A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Some political observers surmised that Graham’s prominent presence at the convention might be a signal that the Democratic party was once again acceptable to the white Evangelicals who had so largely deserted it in the two previous presidential elections, but that interpretation did not last long. The Republicans were not about to concede Billy Graham to the Democrats. “I was invited to the Republican convention,” Graham recalled, “and I went. And they wanted me to lead the prayer after Reagan spoke, and I did. Then they asked me if I would stay over for the Bush speech, and I was glad to do it. I didn’t know I was going to be sitting with Mrs. Bush the whole time.” But there he was, smiling and applauding the nominee, and looking every inch as if he felt quite comfortable in the Republican box, even though he told the Associated Press, “I always stay politically neutral.” Five months later, he would once again look quite comfortable as he mounted the platform at the inauguration and thanked God that “in Thy sovereignty Thou has permitted George Bush to lead us at this momentous hour of our history for the next four years.”

  Graham took no public—and, as far as is known, no private—role in the campaign, but he never claimed he had no favorite in the race. Graham and Bush had, in fact, been friends for many years—“the best friend I have in the whole world, outside my immediate staff,” according to one account. The evangelist met George’s father, Prescott Bush, through friends converted during the 1957 New York crusade, and the Grahams had spent several short vacations at the family’s summer home in Hobe Sound, Florida. “George’s mother [was] one of the most remarkable Christian women I had ever known,” Graham observed. “Whenever we went down there, she would ask me to teach a Bible class. I don’t remember exactly when I met George, but we were thrown together at several things, and we became good friends. Then they began to invite us up to Kennebunkport. We’ve been up there five of the last seven years, I think. In fact, he just invited us to come to Camp David. I was there with Johnson twice and with Nixon once. Interestingly, George and I have never talked politics. Not one time. Never mentioned them. He’s never asked me to do anything for him.” Perhaps not, but on the evening of January 16, 1991, when American and allied forces launched the devastating air attack on Iraq, Billy Graham’s well-publicized presence in the White House and his oversight of a worship service for key political and military leaders the next morning lent powerful symbolic legitimation to the president’s claim to be conducting a just war.

  Graham also continued to stay in touch with another old Republican friend, Richard Nixon. “I visited him in New Jersey just recently,” he reported. “He was explaining his vision of America and the world in foreign policy. But he talked more about spiritual things and the Lord about as much as I had ever heard him talk before. I had a feeling that he was willing to talk now about things that he used to be reluctant to talk about. I think part of that was his Quaker background. He was a very staunch Quaker, and it was hard to express things having to do with spiritual matters. But I never had a doubt from the time I got to know him that he was a very religious man.”

  In 1982, Alexander Haraszti, who had accomplished what many believed impossible, conceded that “it is, humanly speaking, just impossible, even unimaginable, that a Christian minister of the gospel would actually be allowed in any communist country to preach from an open place like in a stadium, a large square, or on any secular premises.” Just seven short years later, in the summer of 1989, Haraszti stood at Billy Graham’s side on a platform erected in the center of Hungary’s largest stadium, and there, before an estimated 110,000 people—inevitably, a stadium record—and the largest known religious gathering in Hungary’s history, he translated into his native tongue a sermon the evangelist had based on Galatians 6:14: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . .” At the conclusion of the sermon, which Haraszti reproduced right down to the classic Graham gestures and the story of the ex-convict who came home to find a yard filled with yellow ribbons, more than 35,000 people came forward—-nearly one third of the crowd and the largest response the evangelist had seen in more than a half-century of inviting people to accept Jesus Christ. When the service was carried on the state television network a week later, many others contacted the sponsoring religious bodies, pushing the decision total even higher. One newspaper headlined its front-page story on the event with “An angel came upon the stadium.” Matyos Szuros, the president of the Hungarian parliament, filmed an interview for Graham to use on the television program that would air a few months later in America. Hungary was changing, he said. There was now greater freedom of religion, freedom for Christians to speak out about what they believed, freedom even, he noted with some sense of historical awareness, to preach in public to 100,000 people. The churches of Hungary, he said, were in the process of renewal, and that was good, because the nation needed to have them involved in the moral education of its people. Szuros’s statement amounted to an official admission that the ideological reasons for the suppression of religion had been proven wrong. These were not empty words. A month after this interview, the State Office for Religious Affairs was abolished as the government announced it was removing all barriers to the free development of church life in Hungary.

  The following spring, Graham registered another triumph over long odds. In 1960, shortly before the Berlin wall went up, he preached to a huge throng gathered in front of the historic Reichstag building near the Brandenburg Gate. The East German government and press denounced him as a warmonger, and Communist military troops tried to drown out his sermon by staging artillery practice a few hundred yards away. Thirty years later, the wall was in ruins, the Communist government in a state of collapse, and Billy Graham, the Great Survivor, was again preaching on the steps of the Reichstag, this time as the guest of both West and East German churches, which had jointly invited him to bring a spiritual dimension to the momentous upheavals destined to produce a reunified Germany, a reconfigured Europe, and an end to the cold war. As 15,000 people, most from East Germany, huddled in near-freezing rain under umbrellas and plastic sheeting, Graham told of the tears of joy he shed while watching the grim symbol of enmity come tumbling down and declared that “God has answered our prayers for peace.” He warned, however, that abandoning moral and spiritual values at this critical point in human history “could be just as devastating to society in the long run as weapons of mass destruction.” Announcing that “God is giving this country another chance,” he proclaimed the same message he had preached for over fifty years in more than sixty countries: “There is no hope for the future of Europe, America, or any other part of the world outside of the gospel of Christ.” His text was John 3:16.

  Dan Rather, who had scored Graham for naïveté at the time of his 1982 visit to the Soviet Union, acknowledged that “before anybody else I knew of, and more consistently than anyone else I have known, of any nationality, race, or religion, Reverend Graham was saying, ‘Spirituality is alive in the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist states. . . . Frankly, there were those years when I thought he was wrong, or that he didn’t know what he was talking about. It turns out he was right. And give him credit—he also took the time to go and see for himself.” And Richard Nixon volunteered, “There is no question that he helped bring about the liberation, the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, and some of the present opposition to Communism in the Soviet Union.”

  These dramatic ventures underlined Graham’s stature as a Christian world figure, but they did not displace his dedication to his primary and continuing call: preaching the gospel to as many people as humanly possible in whatever time is left to him. Fittingly, the undertaking he and his colleagues devised to provide a climax, though not a finale, to his career as a globe-circling evangelist, is known as Mission World. The original plan was to have him address crusade audiences in virtually every country on the planet simultaneously—or nearly so, with brief delays to accommodate differences in time zones. As the project took shape, Graham and his collea
gues, including a skeptical BGEA board, decided that the logistic complexity and enormous financial requirements of a one-shot, worldwide mission were too great to justify, and that a more modest, stage-by-stage approach would be more effective and efficient in achieving the desired goals. Had it not been for the scope of the original vision, however, no one would have dreamed that what actually occurred was a scaled-down version of something even grander. “Mission World arose as a response to cries for help from men and women who attended Amsterdam ’83 and ’86,” Bob Williams explained. “We can’t keep pushing Mr. Graham physically, but wherever he goes, we try to let his shadow fall as far as possible, through available technology, without having to extend him personally.”

  In Mission World’s 1989 incarnation, Graham’s shadow stretched across the British Isles and over 33 countries of Africa. In London itself he addressed nearly 400,000 people at services in four venues and more than 800,000 in 247 “live-link” centers throughout the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In Africa the satellite signal from London was aired live on the national television network in 13 countries. Another 20 nations received the program by videotape a week or two later, usually after translation into one of nine different languages. The initial African effort included 16,000 fully prepared crusades, with an aggregate attendance of 8.5 million. An additional 4,000 film and videotape missions in areas without TV reception were still going on six months later. As Williams pointed out, “We are not talking million-dollar high tech. We have been working with manufacturers. For five hundred dollars, and the cost is dropping all the time, we can buy a whole set of video equipment that a little guy in the jungle can learn to use right away. We put that into the hands of evangelists from Amsterdam ’83 and ’86 and let them tramp all across the country with it. They don’t have the stature to organize a crusade in Lagos, but they copy tapes just by jacking between recorders and then courier them out by bicycle or train or bus to locations all over Nigeria. We figure we were able to reach Africans at a cost of about 3.5 cents per viewer.” No attempt was made to get an accurate accounting of decisions from all meetings, but crusade leaders distributed 2.5 million pieces of follow-up literature. “We are not claiming there were 2.5 million inquirers,” Williams said, not mentioning that such a response would be larger than the number of inquirers who responded to the invitation in all of Graham’s crusades over the previous forty years. Still, he observed, “We can think and hope and dream and pray and wonder about how many there were and about what will happen now.” Furthermore, developments in technology have been so astonishing that achievements undreamt of when Mission World was first conceived now seem almost quaintly modest. “Five or six years ago,” Williams noted, “there were 140,000 television sets in all of India. Today, there are 30 million. In Thailand, one of every four homes has a VCR; five years ago, they were unknown. Now we have avenues and vehicles that would work only in more developed countries just a few years back. This approach could be a key to the ministry’s future after his death. People know exactly what you mean when you talk about Billy Graham evangelism or a Billy Graham School of Evangelism or an Amsterdam-type conference. They know what BGEA is and what it stands for. We can still have a tremendous ministry in being a catalyst and providing resources for genuine biblical evangelism. I don’t know what the Lord wants to do. We are getting a lot done now in Africa, Asia, and Latin America because of what we have done in the past. That doesn’t mean we have a future. But the Lord has gone before us, and He’ll have his hand on what happens next.” For now, however, Williams did not think it necessary to worry about what happened when Billy Graham departed the scene, for the evangelist was still on hand and going strong. “I’ve seen a greater passion, a greater urgency in Mr. Graham during the last five or six years,” he said. “I think he has a renewed strength and vision and courage. He won’t stop. I don’t know if he feels the days are coming when the world will be less receptive to the gospel, or if it’s something about the Second Coming, or what. Maybe it’s just that the helplessness and hopelessness of the world is becoming more evident. But there is a definite sense of urgency. It’s always been there, but it’s greater today than ever.”

  And so it seemed. Late in 1990, as crusade organizers in 70,000 locations in twenty-six countries of Asia eagerly awaited the falling of his shadow on their lands, Billy Graham launched the oriental expression of Mission World. On November 7, exactly seventy-two years to the day after Frank and Morrow Graham first proudly beheld their firstborn son and wondered what lay in store for him, he stood on the deck of a traditional Chinese junk as it crossed Victoria Harbor on its way to Hong Kong, whence, yet again, he would address the largest aggregate audience—an estimated 100 million souls—ever to hear the good news concerning Jesus Christ.

  Part 6

  Finishing the Course (The Final Years)

  38

  The Work of an Evangelist

  When the original edition of this book appeared, the story closed on Billy Graham’s seventy-second birthday. No other major evangelist in Christian history had enjoyed a significant ministry of comparable length, and no one would have faulted Graham had he decided to enter into quiet retirement, especially after his growing problems with trembling and weakness were diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease. But Bob Williams had been correct when he predicted, “He won’t stop.” Indeed, some of the most impressive achievements of Billy Graham’s entire ministry would come during his last decades.

  The most ambitious and logistically complex accomplishment was undoubtedly the completion of Mission World. The first phase, in 1989, had gone from London to more than 30 countries in Africa. The second phase, Mission World Asia, dispatched the Christian gospel, translated into 45 languages, from Hong Kong to more than 70,000 satellite and video crusades in 30 countries in Asia and the Pacific. Each Crusade was prepared as if Graham were coming personally; more than 400,000 counselors were trained and 10 million pieces of follow-up literature were printed in 30 languages. As in all subsequent Mission World efforts, the programs were culturally adapted, with pre-produced musical segments and testimonies designed to appeal to audiences in given regions. Although a precise count was impossible to obtain, available reports indicated that the goal of reaching 100 million people with each program had been met. It was clearly the largest single outreach in over 40 years of Billy Graham’s international ministry.

  Two years later, in November 1991, Crusade services originating in Buenos Aires reached an estimated 65 million people in 20 countries of South America, Central America, and Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean. The European edition of Mission World, dubbed ProChrist 93, called for greater technological sophistication than the three previous efforts. For some time, German Christians had wanted to sponsor a Billy Graham mission, but, perhaps still anxious to avoid association with the Nazi rallies of the 1930s and 1940s, wanted the evangelist to tour 20 cities over a 30-day period instead of holding a standard crusade in a large stadium. Graham’s health and stamina precluded such an exhaustive undertaking, but the Mission World format provided a satisfactory alternative. From a 7000-seat hall in Essen that served as a studio, Graham’s sermons, delivered alongside a German interpreter but translated simultaneously into 44 other languages, were transmitted by satellite to 386 remote sites in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In addition, eight uplink trucks beamed up to 14 daily transmissions of the program via various satellites to more than a thousand venues in 56 countries and territories in 16 time zones. An estimated 2 million people attended the services nightly and countless others viewed them later in thousands of video crusades, including many throughout the former Soviet Union. This venture brought the total of countries reached through Mission World since 1989 to 141, involving at least 95 different languages.

  By 1995, what had seemed unfeasible, perhaps even impossible, when Billy Graham first began to dream about preaching to the entire world at once, now seemed achievable. Bob Williams, still serving as director
of the project, spoke of “a double-hung window of opportunity,” referring to a relaxation of government restrictions in many areas and the dramatic reduction in the cost of satellite technology. Some things, of course, had not changed; one of those was time zones. Apart from being able to boast that the gospel had been preached to all nations at the same moment, actually trying to do so made no sense. As Mike Southworth, BGEA manager of satellite services, observed, “For Christians to get up in the middle of the night to go to a program is difficult enough. To ask non-Christians to do that is next to impossible, [and they] are really the ones we want to reach.”

  Instead, culturally adapted programs, molded around sermons Billy Graham preached in Hiram Bithom Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on March 16–18, 1995, were—after translation into 116 different languages—-bounced off 30 separate satellites to 3000 downlink sites in 185 countries in all 29 time zones, to be viewed at appropriate hours. In addition to stadiums, theaters, churches, and village gatherings at which the programs were projected onto bed sheets tacked to walls, the three programs were aired over national television networks in 117 countries and seen in the U.S. over several cable television systems and in national syndication. BGEA, not given to exaggerated claims regarding its audiences, estimated that more than a billion people heard at least one of the programs. With the possible exception of the Olympics, this project, dubbed Global Mission, may well have been the most technologically complex example of worldwide communication ever attempted.