These men, in essence, spent almost all of their adult lives together, united in spirit and by telephone even when separated geographically. “When you have been together and worked together for so many years,” Barrows pointed out, “you just know one another. You know what the others are thinking, how they are going to react.” None, perhaps, was more important to the unity of the organization than Barrows himself. In a brief but singular tribute in 1986, Graham told the nearly 10,000 evangelists gathered at Amsterdam that “God has given me mighty men, but the mightiest of all has been Cliff Barrows.” Graham knew Barrows was ill, suffering from what proved to be a tumor that sidelined him for almost a year, but it was not compensatory praise. No man in the association, save Graham himself, comes in for higher praise, and several ministry veterans admitted that “Cliff is the guy to go to if there is a real problem.” One key function Barrows served was to discourage power plays on the part of other members of the association. “If anybody could have built a following for himself,” Lenning observed, “it would have been Cliff, because he is such a warm person. But he has not done that. He has been a model for other people in the organization. If the number two man isn’t grabbing for power, it’s harder for anyone else to do it.”
T. W. Wilson, almost invisible publicly, continued to be almost indispensable privately. As Graham’s servitor, shadow, and shield, he arranged travel and lodging, provided confidential companionship, protected the evangelist from the endless stream of petitioners who want “just fifteen minutes” of his time, and performed any other task, large or small, that needed performing. With Graham since the night they answered Mordecai Ham’s challenging call together, Grady Wilson played a vital role in the organization until serious heart attacks in 1977 and 1978 forced him to curtail his activities. After illness made it impossible for him to keep a full schedule, Grady still made it to several of Graham’s crusade services each year and continued to preach on occasion, even when congestive heart disease made it necessary for him to spend a fair portion of each day in bed. He remained a beloved figure until his death early in the fall of 1987. At the Columbia crusade during the spring of that same year, he drew affectionate greetings and smiles as he strolled through the hotel lobby, wearing a raffish plantation hat and sporting a cane over which a rattlesnake skin had been stretched, so that its ferocious fanged head appeared to emerge out of his gnarled fist. The cane seldom failed to attract a comment, and Grady never failed to point out that he was “the only snake handler on the Billy Graham team.” The offspring of other team members, young adults themselves, pumped his hand and hugged him and instructed their children to “love Uncle Grady’s neck.” When old friends asked him how he felt, he assured them he didn’t fear meeting his Maker but was enjoying what time he had left in this earthly realm. “I’m ready to go,” he said more than once, “but I’m not getting up a load right now.” And when an old friend asked when might be a good time to get together for a visit, he told him, “I’m free between now and the rapture.”
When it finally came time for Grady to go, his spirits seldom sagged. Doctors and nurses told family members he had changed their lives as they watched him face death with such equanimity. When a young nurse asked him, “Aren’t you just a little bit afraid?” he replied, “Honey, why should I be afraid? I’m going to see Jesus.” His daughter Nancy, a nurse and missionary herself, sat with him as death came near. The last words he heard as he drew his final breaths were the soft reassurance that “we love you. It won’t be long till we see you in glory.” At the funeral Billy Graham told the story of Grady’s first sermon, when he borrowed and twisted the stem off Billy’s watch, and he used the four points Grady had made in that first sermon to structure his own remarks. The last point called for listeners to make a decision for Christ. Bev Shea sang, and friends and family spent at least as much time laughing as crying. They missed Grady, to be sure, but none doubted where he had gone, and all of them expected to see him again.
Walter Smyth did not spend as much time in Graham’s physical presence as some other members of the inner circle, but contact between the two men was constant, particularly since the early 1960s, when Smyth moved into position as head of team operations and, later, as vice president of the association with special responsibility for international operations. When Smyth left Youth for Christ to go to work for Graham in 1950, Evangelical publisher William B. Eerdmans raised a caution. “Why put all your eggs in one basket?” he asked. “What if something happens to Billy Graham?” Smyth told Eerdmans that if something happened, God would have some other work for him to do. Reflecting on that memory in his small office in Amsterdam, waiting for the 9,600 evangelists who would soon start pouring in from all over the world, he said, “And here we sit, thirty-six years later. When I started out, I had no idea all this could happen. We were fumbling. We were stumbling. We didn’t know what was going on. Nobody in the longest stretch of the imagination ever expected it to run this long. And here we are today with more invitations and larger crowds and bigger responses than ever.” How did he account for that? “You can’t explain it, except for God.”
Knowledgeable observers often acknowledged a low-key but discernible rivalry between Smyth and George Wilson, perhaps inevitable in a situation in which one man’s job is to control the purse strings and the other’s is to see to it that his projects get the resources they need, and several suggested that a major reason the team’s offices were in Atlanta from 1965 to 1977 was because Smyth and other team members wanted to get out from under Wilson’s close supervision. However real and deep that rivalry—and Billy Graham’s men do not speak freely of friction in their ranks—Smyth enjoyed an enviable reputation for spotless character, great personal warmth and wisdom, indefatigable commitment to the ministry’s goals, and astonishing patience with his underlings. Bob Williams, who adopted Smyth as a mentor, recalled an occasion when a staff member was causing notable tension among his colleagues. “I found Dr. Smyth sitting in his office, praying and weeping about this man—the man we all wanted to choke.” Then, with a smile that acknowledged the tensions his own ego and brisk style had some times created, Williams added, “I have heard several times that he has wept over me.” Billy Graham paid a similar tribute to Smyth’s forgiving spirit. “I don’t know that I ever had an argument with Walter,” he mused, “and it’s his fault.”
Pressed up against this inner circle, vital to the organization and held in high esteem, were second and third tiers comprised of such men as John Corts, Sterling Huston, Howard Jones, Ralph Bell, John Wesley White, Alexander Haraszti, John Akers, and the various crusade directors and special-purpose men and women who attended to whatever task needed doing. Leighton Ford was a kind of first among equals in this company before leaving BGEA in 1986. One insightful observer with close ties to the association described Ford as theologically “so conservative he squeaks” but credited him with being “just about the only one who was not absolutely sure of everything” and with having a special sensitivity to the social implications of the gospel and the concerns of non-Western people. Now, under the aegis of the Leighton Ford Ministries, he holds crusades and devotes special attention to training younger evangelists in what he characterizes as an effort to repay the encouragement Billy Graham gave to him. For his part, Graham seemed happy with the arrangement. “I told Leighton twenty years ago, ‘You cannot establish yourself as long as you are staying in my shadow.’ And I’ve talked to him several times since, and finally, he began to see it. So he worked out a plan and we agreed to help him financially, which we have done. I think this last year we gave him about $400,000. We’ll continue to do that if we have enough ourselves.” (In fact, BGEA’s IRS returns indicate that contributions to Ford’s ministry during the year in question amounted to $226,494. No contributions were listed for 1987 or 1988.)
The problem of living in Billy Graham’s shadow was not peculiar to Leighton Ford. “We only need one preacher and one song leader,” Johnny Lenning pointe
d out, “so there’s not room for a lot of competition. We have lost some good men who did not want to be subjugated to Billy and who left to form their own ministries.” Tedd Smith agreed. “People come to hear Billy Graham,” he observed. “You know that and you work with that. You are either very happy with that, or you don’t work out.” Fortunately, most team members found satisfaction in being part of the first rank of big-league evangelism. To be sure, pride found its outlets. Veterans sure of their own place will smile and suggest that one watch the little shuffles that occurred when Graham left his hotel for a crusade service or a press conference as certain members of the organization jockeyed to see who got to ride with Billy and who rode in the second car or the van. And in a circle where honorary doctorates from Christian colleges are as ubiquitous as pocket testaments, those who never managed to garner one or who chose not to flaunt either earned or honorary distinctions poked gentle fun at those who introduced themselves as “Doctor.” Despite such occasional outcroppings of vainglory, members of the Graham team appeared remarkable in their ability to divert attention from themselves to their leader and to the cause they served. “There’s not much upward mobility,” Lois Ferm observed, “but you just have to come to grips with that. My own personal attitude is that I feel very honored and thrilled to be a part of this great movement in history. An important factor, of course, is that Billy himself thinks you are the greatest thing that ever came down the pike. He’s convinced of it. You know that anybody else with your credentials could do the job just as well as you, but he doesn’t believe that. As long as he doesn’t believe it, who am I to disagree with him?”
No one pretends that working for Billy Graham was an unbroken idyll. Crusade directors write and speak of the loneliness they sometimes felt when moving to a new city, even though they typically took a small core of associates with them. Men who spent more than half their time away from home acknowledged that this put a strain on even the most long-suffering of wives and understanding of children. Faithful workers down in the ranks devoted their lives to Billy Graham’s ministry, then sometimes wondered if he knew they exist. And those who have experienced dark nights of the soul occasionally admit that the genuine closeness and family spirit that pervaded the organization when things were going well, or when illness or death or other kinds of externally caused problems to arise, were not always manifest in less straightforward circumstances. “There is a need for more pastoral care within the team,” one former team member alleged. “There could have been more closeness in times of trouble, more help when there were pressures and problems. People in the association have an enormously hard time facing conflicts and personal problems. It’s almost considered a sign of weakness if you confess a problem. They tend to give you a straight spiritual answer—if they ever discover the problem—without looking at the sociological or psychological aspects. They can win an argument without helping the person. There can be a sort of condemnation for failures, faults, and sins, instead of a spirit of helping people seek and find forgiveness, and work out their problems.”
Whatever the truth of that assessment—and a sufficient number of present and former team members sounded similar notes to make it seem plausible—it is also quite apparent that the level of personal harmony and mutual commitment among at least a fairly wide circle of key personnel was truly remarkable. John Stott, who lauded Graham for surrounding himself with able men, observed that competence was not their only distinguishing mark. “They truly love each other. And they are extremely loyal to each other. They’re like overgrown schoolboys. It’s endearing.” Stott’s country man, the Reverend Gilbert Kirby, agreed: “It’s the most effective small team I have ever seen. You can liken it to the apostolic party with Paul, traveling around Asia Minor, going to strategic places. I don’t know when there has been another small team like it. Certainly not in this century.”
35
The Bible [Still] Says
More than forty years into his public ministry, Billy Graham had few, if any, peers as a Christian leader. Still, he regularly insisted that he lacked depth and profundity as a theologian and that his sermons and books were rather ordinary in both form and content. Few of his closest colleagues seemed inclined to dispute him. Robert Ferm, who spent a career putting the best possible face on Graham’s actions and words, described him as “a theologian of the highest realm” but made the mark of his greatness his ability to simplify. “I have read the major theologians,” Ferm said, “and he is in an entirely different category. He is a man who knows God. Knowing God, he has a concept of the inspiration of Scripture that he can put into fifteen or twenty words, while other men would write a whole book about it.” Other associates and friends acknowledge the simplicity of Graham’s theology but do not assign it the same depth. John Akers tactfully observed, “I have found from time to time that he had more understanding about certain theological issues than is perhaps the popular perception.” Carl Henry admitted that “I keep my fingers crossed about the books Billy writes” and characterized Graham’s theology as a conservative “people’s theology” that gained its authority from the evangelist’s total reliance on Scripture. Still another veteran colleague was more blunt: “Billy has never worked through his theology.”
The theology Graham espoused in his later years differed a bit from that of his early ministry, but warnings by his Fundamentalist detractors that association with liberal churchmen would undermine his allegiance to the pillars of Evangelical orthodoxy proved unwarranted. He made room for more liberal views than his own but remained loyal to traditional formulations. He refused, for example, to damn those who espouse some form of theistic evolution—“I seriously doubt if differences at this point really make too much sense”—but made it clear he believed Adam and Eve were real people who lived in a real Garden of Eden “that many scholars think was in the area now occupied by Iraq and Iran.” Similarly, he acknowledged he could find nothing in the New Testament that made belief in the Virgin Birth essential to salvation but unequivocally stated that “I most certainly believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin.” As for the nature of Scripture itself, he shied away from the shibboleth term inerrancy, by which conservatives mean the Bible contains no scientific or historical error, but he regularly asserted his belief in the “plenary verbal inspiration” of the Bible, noting that “it has always been clear to me that we cannot have inspired ideas without inspired words.” And he never wandered far from his conviction that when he used the phrase “The Bible says . . . ,” it was tantamount to saying, “The Bible means. . . .” Even so, he did not insist that all Christians hold a conservative view of Scripture. “We are not saved because of our view of the Bible,” he said. “We are saved by our view of Jesus Christ and our acceptance or rejection of him and the life we live after we come to Christ.”
Graham’s reflections about other key aspects of systematic theology were equally innocent of struggle or conflict. “I cannot prove the existence of God,” he said, “but deep inside, everyone knows there must be some sort of supernatural being.” Though he confessed that “I can’t explain the Trinity satisfactorily,” he noted that “it’s not what I don’t understand about God that troubles me. It’s what I do understand and don’t do. That’s not original with me, by the way. I’ve heard a lot of people say that.” His view of humanity and its deepest need also remained essentially unchanged from the portrait he drew in the 1950s. The complexities of human nature plumbed by Shakespeare and Sartre, by Camus and Chekhov, by Bergman and, indeed, by the Bible itself need not occupy us unduly, he seemed to say, since virtually all human problems can be explained by reference to “something that happened in the Garden of Eden long ago.” In the early years of his ministry, Graham had proclaimed that “Christ is the answer” to virtually any problem his hearers might face. Wider experience and honest reflection eventually taught him to admit to inquirers that “coming to Christ is not going to solve all your problems. It may create some new problems. Because when you�
��ve been going one way and suddenly turn around and go the other way, against the tide of evil in the world, that’s going to create some friction and difficulty.” Still, those fearing they were doomed to days of persecution and long nights of existential wrestling were surely relieved to hear in his next sentence that they could successfully meet and master these challenges if they had “certain things, and we’re going to give them to you in just a moment.” The promised buckler and shield consisted of a copy of the Gospel of John, a few memory verses, the first lesson of a Bible correspondence course, and assurance that God would not allow Satan to subject them to doubt or temptation too compelling to resist.
One of the thorniest problems for Evangelical Christians is the fate of the heathen who never hear Billy Graham or any other Christian evangelist proclaim the gospel. A 1978 article in McCall’s magazine quoted Graham as having said “I used to believe that pagans in far countries were lost if they did not have the gospel of Christ preached to them. I no longer believe that.” Predictably, that apparent widening of the circle of the saved scandalized some of Graham’s supporters and led to a hasty assurance by Christianity Today that the evangelist’s beliefs had been misrepresented. Graham was careful not to make any subsequent statements that appeared to exempt anyone from the need to make an explicit commitment to Christ, but he did not automatically consign to hell all who never hear the Christian gospel preached. “They are in the hands of a God of love and mercy and grace,” he said. “I don’t think I can play God.” He was willing to venture, however, that he doubted a righteous God would consign an Albert Schweitzer, who denied the deity of Christ but gave his life to good works, to the same fate reserved for such consummately evil men as Hitler and Eichmann. “Hitler and Schweitzer should not be in the same place.” Beyond that, he would not speculate: “I’m going to have to wait until I get to heaven, and ask the theologians up there and get the answer.”
A Prophet with Honor Page 87
