Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  The Wall Street Journal reported that Bible sales were up dramatically in New York City during the Crusade. It also noted that the owner of a bar near Madison Square Garden had sent four of his bartenders on their vacations early because his business had declined so much.

  Presbyterian seminary student Lane Adams had been a professional night-club entertainer before his conversion; we recruited him to work specifically with those in the performing arts in New York. Many came to Christ as a result, and a group calling themselves the New York Christian Arts Fellowship was formed, with famed opera singer Jerome Hines as president. One actor who came forward turned down a Hollywood movie contract so he could stay in New York and take his friends to the meetings.

  Black actress and singer Ethel Waters slipped into the meeting and rededicated herself to Christ one night. When Cliff learned she was in the audience, he asked her if she would be willing to do a solo, which she did. She then joined the choir. As Ethel often related afterward, because of her generous size, they had to remove the armrest between two seats to accommodate her. She sat anonymously in their midst night after night for the rest of the Crusade. She later became a fixture in many of our Crusades, singing a song that touched the hearts of millions: “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

  Even after the Crusade ended, we heard reports of people who continued to come to Christ. Sometimes seed that is sown takes a long time to grow.

  One man we heard about attended a Madison Square Garden meeting but left unmoved. Some weeks later, he attended a rodeo in the same arena. As he was sitting there, the Holy Spirit brought to his mind the Crusade service, and in the middle of the rodeo he silently bowed his head and gave his life to Christ.

  God worked in other ways also. Seminary student Michael Cassidy from South Africa stood in the inquiry room in the Garden almost overwhelmed by what he was witnessing. Could this happen elsewhere? he asked himself, and sensed God answering yes. A few years later, after graduating from Fuller Theological Seminary, Michael founded an organization called African Enterprise to reach Africa for Christ, and he has been greatly used as an evangelist himself.

  At the same time, the New York Crusade pointed up a bottleneck in our work. Sadly, many of the churches failed to reach out to new converts and help them in their newfound faith. Some months later, Robert Ferm—who with his wife, Lois, ably assisted me for many years in research and contacts with pastors—spent a month in New York interviewing pastors and inquirers. He found that at least 75 percent of the converts had received no personal contact from a church—nothing more than a letter or phone call, if that. And yet remarkably, the majority of them were still continuing in their faith.

  Dan Potter remarked that he almost never visited a New York church during the next five years without having people come up and tell him of their conversion during the Crusade. In our future Crusades, we continued to work diligently on follow-up, especially seeking ways to encourage and train churches to seize the opportunities and challenges of new converts.

  New York also had an unforeseen impact on our own ministry. Through the medium of television, an estimated 96 million people had seen at least one of the meetings from Madison Square Garden. That experience showed us that God was opening the door to a new medium for the furtherance of the Gospel. The televised meetings also resulted in a flood of invitations to other major cities under broad sponsorship, including Chicago.

  The meetings had an impact on me personally as well. I now knew that no city and no area—no matter how difficult on the surface—was entirely closed to the Gospel message through so-called mass evangelism. But New York also took a toll on me physically. I left drained; I had lost twenty or more pounds. I have said in later years that something went out of me physically in the New York Crusade that I never fully recovered. Never again would we attempt anything as extensive in length.

  My exhaustion was caused not just by the intensive schedule. A doctor who was also an evangelist once told me that the hardest work a person can do is preach an evangelistic sermon. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that evangelistic preaching is physically and emotionally draining. One reason it is draining for me is that I am constantly driving for commitment. Another reason is that speaking of matters with eternal consequences is a great responsibility, and I am always afraid I won’t make the message clear or will say something that is misleading.

  From the moment I stand up to speak to a crowd, I am thinking about that person whose life is being crushed by heartache or alcohol or family problems, and I want to make the hope of the Gospel as clear as possible to him or her. Sometimes I pick out someone in the audience who seems to be especially burdened and preach directly to that person. Preaching also involves us in a spiritual battle with the forces of evil. I am always deeply conscious that I am absolutely helpless and that only the Holy Spirit can penetrate the minds and hearts of those who are without Christ. When I am speaking from the Bible, I know there is also another voice speaking to the people, and that is the voice of the Holy Spirit. I am reminded often of Jesus’ parable of the seed and the sower (see Mark 4:1–20), knowing that all I am doing is sowing seed. It is God—and only God—who can make that seed bear fruit.

  We returned to New York several times after that 1957 Crusade. Our 1970 Crusade in Shea Stadium particularly reached areas outside Manhattan. A series of meetings on Long Island and at the Meadowlands (across the river in New Jersey) in 1990 and 1991 brought large numbers of people from the city itself, as well as from surrounding metropolitan areas. In 1991 a one-day rally in Central Park drew a quarter of a million people together to hear the Gospel—the largest audience we ever addressed in North America. On the bus going back to the hotel after Central Park, one of my grandchildren noticed vendors on the sidewalk selling T-shirts saying, “Billy Blessed Us.” I trust this was true; but if so, it was solely because of God’s grace.

  18

  To Earth’s Ends

  Australia 1959, Africa and the Middle East 1960

  As the people at the 1957 Crusade in New York poured down toward the front to make commitments, I prayed two things over and over.

  First, “Lord, help these people to receive You in answer to the prayers of the people—and do not let me get any credit.”

  Second, “I am willing to take any kind of tiredness, disease, or whatever it is, for this one night, for you to win these people.”

  As the end of the Crusade came, I wondered if I would ever be up to holding another full-scale Crusade.

  But news of the Crusade’s impact spurred the prayers and sharpened the hopes of Christians elsewhere. Even before the New York Crusade ended, invitations from cities in this country and abroad passed the one hundred mark. All we could do was pray that God would give us the strength and the wisdom to discern His will.

  AUSTRALIA

  One invitation in particular captured my interest. For some reason I could not fully understand, although I believed it was the leading of the Holy Spirit, I had developed an overwhelming burden to visit the distant continent of Australia.

  During our London Crusade in 1954, I had become particularly aware of Australia’s spiritual needs, in part through the contact we had there with some church leaders from Australia. Then, in late 1955, an Australian Presbyterian evangelist, Harold Whitney, met with us during our meetings in Ocean Grove, New Jersey; afterward he traveled to England and Scotland to evaluate the impact of our Crusades there. On his return, he wrote a book urging his fellow Australian churchmen to invite us as part of a Tell Australia movement, to be patterned after the Tell Scotland Campaign.

  Most influential in my thinking, however, was the strong support of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Howard Mowll, whom I first met during the meetings of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in 1954, where I was an observer. He was unquestionably one of the finest Christian leaders I have ever known, enormously respected in Australia by all denominations; regrettably, he passed away sho
rtly before our 1959 meetings began. Archbishop Mowll spearheaded the preliminary invitation from a broad cross section of clergy in 1955, then followed it up with a strong personal letter in July 1957, during our New York meetings. In response, I asked Jerry Beavan, although he had left our full-time Team, to travel to Australia and New Zealand to assess the situation.

  Jerry brought back a number of formal invitations, from Mel-bourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, and Brisbane—cities containing at least half of Australia’s population; there were invitations from New Zealand as well. His report spoke realistically of the possible barriers to evangelism in that part of the world, but as we prayed and studied the situation, we sensed God was leading us to accept.

  Accordingly, in May 1958, Jerry and Crusade associate Bill Brown moved to Sydney to direct the Crusade preparations there. Walter Smyth, a former Youth for Christ director in Philadelphia who now headed our film distribution work, moved to Melbourne after directing our San Francisco Crusade in the early summer of 1958. Dates were set for meetings in Australia and New Zealand from February through June 1959. It would be the longest series of meetings we had ever held outside the United States.

  I knew it was going to be very difficult for me personally. Ruth could not be with us for even part of the time, due to the distances and our growing young family. Our fifth child, Ned, had been born early in the previous year. His birth was the only one I witnessed. The doctor allowed me into the delivery room to hold Ruth’s hand and pray with her during the birth. Of course, I had seen the birth of animals before, but the birth of a child was a unique and moving experience for me. When the doctor told me it was a boy, I prayed that he would grow up to be a man of God. The thought of leaving Ned and the other children for five or six months was almost more than I could bear.

  Cliff faced exactly the same situation. Because he and Billie had committed themselves to this ministry, he was willing to leave his family to go with me on that long trip; but the separation was still wrenching.

  The Australian preparations were unquestionably the most thorough we had undertaken to date. We drew not only on our experiences during the last decade but also on the insights of the Australian committees and leaders. Never before, for example, had we organized such a comprehensive series of neighborhood prayer meetings—5,000 in Sydney alone.

  Committees were developed to deal with outreach to all kinds of specialized groups, from doctors, trade unionists, and university students to Australia’s Aborigine and New Zealand’s Maori populations. Christians who were professional social workers formed special counseling teams to help those with difficult social or emotional problems.

  Australia was just beginning to draw large numbers of immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. To serve that new population, in each city we provided translation via headphones for those who did not understand English. Some services were also translated into pidgin English and put on tapes that were carried into the jungles of New Guinea.

  The Australian clergy insisted on having special counselors and counseling materials for children as well. Our counseling directors, Charlie Riggs and Dan Piatt, were at first slow to agree, what with all the other pressures on them; but like most everything else we tried in Australia, these materials became standard practice in our later Crusades.

  Of special significance was the system of telephone landlines we developed to reach hundreds of far-flung towns and outback settlements. About 650,000 people attended the audio meetings served by those landlines, in everything from churches and theaters to bunkhouses on vast cattle ranches (or stations, as they are called in Australia); these additional meetings resulted in 15,000 registered commitments. The use of Operation Andrew and extensive chartered bus reservations for groups also exceeded anything we had ever done.

  The major obstacle we faced in this Crusade was that to the average Australian, I was little more than a vague name; most knew nothing of our message or methods. To overcome this in advance of the meetings, the local committees asked us to blanket the nation with broadcasts of The Hour of Decision. In addition, copies of our films—especially the documentaries we had done in London and New York—were shown all over the country.

  One day shortly before leaving for Australia, Grady and I were playing golf. He noticed that I kept missing the ball—even more than usual, that is! I soon noticed something distorted in my vision: when I looked at the ground, it seemed to be wavy or ridged. Suddenly, I had a sharp pain in my left eye and lost its peripheral vision. Doctors diagnosed a rare but serious problem called angiospastic edema of the macula, which they traced directly to strain and overwork. Failure to rest until it healed, they warned, could lead to permanent blindness.

  As a result, we were forced to postpone the beginning of the Australia visit by two weeks and to reschedule all the dates as best we could. Through the generosity of a friend, Grady and I went to a quiet spot in Hawaii, Hana on the island of Maui, which was near the home of Charles Lindbergh. Also staying there were Charles Laughton and his actress wife, Elsa Lanchester, with whom we got acquainted. We ate in the little dining room and enjoyed sitting by ourselves on the black-sand beach. I was grateful that Ruth was able to join me; and through the generosity of another friend, Wilma Wilson was able to join Grady. It would be four months before we would see our wives again.

  Another bonus was that Dr. V. Raymond Edman—the president of Wheaton College who had been such a continuing encouragement to me—came over to Maui to lead us in a series of Bible studies. I have never forgotten the spiritual as well as physical refreshment of those days. In spite of the change in plans, we sensed that God’s hand was in the whole situation. Gradually, my vision improved, although I still had only 30 percent vision in that left eye when we landed in Australia. On the orders of my doctors, I tried to restrict my schedule to the main meeting and only one or two additional events a day.

  Melbourne

  Our first city was Melbourne. In spite of the enthusiasm of the local committee, which was led by the dean of the Anglican cathedral, Dr. Stuart Barton Babbage, Walter and others on our staff were cautious. Because Melbourne was known as a conservative, wealthy city with a tradition of education and culture, Walter was afraid we would meet with indifference or even opposition. A few years before, another American evangelist had been forced to cut his campaign short and leave the country because of active opposition there.

  After our first meeting on February 15, however, it was obvious that the Melbourne committee had been correct. That first night, both the indoor stadium we had rented and an adjoining temporary annex were jammed to capacity. Additional thousands were standing outside in the rain; after the main service, I went out and spoke to them. As in New York, preaching twice—once to the crowd inside, once to those outside—became standard practice while we were in that stadium.

  I appreciated the blunt but cordial honesty of one well-known Melbourne columnist, Eric Baume: “What is the difference between Dr. Billy Graham and some of our local hot-gospellers? He insults no one; he exhorts all; his heart of wondrous sympathy beats in his face. And I, as an infidel, but a convinced Theist, will not hear a word against him. . . . I, personally, cannot accept all he preaches. But that does not debar me from thanking him for coming to Australia.”

  It was increasingly apparent that the indoor stadium, even with the help of the annex, was inadequate. After five days, we moved to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater set in a large park with a dramatic, aluminum bandshell shaped something like a giant parasail or kite. Tens of thousands of people could sit in the open air on the sloping ground—and did, with attendance reaching as high as 70,000.

  During this time, we also went on television with a special program Cliff directed, offering a phone-in number at the end of the show for people desiring spiritual counseling. The second night our meeting was telecast, 10,000 callers overwhelmed the Melbourne exchange’s automated system, with hundreds of those callers professing faith
in Jesus Christ. Offering phone counseling in conjunction with television broadcasts later became a regular part of our televised Crusades in the United States.

  After some days, however, we were forced to move from the Myer Music Bowl; it had already been committed to the city’s annual Moomba Festival. The only facility available was a rough open-air structure at the Agricultural Showgrounds, located on the fringe of the city. Dr. Babbage later picturesquely described it as “probably the least suitable surroundings for the preaching of the Gospel that could have been devised. . . . Amplified sound reverberated like an echo machine around the straggling stands. Some nights sulfurous smoke belching from the funnels of shunting trains in the nearby saleyards blended with the stench of adjoining abattoirs to form a misty pall that drifted clingingly over the whole arena.” To add to the bleak picture, Melbourne’s weather turned unseasonably cold, with drenching rains flooding the area and turning the ground into a quagmire.

  And yet people continued to come—up to 25,000 a night. When the four-week Crusade drew to a close, over half a million had come to the Melbourne meetings, with 22,000 inquirers coming forward at the Invitation.

  The final service was held in the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a huge facility that had been expanded to a capacity of 105,000 for the 1956 Olympic Games. Two hours before we were scheduled to begin, I went up to the plush area where the directors of the Cricket Ground had gathered. When I asked for their projection, they predicted a crowd of perhaps 50,000. Not long after that, the manager of the grounds sent word that the place would be filled to capacity. When every seat was filled, he had the gates locked and sent word to the directors that thousands more were clamoring to get in. The directors decided on the spot to do something unprecedented; they opened the gates and allowed the crowd to invade the sacred precincts of the cricket pitch, on which only players were supposed to tread. The final crowd estimate—143,750—not only broke the record for the stadium but was also the largest audience I had addressed up to that time.