by Billy Graham
My friend Bob Evans, who had been at Wheaton with me, was also at Forest Home. He overheard Chuck say, “Poor Billy, I feel sorry for him. He and I are taking two different roads.”
This cut me to the quick; the friendship and fellowship we had enjoyed meant a great deal to me. Ironically, the Christian Business Men’s Committee of Greater Los Angeles (which was taking a great step of faith in having an unknown evangelist like me) had invited Chuck to speak in July at a “booster dinner” for the Campaign.
I ached as if I were on the rack, with Miss Mears stretching me one way and Chuck Templeton stretching me the other. Alone in my room one evening, I read every verse of Scripture I could think of that had to do with “thus saith the Lord.” I recalled hearing someone say that the prophets had used the phrase “the Word of the Lord said” (or similar wording) more than two thousand times. I had no doubts concerning the deity of Jesus Christ or the validity of the Gospel, but was the Bible completely true? If I was not exactly doubtful, I was certainly disturbed.
I pondered the attitude of Christ toward the Scriptures. He loved those sacred writings and quoted from them constantly. Never once did He intimate that they could be wrong. In fact, He verified some of the stories in the Old Testament that were the hardest to believe, such as those concerning Noah and Jonah. With the Psalmist, He delighted in the law of the Lord, the Scriptures.
As that night wore on, my heart became heavily burdened. Could I trust the Bible? With the Los Angeles Campaign galloping toward me, I had to have an answer. If I could not trust the Bible, I could not go on. I would have to quit the school presidency. I would have to leave pulpit evangelism. I was only thirty years of age. It was not too late to become a dairy farmer. But that night I believed with all my heart that the God who had saved my soul would never let go of me.
I got up and took a walk. The moon was out. The shadows were long in the San Bernardino Mountains surrounding the retreat center. Dropping to my knees there in the woods, I opened the Bible at random on a tree stump in front of me. I could not read it in the shadowy moonlight, so I had no idea what text lay before me. Back at Florida Bible Institute, that kind of woodsy setting had given me a natural pulpit for proclamation. Now it was an altar where I could only stutter into prayer.
The exact wording of my prayer is beyond recall, but it must have echoed my thoughts: “O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. There are many problems with it for which I have no solution. There are many seeming contradictions. There are some areas in it that do not seem to correlate with modern science. I can’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck and others are raising.”
I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken. At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”
When I got up from my knees at Forest Home that August night, my eyes stung with tears. I sensed the presence and power of God as I had not sensed it in months. Not all my questions were answered, but a major bridge had been crossed. In my heart and mind, I knew a spiritual battle in my soul had been fought and won.
Despite all the negotiations and arrangements we had already entered into with the Christian Business Men’s Committee of Greater Los Angeles, I still had a frightening lack of assurance that the Lord really was leading us to Los Angeles.
I had been away from home so much that year that I hated to be leaving again, even though Ruth was going to attempt to join me later. The first week in September, she and I took a short vacation drive up in the northwoods of Minnesota.
We returned to Minneapolis in time for a weekend faculty retreat at Northwestern Schools, where the fall semester was about to begin. I knew that the faculty and students had a right to expect me on campus. I also knew, though, that T.W., Dean Ed Hartill, and Mrs. Riley could capably handle everything for at least a while.
Some of my negative praying would have made even God gloomy, I guessed, if He had not known ahead what He was going to do for the glory of His name.
Part Three
1949–1955
Turning Points
9
Watershed
Los Angeles 1949
If the amount of advance press coverage was any indication, the Los Angeles Campaign was going to be a failure. Not that the local organizing committee hadn’t tried. They had employed Lloyd Doctor, public relations director for the local Salvation Army, to drum up interest. One day shortly before the meetings opened, he persuaded a handful of reporters to attend the first press conference I had ever conducted. Next day we eagerly scanned the newspapers to see the stories those reporters had written.
Nothing.
As far as the media were concerned, the Los Angeles Cam-paign—by far our most ambitious evangelistic effort to date—was going to be a nonevent.
Later Lloyd got me a brief appointment with the mayor of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Times carried a small back-page picture and story of that meeting. Except for the ads that the committee ran in the church section, that was virtually the only press exposure we got for the first couple of weeks.
The invitation to hold meetings in Los Angeles originally came from a group of businessmen who called themselves “Christ for Greater Los Angeles,” representing about two hundred churches. They had already sponsored several such Campaigns with other evangelists, all of which were reasonably successful. Now they wanted me to preach and to bring Cliff Barrows and George Beverly Shea. I agreed but insisted on several stringent conditions.
First, they were to try to broaden church support to include as many churches and denominations as possible. Second, they were to raise their budget from $7,000 to $25,000, in order to invest more in advertising and promotion. Third, they were to erect a much larger tent than they had planned; our limited experience in citywide Campaigns had already taught us that the crowds seemed to grow as the days went on.
The men from Los Angeles initially agreed to every point except raising the budget. They were convinced it would be impossible to come up with such a large amount.
They had a point. In those days, Campaigns were modest efforts. Even at the biggest meetings, it was unusual to hear of more than 50 people responding to the Invitation to receive Christ. Any evangelist preaching before more than 2,000 people was considered highly successful. The Christ for Greater Los Angeles committee undoubtedly felt that their commitment to raise $7,000 was an ambitious step in the right direction.
To many of those seasoned, older Christians, I came across as brash. But I found myself drafting a Los Angeles scenario bigger and bolder than anything I had imagined before. Besides insisting on the budget increase, I set yet another seemingly impossible condition: the committee had to put the public leadership and the platform duties of the Campaign entirely in the hands of local clergy. The committee, I felt, represented too limited an evangelical constituency to make an impact.
I consulted with Cliff, and he agreed. I wrote back to our hosts and told them we would be forced to cancel if they could not see their way clear to step out in faith and take that financial risk.
“I stand upon the brink of absolute fear and trembling when I think we might come to Los Angeles with only a small handful of churches,” I wrote in February 1949. “The city of Los Angeles will not be touched unless the majority of the churches are actively back of this campaign.”
My limited experience had already shown me that without the cooperation of the local churches and their pastors, not only would attendance suffer but so would the follow-up of new Christians.
One of my objectives was to build the church in the community. I did not simply want the audience to come from the churches. I wanted to leave something behind in the very churches themselves.
Even as I imposed these conditions on the long-suffering committee, I doubted that t
hey could comply. Yet I burned with a sense of urgency to move forward: “I’m convinced . . . that if a revival could break out in the city of Los Angeles,” I wrote to Mr. Claude Jenkins, secretary of the committee, “it would have repercussions around the world. Let’s not stop at anything to make this the meeting that God could use as a spark to send a flame of revival through the nation. Your responsibilities are tremendous. Let’s go forward by prayer.”
Initial reports from Los Angeles indicated that I was stirring up a hornet’s nest. Some opponents circulated distorted and false stories about my being a self-promoting money-grabber. The kind of conditions I was insisting on certainly might have fueled that fire. And getting the committee’s agreement would take a miracle. I was soon humbled when I found out what truly big men they were in the depth of their devotion to evangelism: they agreed to do what we had asked. The Campaign was set to begin in the last week of September and run for three weeks.
Just before the Campaign began, Henrietta Mears invited me to her home in Beverly Hills to speak to the Hollywood Christian Group. That occasion gave me an opportunity for lengthy discussions with well-known actors and actresses.
One man at the meeting, Stuart Hamblen, impressed me tremendously. He was rough, strong, loud, and earthy. Every inch of his six-foot-two frame was genuine cowboy, and his 220 pounds seemed all bone and muscle. His name was legendary up and down the West Coast for his popular radio show, heard every afternoon for two hours. He said he would invite me on as a guest. I took an instant liking to him and coveted him for Christ. Only half-jokingly, he said he could fill the tent if he gave his endorsement.
In the months ahead, I would meet other Hollywood celebrities of the time, especially in visits to Miss Mears’s “out of this world” home, as Ruth described it—people such as Tim Spencer (who wrote a number-one song on the hit parade, “Room Full of Roses”), Mickey Finn, Jon Hall, Connie Haines, and Jane Russell. Edwin Orr led these meetings, so they were both intellectually stimulating and spiritually stirring. Many of these stars were so earnest about learning the Word of God and translating it into daily living that Ruth felt they put to shame our Thursday afternoon prayer meetings back home in the Bible Belt.
I was inspired especially by the testimony of actress Colleen Townsend, who had a contract with Twentieth Century–Fox and whose picture had just been on the cover of Life magazine. She was one of the most dedicated Christians I had met, and yet she was working in the film industry—an industry that was anathema to many of the supporters of the Crusade. She became engaged to Louis Evans, Jr., whose father was pastor of Hollywood’s First Presbyterian Church. They would actively participate in the tent meetings. It was she who thoughtfully wrote a note to Ruth after meeting me at Forest Home. “Billy mentioned how much he’d like to have you here,” she said, “so I thought I’d just drop you a note of added encouragement.”
Ruth did come, a month earlier than she intended. She wanted to be with me for my birthday on November 7 but got mixed up on the date and arrived on October 7 instead! “I tell you, I have a brain tumor,” she wrote back to North Carolina. “I’ve never felt so foolish in my life, and got ribbed good and properly.” Gigi had been left in the care of Grandmother Bell in Montreat, and Anne was staying with her Aunt Rosa and Uncle Don Montgomery in Los Alamos, New Mexico. (Bunny hadn’t yet been born, of course.)
I was overjoyed to have Ruth with me so soon. Having gotten to California well ahead of the September 25 starting date to allow time for getting acquainted with the leaders and the special challenges of the area, I had been missing her terribly.
The attendance at our early Los Angeles meetings averaged about 3,000 each night and 4,000 on Sunday afternoons, so the tent was never filled to capacity.
I sensed that interest was building, though, and the crowds were getting larger. However, I found that I was preaching mainly to Christians. As Ruth observed in a letter home to her folks in October, “It isn’t easy to get unconverted to a tent.”
Nevertheless, I was preaching with a new confidence and fervor. I had always been loud and enthusiastic (and some said authoritative). But since my pivotal experience in the mountain woods at Forest Home, I was no longer struggling internally. There was no gap between what I said and what I knew I believed deep in my soul. It was no coincidence that the centerpiece of the 150-foot platform in the tent, right in front of the pulpit, was a replica of an open Bible—twenty feet high and twenty feet wide.
Stuart Hamblen did indeed invite me to be a guest on his radio show. I hesitated at first. Would the Campaign committee want me on that kind of program, sponsored by a tobacco company, even if Hamblen was the number-one radio personality on the West Coast?
The more I thought about it, the more intriguing the idea seemed. Hadn’t Christ Himself spent time with sinners? Hadn’t He been criticized by the religious leaders of His day for that very thing? Why should I not take the risk? I said yes.
On his show, he surprised me by telling all his listeners, in his own rough-and-ready manner, to “go on down to Billy Graham’s tent and hear the preaching.” Even more surprising, to his listeners as well as to me, was his next remark: “I’ll be there too!”
The first night Stuart attended, we would find out later, he became deeply convicted of his own sins and the need for Christ to save him. Not understanding what was going on in his soul, he became angry and stalked out. For two or three nights he stayed away. Then he came back. Each time he showed up, he had the same reaction, getting so mad once that he actually shook his fist at me as he walked out of the tent.
We were approaching the scheduled closing-night meeting—Sunday, October 16—of our three-week Campaign. During the week before that final meeting, since there was evident blessing, some committee members advocated extending the Campaign a short time. Others thought it should stop as planned; the choir, the counselors, and other workers were tired, and we might risk an anticlimax. The budget had been met, and now the organizers just took love offerings for Cliff and me. Everybody was confident the tent would be filled on the closing Sunday to give us a truly grand finale to an excellent series of meetings.
Should the Campaign be extended? It was not simply for the committee to decide. We needed a clear sense of direction from the Lord. Grady, Cliff, Bev, and I prayed together over and over again as the last week wore on. At last we decided to follow the example of Gideon in the Old Testament and put out a fleece, asking God to give us a decisive sign of His purpose.
It came at four-thirty the next morning.
I was awakened in my room at the Langham Hotel by the jangling of the telephone. In a voice broken by tears, a man begged to see me right away. It was Stuart Hamblen. I woke up Grady and Wilma Wilson, and they went with Ruth into another room to pray.
By the time I was up and dressed, Stuart and his praying, godly wife, Suzy, were at my door. We talked together and prayed, and the rugged cowboy gave his life to Christ in a childlike act of faith. He came forward in the next service. The first thing he did after he received Christ was to call his father, who was an old-fashioned Methodist preacher in west Texas. I could hear his father shout with joy over the phone!
It would not be long before Stuart put his vibrant experience into a song that was inspired by a conversation he’d had with John Wayne: “It Is No Secret [What God Can Do].” That still remains one of the favorites people like to hear Bev Shea sing. Shortly after, he wrote another testimony song, “This Ole House,” which I think was number one for several weeks on the national radio show Your Hit Parade.
Years later, when we were back in Los Angeles for a Crusade at the Coliseum, Cliff, Grady, Bev, and I went to Stuart’s home for breakfast. “Billy,” Stuart said at one point, “it’s terrible that these planes come over the stadium while you’re trying to preach. I’m a member of the President’s Club of Western Airlines, and I think I’ll call the president. If he won’t do anything about it, I think I’ll get my old longhorn rifle out and see if I can’t
stop those planes from here!”
That very night I was telling the crowd how Stuart was willing to get his longhorn rifle out to bag a few of the low-flying airplanes . . . when there was a terribly loud bang at the other end of the stadium.
“Stuart, is that you?” I called out.
The crowd roared.
That night back in 1949, Cliff and I knew that we had our answer about continuing the Campaign. Clearly, the Lord had unfinished business to do in the lives of people who were just beginning to hear about the meetings and think about the Gospel. We told the committee that the Campaign had to go on, and they agreed.
But for how long? During the next week—the first week of our extension—we were thrilled to hear Stuart Hamblen give his testimony over his radio program, telling listeners how Christ had changed his life. People were talking about it all along the West Coast. Did this justify another extension of the Campaign?
Cliff and I had not experienced such mounting interest and enthusiasm during our previous Campaigns. In our uncertainty about what to do, we agreed that the best thing was to put out the fleece again, as Gideon had done, and ask the Lord for another sign. We were relatively inexperienced young men with a lot to learn. (Cliff was four and a half years younger than I.) Our wives were coping with our unpredictable lifestyles, but we wanted to be considerate of their feelings too. Would God give us another clear indication what to do?
When I arrived at the tent for the next meeting, the scene startled me. For the first time, the place was crawling with reporters and photographers. They had taken almost no notice of the meetings up until now, and very little had appeared in the papers. I asked one of the journalists what was happening.
