Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

Stockholm

  On to Stockholm, Sweden.

  During a stopover in Gothenburg en route to Finland, a reporter had given me something of a warning: “So many of you Americans think we Swedes are Christians because almost all of us are baptized. . . . The truth is we are deeply pagan underneath. You will get little response from us.”

  A few days later, after our Helsinki meetings, a large crowd, estimated variously by the press as anywhere from 45,000 to 100,000, filled Skansen Park, an open-air area in Stockholm; the meeting was carried live by the national radio network. A second rally took place the next evening in the city’s main stadium, with many turned away for lack of space. We were heartened by the response, although we did sense that secularism had become firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of many Swedes.

  Copenhagen

  On June 21 we flew from Stockholm into Copenhagen.

  An afternoon meeting for clergy in the cathedral drew 2,000 people. With only a small percentage of the Danish population actively involved with any church, I knew that many of the clergy were discouraged. I sought to point them to the biblical mandate for evangelism and to the reality of the spiritual hunger we were seeing everywhere we went. I myself was frustrated by the passive attitude I had detected among some of the clergy in Europe. I challenged the audience to be more aggressive in proclaiming the Gospel: “It’s up to you to carry the Gospel out to the masses, not to wait with empty seats in your churches for the people to come to you! ”

  That evening 5,000 people filled the city’s largest auditorium; several thousand others were connected to the meeting by an audio link to several churches and a nearby tennis arena. After that meeting was over, the local committee took me to another meeting they had scheduled at midnight, this one in an open square sometimes used as a vegetable market. In spite of the lateness of the hour and the rain, 15,000 more people came to stand and hear the Word of God. At the end of the message, I asked those who wanted to commit their lives to Christ to wave their handkerchiefs. Their response looked like a sea of white. We then directed those people to a church at one corner of the square, where counselors spoke and prayed with 1,000 of them.

  During the time we were in Scandinavia, we saw 200,000 attend the meetings in Helsinki, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, with thousands professing a commitment to follow Christ.

  Amsterdam

  The next day, June 22, we flew into Amsterdam, where Jerry and Bob had laid out for us a packed schedule that lasted for only eight hours. In that time we had a large meeting with clergy, a press conference, and a public rally in the city’s Olympic Stadium. Unlike other secularized areas of Europe, Holland still retained a measure of active church life, particularly among the various Reformed churches.

  During the weeks before the meeting in Amsterdam, we had been alternately attacked and defended in the Dutch press, the lively comments often reflecting the theological divisions within the churches. One liberal pastor wrote disdainfully of our planned meeting as a “dismal religious circus” and attacked me as “primitive” for quoting the Bible as the Word of God. He was answered by others, including the distinguished theologian G. C. Berkouwer, professor of systematic theology at the Free University of Amsterdam. While there, I also saw Willem Visser ’t Hooft, who had gone out of his way to befriend and support me a few years before when the World Council of Churches was formed. All of this focused public attention on our brief visit and probably brought many more people to the public meeting—and to Christ.

  The Amsterdam meeting filled all 40,000 seats in the stadium, with Cliff Barrows leading a choir of 2,400. Dan Piatt, European director of The Navigators, had trained 1,000 counselors. (The Navigators is an American organization started by Dawson Trotman during World War II to work with American service personnel in both evangelism and discipleship training. The methods they developed in training people to do evangelism and in helping new Christians to grow spiritually greatly influenced our own counselor-training and follow-up programs in the years to come.) But even after the training, the counselors were still unprepared for the overwhelming response. Nevertheless, they pressed on, doing what they could, encouraging those who made commitments to grow in their faith through prayer and Bible study, as well as involvement in a Christian church.

  Each of these meetings during that whirlwind week in Scan-dinavia and Holland convinced us that something extraordinary was happening—something that could not be explained only by publicity or curiosity over what had happened in London. Millions in Europe could be called confirmed secularists, although wherever there was a state church, there was some understanding of God and some knowledge of stories from the Bible in their background. Countless people, however, obviously had a spiritual hunger and an openness to the Gospel that was almost overwhelming.

  Berlin

  On June 23, we moved on to Germany. Accompanying us was German-born industrialist John Bolten, who had recommitted his life to Christ during our 1950 meetings in Boston. Exactly a year before our German meetings, something had happened to focus the message I was preaching; and John was part of that change.

  In 1953 he had been with us during a series of Crusade meetings in Dallas’s Cotton Bowl. One night my preaching did not seem to have spiritual depth or power, although a number of people did come forward at the Invitation. After the meeting, John and I took a walk together, and he confronted me.

  “Billy,” he said, “you didn’t speak about the Cross. How can anyone be converted without having at least one single view of the Cross where the Lord died for us? You must preach about the Cross, Billy. You must preach about the blood that was shed for us there. There is no other place in the Bible where there is greater power than when we talk or preach about the Cross.”

  At first I resisted his rebuke. The Cross and its meaning were, more often than not, a part of my sermons. But that night I could not sleep, and before morning came I knew he was right. I made a commitment never to preach again without being sure that the Gospel was as complete and clear as possible, centering on Christ’s sacrificial death for our sins on the Cross and His resurrection from the dead for our salvation.

  Back to Germany . . .

  Our 1954 visit unleashed a torrent of publicity in the national press—some favorable, but much of it highly critical. One paper labeled me “God’s machine gun”; another, “God’s flame-thrower.” The Communist press in East Germany outdid itself in attacking me as a lackey of American capitalism, a tool of greedy Texas oilmen, a spymaster for the Office of Strategic Services.

  The meetings began with a service for U.S. Army personnel in Frankfurt on our first day. A reporter from Germany’s largest mass-circulation magazine, Der Spiegel, cornered John and me. She was a beautiful woman of about thirty-five, and she had only one question.

  “Mr. Graham, what do you think about sex?” she asked.

  “Sex is the most wonderful thing on this earth,” I replied, “as long as God is in it. When the Devil gets in it, it’s the most terrible thing on this earth.”

  She wrote my response down, but she looked disconcerted at what I was saying and quickly turned away without so much as a thank-you. To my knowledge, the brief interview never appeared in print.

  The following evening, we had a public service, our first to an all-German audience. Some 34,000 people filled Düsseldorf’s Rhine Stadium. The local sponsors, skeptical that anyone would respond, had resisted the attempts of The Navigators’ representative, Bob Hopkins, to train counselors and ushers; they said they would not be needed. After the Invitation, Bob hurriedly recruited some Chris-tian airmen from a nearby U.S. base to help direct people to the tent set aside for inquirers. Twice as many people came for counseling as could be accommodated in the tent.

  It was midnight when we finally got back to our hotel. About two in the morning, I had to call Jerry Beavan and Bob Evans to ask them for help. They came immediately and found me writhing in agony on my bathroom floor. I wondered if I had been poisoned, or was dying, or both.
John, who had been born ten miles from Düssel-dorf, woke up a local doctor (who, it turned out, was a Christian and had been at the meeting that evening). He gave me a painkilling shot, then got me to a local specialist the next morning.

  The X rays showed a kidney stone. The agony lingered, and the doctors insisted I enter the hospital for a complete physical examination. However, our next scheduled meeting was going to be our largest, in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, where Hitler’s rhetoric had inflamed the hearts and minds of his followers slightly over a decade before. I told the doctors I was determined to preach in Berlin even if they had to carry me in on a stretcher. From that moment on, I refused the painkillers the doctors offered me. I did not want to be groggy when I preached in Berlin.

  “Why is God doing this to me? Or is it Satan?” I asked John that night as he sat by my bedside. “I can’t understand it!”

  Then, as we talked, it occurred to me that God was humbling me, making me depend on Him and not on myself, so that He alone would get the glory. The dangers of depending on my own strength and abilities were very real, I knew. I recalled again God’s word to Isaiah: “For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: . . . and I will not give my glory unto another” (Isaiah 48:11, KJV).

  Berlin’s local committee, unlike the organizers at some of the other stops on this tour, had prepared for six months to make sure every detail was covered in the arrangements. The Lutheran bishop of East and West Berlin, Otto Dibelius, had given strong support to the event. Thousands of posters blanketed the city.

  In spite of a steady rain, 80,000 poured into the stadium—a record for any postwar event, or so we were told at the time. Accord-ing to the Manchester Dispatch, “There has been no such crowd since the days of Hitler.” From the offering, which contained a large amount of East German currency, we could tell that perhaps as many as 20,000 people had come from the Eastern Zone.

  I began my message with an allusion to Hitler’s use of that same stadium: “Others have stood here and spoken to you,” I said. Then I raised my Bible. “Now God speaks to you.” I then spoke on Jesus’ story of the rich young ruler found in Mark 10.

  Because of stadium regulations, we could not have people come forward to the platform. Five days later, on a ship in the Atlantic heading for home, came a radio phone message from Berlin: 16,000 Germans had filled out decision cards. This swamped the follow-up program headed by Peter Schneider of the Berlin YMCA. He organized a series of meetings in churches scattered around Berlin to help those who had made a commitment to Christ to become grounded in the Bible. Many of them, he later discovered, were unclear about the meaning of the Invitation. The idea of making a personal decision or commitment to Christ was foreign to their background in the Lutheran state church, but large numbers were brought to a full commitment during the follow-up process. One of those was Peter Schneider’s future wife, Margot.

  Paris

  After Berlin came Paris a few days later. We were already planning a full Crusade there for the next year, so we held no public meetings, though we did meet with clergy to help prepare for the upcoming event.

  As we looked back over this whirlwind tour of the Continent— lasting almost exactly two weeks—we could not help but be overwhelmed by the response we had seen almost everywhere—a response we could attribute only to God. For millions in Europe, the crushing devastation of war and the failure of secularism and rationalism to prevent the greatest slaughter in history were creating a new openness to Christ. We left determined to make Great Britain and the Continent a major part of our ministry in the future.

  HARVESTING IN SCOTLAND, AND BEYOND

  We did not wait long to return.

  Less than a year later—an interval marked mainly by extended Crusades and other opportunities in the United States—we went back, this time to Scotland. The invitation came from a broad-based committee for an effort known as “Tell Scotland,” sponsored by the Church of Scotland. There was a huge debate about the invitation in both the press and the Church of Scotland General Assembly; the latter voted that Tell Scotland would be the instrument, and that Tom Allan, who was highly respected in the Church of Scotland, would be the chairman. Most meetings would be held in Glasgow, with single rallies in other major cities.

  On March 12, 1955, we sailed from New York on the French liner Liberté. I told reporters at our departure that in my view our forthcoming meetings were more important than any diplomatic or political mission. Given the intensity of the work to come, I was grateful for the blessed leisure of the ocean voyage. I usually had breakfast in bed, met with Team members at eleven for a prayer meeting, took lunch, studied until four, and then got some exercise on deck.

  On Sunday I was invited by the captain to preach in the ship’s theater. Such had been the international coverage of our meetings that I was already pretty well known to everyone on board the ship; they filled the theater that morning. Our colleague Howard Butt, who was introduced as a Texas millionaire, led the temporary congregation in the Lord’s Prayer. He forgot part of it, confusing everybody. He explained to me afterward, with a smile, that he knew I was pressed for time and he thought an abbreviated version of the prayer would help!

  We arrived in Plymouth, England, at six in the morning. As the tender bearing us to shore pulled away from the ship, we could hear the strains of “This Is My Story, This Is My Song” floating toward us. A large group of people had gotten up early and waited in the cold morning to greet us. Before we could get off the tender, the press tumbled on board and asked me all kinds of questions, from my reaction to the hydrogen bomb to what I thought of Princess Margaret. The Lord helped me through it. Their coverage turned out to be pretty favorable—much more so than the year before.

  On the two-hundred-mile trip by car to London, somewhere between Plymouth and Bournemouth we had a coffee break at an inn on the coast; the town parson greeted us warmly there. We spent a lot of our driving time in prayer, with a renewed burden for Great Britain to come to Christ. Lunch was at Bournemouth, which I remembered from eight years before. When I went to the restroom in the hotel, a man followed me in, saying that he needed God. I gave him the Gospel in essence, and he promised to attend our Wembley meeting in London after the Glasgow Crusade.

  Jerry was not very reassuring about the prospects in Scotland. There was a feeling among some people there that the Crusade had been so overorganized and overpromoted that the meetings themselves might be an anticlimax. A local debate over our coming had at least shaken a lot of people out of indifference. It didn’t help, though, that Lorne Sanny had the flu, Bev Shea couldn’t speak above a whisper, and Willis Haymaker had laryngitis.

  We had dinner that night in London at the home of Mr. Joynson-Hicks, a member of Parliament who served as the British attorney for several Hollywood film companies. He and his wife were perfect hosts, even letting our shivering Texan, Howard Butt, have that English rarity, a hot bath; just taking off his shoes and putting his feet up by the fireplace hadn’t done it for Howard.

  In London many old friends came down to the station to see us off on the train for Glasgow. When a little girl about seven—our Anne’s age—waved to me, a lump came into my throat as I thought of my children back home. A picture that had been taken of Gigi kissing me good-bye in Montreat was in all the British papers and stirred a lot of warmhearted comment.

  The photographers and reporters were becoming a nuisance. On the train to Glasgow, when reporters tried to interview me in the corridor, I said goodnight and shut the door to my compartment.

  Before I went to bed, I felt a great burden of prayer. In my pajamas, I got on my knees and prayed for the meetings in Glasgow, particularly for the press conference the next day; I asked that the Lord would give me wisdom. A verse kept coming to mind: “So he fed them according to the integrity of his heart; and guided them by the skilfulness of his hands” (Psalm 78:72, KJV). I also prayed that the Lord would give me a good rest; I had been having difficulty sleeping the last few
nights and was tired. No sooner had I prayed and crawled into bed than I went sound asleep.

  At six-thirty the next morning, I was awakened by the porter with a cup of tea. As our train stopped in the first Scottish village, scores of people at the station greeted us with hymns. I got out of bed, put on my overcoat, and looked out the window. The wellwishers all laughed when I told them I was not dressed to come outside. During the next two hours to Glasgow, I saw more people standing along the way, waving to us and singing. Apparently, the newspapers had revealed the precise train we would be on. They were “angels unaware,” I thought, whom the Lord had sent to cheer my tense spirit.

  A fresh concern to communicate the Gospel message had been stirring for two years among many Scottish Christians. Our All-Scotland Crusade, beginning on March 21, 1955, was to be just a part of the harvesting from the faithful sowing and nurturing of the spiritual seed done by those Christians, as I told the 1,000 clergymen who gathered at Glasgow’s St. Andrew’s Hall to welcome us.

  Before the meetings began, I was to address a gathering of clergy, theological professors, and theological students. That was a bit intimidating. I asked Dr. John Sutherland Bonnell, the distinguished Scottish-born pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, to accompany me. As he looked over the crowd, he leaned over and whispered, “This is probably the greatest gathering of theological minds in modern Scottish history.” That didn’t help me to relax!

  The main meetings were held in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall. I took encouragement from the city’s ancient motto, inscribed over the entrance: Let Glasgow Flourish by the Preaching of the Word and the Praising of His Name. Some Scottish church leaders had advised against giving an Invitation at the meetings, saying that the Scots had no tradition of coming forward in an evangelistic meeting; besides, they were far too reserved to do so.

  The first night, Kelvin Hall was filled to capacity; normally, it held 8,000 or 9,000 people, but it had been renovated to hold several thousand more. I felt a strong closeness with the audience that I could explain only as the power of the Holy Spirit. But when I gave the Invitation at the end of the sermon, not a soul moved. My advisers, I admitted, had been right. I bowed my head in prayer, and moments later, when I looked up, people were streaming down the aisles, some with tears in their eyes.