found their greatest joy in going about from place to place, preaching the word and winning souls. The upshot of that impulse was a pair of conferences in Amsterdam in 1983 and 1986, which, one participant noted, “[if they had happened] in the time of the Early Church, they . . . would have been written up in the Book of Acts.”

  According to Walter Smyth, the idea of a practical, instructional conference for itinerant evangelists was “something that had been burning in [Graham’s] heart for years.” He had been pleased with Lausanne as “a movement to reach leaders,” but wanted something “to reach the little guys out in the bushes,” the uneducated evangelists in Calcutta or the Congo whose primary need was not a treatise on how to establish dialogue with a Marxist or a Muslim but basic instruction in such mundane matters as sermon composition, fund-raising, and effective use of films and videotapes. He had thought of such a conference as early as 1954, but it was not until 1977 that he finally pushed the wheels into motion. And what he had in mind was such a mammoth undertaking that it did not come to pass for another six years. The kind of gathering Graham envisioned was far more difficult to organize than the Berlin and Lausanne congr
esses. The first challenge lay in identifying and then contacting “the little guys out in the bushes.” Simply by virtue of being little guys, most of the men whom Graham sought to help were unknown to the people in charge of sending invitations. German Evangelical leader Werner Burklin, a YFC veteran who had worked for BGEA on other projects and who served as executive director for both conferences, acknowledged as they set about to construct an invitation list that he and his colleagues had no idea how many itinerant evangelists there were in the world or how to get in touch with them. By contacting church and parachurch leaders for names and references and putting out word that such an event was being planned, conference organizers eventually assembled a list of approximately 10,000 itinerant evangelists in 133 countries. After screening them as carefully as possible and allocating quotas to various countries, nearly 3,900 (70 percent from Third World countries) were invited to assemble in Amsterdam for an International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists (ICIE). Amsterdam was selected because, of the few locations in the world capable of providing food, lodging, and meeting places for a gathering of this size, the Netherlands had the additional advantages of being a major international airline center, with its own KLM Royal Dutch Airlines offering service from many parts of the world, and a tradition of allowing people from most other countries to obtain visas with little difficulty.