A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  The answer to the first concern—“Will they show up?”—came early. Five hours before the concert was to start, an estimated 50,000 kids were waiting to get into the stadium. That sight hardly eased the concerns about behavior. Larry Ross, who now had primary responsibility for Graham’s public relations, recalled that Roger Flessing, by then in charge of BGEA media but still something of a free spirit, had provided his crew with T-shirts that read, “The Billy Graham It-Seemed-Like-a-Good-Idea-at-the-Time Tour.” In a similar spirit of giddy anxiety, Ross and several others sported clip-on earrings backstage. As the time for Graham to go on approached, Ross peeked out from backstage to see a mass of young humanity “pogo-ing” in front of the stage and a “wave” whipping around the upper deck of the stadium. Later he remembered thinking, “‘There is no way we are going to get control of this crowd. What are we going to do?’ But then, when Mr. Graham got up to speak, they settled down and you could hear a pin drop. Whether it is the grandfatherly image or the respect for his generation, I don’t know, but it was amazing. And it’s like that everywhere we go.”

  Tedd Smith gave a similar account. “We’ve never had anything like drugs,” he observed. “When the music is on, the kids are listening, doing what they do at a concert. Then here comes granddaddy on stage. The musicians give Billy Graham a hug. The kids say, ‘Oh, gee, these guys are hugging him. He’s a good person.’ And all of a sudden, they become very, very quiet. We have found that in every single city. What he says is very much what they want to hear.”

  Clearly, the experiment was a success, and Youth Night became a standard feature of Graham crusades, as did a Saturday morning Kidz Gig, aimed at younger children and often drawing upwards of 20,000 kids and their parents for a Christian music review featuring Psalty the Singing Songbook, a cartoon character popular in Evangelical circles. In a remarkably short time, Michael W. Smith, Kirk Franklin, dc Talk, Jars of Clay, Third Day, Steven Curtis Chapman, Crystal Lewis, Ricky Skaggs, the Gaither Vocal Band, the Tommy Coomes Band, Dennis Agajanian and the Praise Band, and other young Christian musicians were just as likely to be part of a Billy Graham crusade as were Sandi Patti or Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash.

  Ross acknowledged that not all of the old guard were easily won over. “It has been tough. Let’s put it this way—it has been an education process. Though they were very progressive in the early days, this was a whole genre of music they were not used to,” an observation underscored by watching team members remove ear plugs and grimace as they tried to communicate through the noise coming from the stage. The team was not alone. Franklin noted that “Daddy is not too comfortable with the music,” or, more pointedly, “Daddy doesn’t like it. He won’t even listen to it. But he’s willing to give it a try. They’re stocking the pond so he can go fishing.”

  The old evangelist was also willing to adjust his preaching to a new audience. Instead of hauling out a classic sermon about King Manassas, “The Wickedest Man Who Ever Lived,” he preached about Solomon, “the richest, most powerful, and sexiest man of his time,” moving somewhat beyond strict exegesis of Scripture to assert that Solomon had several Ph.D.s from the universities of his day and used drugs, not to mention all those wives and concubines, but still could not find happiness in pleasure and power. Instead of quoting Reader’s Digest or a world leader he had personally known, he cited MTV and shared nuggets of disillusionment from the lead singer of Nine-Inch Nails and the rapping Notorious B.I.G., or referred to Kurt Cobain’s widely publicized suicide.

  In city after city, Youth Night not only consistently drew the largest crowd for the crusade, but set stadium records in almost every venue—78,000 in Atlanta, 73,500 in Toronto, 82,000 in Minneapolis, 88,000 in Charlotte, 75,000 in San Antonio, 70,000 in Jacksonville. And so it went. In 1996 a special Youth Night television special was translated in 48 languages and sent to 160 countries. While asserting that “these programs have become not only a hallmark for his ministry, but a model for pastors who are trying to reach this generation,” Larry Ross admitted that the phenomenon continued to amaze him. “Sometimes,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head, “they will chant, ‘BILL-Y, BILL-Y, BILL-Y’ for a minute or two before they settle down. And then they hang on every word. To have an 82-year-old evangelist setting stadium attendance records on Youth Night—go figure. I think it just confirms the search for meaning.”

  The Youth Night programs had another quite visible effect on Billy Graham crusades. To accommodate the bands and such high-tech items as the JumboTron screens, the stage settings underwent radical transformation. Before Youth Nights began, the standard setting was a simple draped platform with several rows of chairs for key committee personnel, local clergy, and various dignitaries. Sometimes, in outdoor venues, a small canopy might be erected over the pulpit to protect the evangelist from sun or rain. In the new arrangement, the stage resembled those erected for major rock concerts, with a huge boxlike superstructure that stretched, with the screens and protective fencing, almost completely across the end zone of a football stadium and extended eighty feet upward. This provided protection from the elements and lent a much more theatrical air to the event. The rows of chairs for dignitaries were gone; only the few people with key roles appeared on the stage. Musicians entered through a curtain at the rear and performed before large screens that could be illuminated in dramatic ways, then lifted out of the way by cables when the performance ended. Billy Graham still spoke from a simple pulpit—a tiny, even lonely figure on a huge sound stage. Yet, as he summoned his strength and began to preach, it was easy to forget the new trappings and to remember the old days when he dominated the platform, even though that memory would have been far dimmer had his audience not been able to view him on the huge screens on each side of the stage works. As had been the case for more than a half-century of public ministry, the old evangelist was still anchored to the rock, geared to the times.

  Apparently Graham’s appeal to youth was not limited to Evangelical circles. In 1999 two addresses at Harvard drew capacity crowds. At the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he spoke on “The Relevance of God in the Twenty-first Century,” he received a long standing ovation from students and faculty after his address and forty-minute question-and-answer session. The demand to hear him was so great that a lottery system was used to select those allowed to attend the event. The only other person to require such a measure that year was Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. During the same visit Graham spoke at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. No lottery was used, but many students spent the night on the front steps of the church to make sure they could get seats the next morning. The Rev. Peter Gomes, a university minister and himself an unusually able and eloquent preacher, said Graham’s sermon on the meaning of the cross was one of the highlights of his twenty-five-year career at Harvard. The visit received extensive positive coverage in the college newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, not usually regarded as an Evangelical organ.

  Of all Billy Graham’s efforts to encourage the spread of the Christian gospel throughout the world, it is possible that none meant more to him, or ultimately will prove to have greater impact, than the mammoth Amsterdam conferences for itinerant evangelists. The 1983 and 1986 conferences described earlier in this book, together with numerous smaller regional conferences organized along the same lines, have trained tens of thousands of evangelists from all over the world in the arts, crafts, and commitment required to fulfill their calling in an effective manner. Glowing reports from participants in these programs regarding the efficacy of this training continue to support the view that the answer to the oft-asked question, “Who will be the next Billy Graham?” is not a single towering figure, but the thousands of men and women trained by BGEA to carry on his kind of ministry, not in great stadiums or via synchronous-orbit satellite, but in the highways and byways of the world, largely unknown outside their modest spheres. It was fitting, then, that the capstone to Billy Graham’s ministry was Amsterdam 2000, an expanded version of th
e earlier conferences.

  This nine-day gathering, held in July and August 2000, involved 10,732 participants from 209 countries and territories. It was undoubtedly the most international conference in the history of the world. Three-fourths of these men and women—while women constituted only eight percent of the total, they were still present by the hundreds—were from developing nations and most of these, approximately 7000 in all, lived in the same mass dormitory in Utrecht that had been used in the earlier conferences. Once again, preference was given to evangelists in the presumed prime of their careers, between ages twenty-five and forty-five, and to those whose formal educational opportunities had been limited. The twenty-two plenary sessions featured many of the familiar luminaries—Ravi Zacharias, Billy Kim, Luis Palau, Stephen Olford, J. I. Packer, John Stott, Bill and Vonette Bright, Charles Colson, Franklin Graham, Anne Graham Lotz, and George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, among others. Hundreds of other Evangelical stalwarts led 130 seminars and more than 200 workshops. To his great disappointment, and certainly to that of the participants, Billy Graham himself was unable to attend, due to a setback in the treatment of his disease, now re-diagnosed as hydrocephalus, which produces Parkinson’s-like symptoms. He did, however, watch the plenary sessions over the Internet, and Franklin delivered the message his father had prepared for the opening session of the conference.

  In addition to the larger enrollment, Amsterdam 2000 went beyond its two predecessors by widening the scope of its concern to include elements addressed by the other BGEA-supported international conferences, Berlin and Lausanne. (See pp. 325ff. and 439ff.) Echoing the concerns of the 1966 Berlin Conference, a Church Leaders Task Group focused on ways churches might become more evangelistic and cooperate more effectively with independent evangelists. Recalling the 1974 Lausanne Conference’s call for a greater sensitivity to cultural differences, a Theologians Task Group concentrated on problems encountered by evangelists trying to proclaim a uniform gospel message in a pluralistic world. A third contingent, the Strategists Task Group, focused on ways of implementing more fully Jesus’ Great Commission, developing specific strategies to plant churches by the end of 2002 in each of 253 population groups designated as “unreached peoples.” At the end of the conference these task groups produced what they called the “Amsterdam Declaration: A Charter for Evangelism in the 21st Century,” comprising a list of fourteen pledges they urged upon those called to evangelistic ministry. Like the previous conferences, the final session of Amsterdam 2000 included a massive communion service. Richard Bewes, Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, who officiated at that service, did not exaggerate when he called it “the most internationally representative Christian service of all time.”

  The thousands of participants for whom Billy Graham was a legendary hero were understandably disappointed at not having a chance to see him in person. The BGEA family itself, however, suffered a greater sadness. Bob Williams, who had played a major role in all three of the Amsterdam conferences, had contracted pulmonary fibrosis, a serious lung disease, during the course of his travels for the association as director of international ministries. Although seriously restricted by this condition, Williams remained heavily involved in the planning and oversight of this last great effort, all the while wearing a special pager that would notify him the moment a lung became available for transplant. The call never came. Bob Williams, age fifty-one, died on August 7, one day after the close of Amsterdam 2000.

  39

  “Guard What Has Been Entrusted to You”

  *Bob Williams’s death was untimely, but the Graham organization had been confronted with the realities of aging and death for several years. No one had believed Billy Graham would live forever, but questions of who, if anyone, would succeed him at his passing and of what would happen to BGEA at that point had been difficult to face. Graham and some of his closest associates clearly hoped Franklin would assume the mantle as leader of the organization and perhaps even as primary evangelist, even though Franklin had expressed considerable ambivalence about taking either role. Others were less sanguine at the prospect of transferring their loyalty and devotion to a man whose style differed significantly from his father’s and who, some thought, had not yet fully proved he was ready to assume such a position. And understandably, many people who had grown comfortable with a system and organization that had shown remarkable stability over more than four decades were anxious at the prospect of any significant change. As an obscure but wise philosopher once remarked, “When you start changing things, something different might happen.” But when Billy Graham was diagnosed with serious progressive illness in 1992, the pressure to attend to BGEA’s future began to mount, as it became increasingly clear that “someday” was, unavoidably, now at hand. Inevitably, Franklin Graham edged closer to center stage and the spotlight he had never seemed to crave.

  Franklin had been ordained in 1982, but he doubted the pulpit would be a major focus of his ministry, and he clearly did not aspire to follow in his father’s footsteps as a crusade evangelist. In 1983, while he was assisting at a crusade in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, led by BGEA associate evangelist John Wesley White, White persuaded him to preach one evening. When not a single person in the crowd of approximately 1,000 responded to the invitation, Franklin was devastated. “Don’t you ever ask me to do that again,” he told White. “I’m not Billy Graham.” He was serious. Not until 1989 did he preach in another crusade and then only after strong urging from his friend, hunting companion, motorcycle buddy, and born-again country guitar picker Dennis Agajanian, who gave him a rifle as an added inducement to join White in a crusade in Juneau, Alaska. The first effort in Juneau was hardly more successful than the Saskatoon outing. As Franklin told the story, only nine people came forward, and four of them were Dennis Agajanian’s friends. “He wanted to make sure that somebody went up,” Franklin recalled. “I didn’t find out about that until several years later. I asked him, ‘Dennis, why in the world would you do that? If God is in this and we try to manipulate the invitation, God will curse us. He won’t bless us.’”

  A night or two later, Franklin used one of his father’s favorite sermons, and the unmanipulated response to that one was much better. Franklin took this as a sign. “I realized that I had nothing to do with that. That was the Holy Spirit of God touching the lives of these people. They were responding to God’s invitation. I went back to my room that night and said, ‘God, if this is something you want me to do, I’ll be glad to do it. I will make it the number one priority in my life and I will do it as long as you will allow me to do it, but I will need your help.’” While he had no intention of shortchanging his work at Samaritan’s Purse, Franklin pledged to devote one-tenth of his time to evangelistic preaching and was soon holding eight to ten crusades around the world each year, at first alternating with John Wesley White and later as sole preacher, to progressively larger crowds.

  The success of these crusades surprised no one more than Franklin Graham himself. In 1994 he told Ken Garfield of the Charlotte Observer that he had avoided evangelistic preaching, because “I didn’t want to be compared to Daddy. There is enough pressure in life. I didn’t need that one.” And even with five years of preaching under his belt, he said, “It’s not that I want Daddy’s mantle. The Lord in heaven called me to do it.”

  Although convinced of his own call, Franklin understood that many people had come to hear him, at least during the early years of his evangelistic ministry, to see how he stacked up against his famous father. “I don’t know if I can avoid comparisons,” he admitted. “Billy Graham is my father. I’m his son.” But, he added, “I love my father. How can you be tired of being compared to someone you love and admire so much?” He frequently told his audiences that “because I am the son of Billy Graham, that did not impress God one bit,” but he realized it might impress others, so when he conducted a campaign in Australia in 1996, billboards proclaimed that “Over 40 years with Billy Graham makes him worth hearing.�
�� The family resemblance is clearly there, with the strong, classic features and piercing, direct gaze. His preaching style is nothing like his father’s early, spellbinding, Gatling-gun delivery, but it had been decades since Billy’s own preaching, tamed by television, had borne much resemblance to the impassioned oratory that took him to fame in the 1950s.

  Franklin calls his campaigns “festivals” instead of “crusades,” explaining that “a crusade is not something unchurched people understand. What does that mean? A crusade for what? People understand festivals. You have beer festivals, art festivals, and music festivals. Albuquerque has a balloon festival. I would rather have a name that, if we’re going to publicize something in the community, people will say, ‘Well, sure, if there’s going to be a festival, I will be there.’ I majored in marketing. This is a way to attract people. You don’t want to turn people off. You want them to taste your product.” His festivals certainly have music and perhaps a few balloons, and JumboTron screens flash with video clips aimed at holding his audience’s attention, but the product they are invited to taste is hardly all milk and honey.

  While his services often resemble the Youth Nights in his father’s crusades, he is quick to note the differences. Shortly before Billy Graham’s Greater Louisville Crusade in June 2001, Franklin observed that “Daddy’s Youth Nights are a little more edgy than mine. We have had some discussions about that. It is not so much Daddy as it is the people around him that are pushing him in that direction. I think they have pushed Daddy a little too far. I know he has felt uncomfortable, and his board has felt uncomfortable. I have felt uncomfortable. For me, Billy Graham is a standard, and when Billy Graham does something, we’re saying to the churches of America, ‘This is okay,’ and churches will say, ‘Billy Graham is doing it, so we can do it too.’ Some of these groups, you can’t understand them, and I’m thinking, ‘Why do I want them?’ They make a noise. A crusade or festival should not be there solely to entertain. We should have good music, which is part of the magnet that helps attract people, but it has to be music that’s focusing on what we want. If we lose that, if we bring groups that are just doing a gig, I don’t want them. The key is having everything point to the cross—your music, your musicians, everything—so that when I stand up to preach, the platform has been set. Everything has to focus toward the Lord Jesus Christ and preparing people for that invitation.”