Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  The meetings in Glasgow lasted for six weeks. We took every opportunity we could to extend the mission to people who might not ordinarily come to the main meetings. For example, we preached to thousands of steelworkers and dockers at the John Brown Shipyard. Other meetings ran the gamut from mills and factories to the homes of the wealthy. The Scots were particularly fascinated by Howard Butt, attracted both by his image as a wealthy Texas businessman and by his clear-cut testimony to Christ.

  In Scotland we had the support of several prominent people, which helped gain entrée into social and business circles. John Henderson, member of Parliament, went with us everywhere and became a good friend; Hugh Fraser, founder of the House of Fraser department store chain in Great Britain, likewise was very supportive and had us to his home for gatherings with other leading businesspeople.

  Our time in Scotland included a number of other unique events. I was invited to many of the colleges and universities, and following the Glasgow Crusade I was asked to address the Church of Scotland General Assembly, which meets annually. The latter was a very formal occasion, and I had forgotten to bring the proper clothing from London. The day in question was a holiday, and Paul Maddox could not find a store open that carried formal wear; eventually, I had to call Hugh Fraser, who let us into one of his stores.

  Ruth and I also attended an elaborate dinner as guests of the Duke of Hamilton, held in the banquet hall of Mary, Queen of Scots, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Almost everyone I met at that dinner seemed to be a lord or lady.

  “Your Grace,” I said to one of the handsome young men dressed in black tie and tux, “I don’t believe I’ve met you.”

  “No, sir, you haven’t,” he said, somewhat amused. “I’m your waiter this evening.”

  I assured him that I was still happy to meet him.

  “And you might like to know, sir,” he added, “that Your Grace is reserved for dukes and archbishops.”

  Overwhelmingly, however, we were mostly with ordinary people like ourselves, not with the wealthy or influential. We took advantage of every opportunity to speak before all kinds of groups, whatever their social position. I was especially concerned to reach out to working people, who I felt had often been alienated from the churches.

  One of my British-born associates, Joe Blinco, was a workingman himself and therefore knew the workingman’s language inside out. He went to all kinds of meetings. He had a volatile spirit, though, and on one occasion, at a tumultuous gathering of jeering, working-class people like himself, he got so mad that he told them, “Okay, so go to Hell!”

  More than any previous Crusade, the Glasgow meetings attracted large numbers of nonchurched people, in part through the implementation of a program we called “Operation Andrew.” Al-though the basic concept had been in place in other Crusades, Lorne Sanny and Charlie Riggs refined its operation in Glasgow. It took its name from the disciple Andrew in the New Testament, who brought his brother Simon Peter to Christ (see John 1:40–42). Through this program, individuals were encouraged to make a deliberate effort to pray for those they knew who were unchurched or uncommitted and to bring them personally to the meetings. Lorne and Charlie also refined the process for recruiting and training our counselors more effectively.

  The response was far beyond anything we could ever have anticipated. Using telephone lines during Easter week from Kelvin Hall, Church of Scotland evangelist D. P. Thomson helped us to organize rallies in thirty-seven locations; over 1,000 people later attended follow-up classes from these meetings. Nor was the Crusade’s impact limited to Scotland. On Good Friday, the BBC beamed on radio and television a special sermon I had prepared on the meaning of the Cross. It had what was said to be the largest audience for a single program since the coronation of the Queen.

  We later discovered that the Queen herself had watched the program. Two or three days later, one of her equerries came to see me, conveying an invitation to preach at Windsor Castle the week after the London Crusade. He stressed that the engagement must be kept confidential, however, or it would have to be canceled. I told only Ruth.

  During this holy but hard time, letters to Ruth were my safety valve. In the intimacy of our partnership in the ministry, as well as our mutual love and respect, I could express myself to her as to few others. I smarted under grievous criticisms from fundamentalists, and I minced no words in telling her how I felt: “Some of the things they say are pure fabrications. . . . I do not intend to get down to their mud-slinging and get into endless arguments and discussions with them. . . . We are too busy winning souls to Christ and helping build the church to go down and argue with these . . . publicity-seekers.”

  I continued in the same vein: “If a man accepts the deity of Christ and is living for Christ to the best of his knowledge, I intend to have fellowship with him in Christ. If this extreme type of fundamentalism was of God, it would have brought revival long ago. Instead, it has brought dissension, division, strife, and has produced dead and lifeless churches.”

  The fact that I was in Christian work didn’t make it any easier, humanly speaking, to be away from Ruth and the children. Right after I got to Scotland, I expressed my yearning for her company in a letter that might have pressured her as much as I hope it pleased her: “You have no idea how lonesome it is without you! In thinking about my message tonight, I’d give anything if you were here to talk it over with. You are the only one that ever really understands my dilemma in the choice of messages. Your advice is the only one that I really trust. You have no idea how often I have listened to your advice and it has been as if it were spoken from the Lord. During the past year, I have learned to lean on you a great deal more than you realize. I’ll be counting the days till you arrive.”

  I guess I must have let my feelings for Ruth show in public. The Scottish reporters asked me how many letters I had received from her, and how many times I had written to her. They even wanted to know how much perfume she put on her letters for me to smell!

  “Hurry on over,” my associate Lee Fisher wrote to Ruth. “Bill’s about to languish away. He tries to act like he’s self-sufficient, but he’s a perfect fool about your coming.”

  In Glasgow, though, criticism took a back seat to rejoicing in Crusade blessings. My personal joy reached new heights when Ruth came over to join me for the last two weeks of the Crusade; it had been only a month since I had left home, but it seemed like a year. She brought with her nine-year-old Gigi, who was old enough to appreciate a visit to another country. Gigi immediately got a crush on our Scottish chauffeur. It was my first experience of functioning as evangelist and daddy at the same time.

  The meetings in those last weeks were carried by telephone lines to locations all over the British Isles. The final meeting in Kelvin Hall drew a capacity crowd on Thursday night, with another 6,000 listening outside in the streets over loudspeakers. Then, on Saturday, 100,000 people jammed every available space—sitting and standing—at Hampden Park, Glasgow’s main soccer stadium.

  Dr. Tom Rees put it well: “London broke the ice; Glasgow swam in a warmer current.”

  At Hampden Park and elsewhere, the St. John Ambulance Brigade was on duty for first aid. When they received a call for help while I was preaching, they ran to whomever was in distress and brought him or her back to their station, which was under the platform. One night especially it seemed to us that a lot of people were in distress. Grady went down to find out what was going on and discovered that the primary restorative used by the first aid workers was a shot of brandy. While down there, Grady claimed he saw one woman come back three times!

  We reached a half-million more people in our six weeks in Glasgow and at single rallies in Aberdeen and Inverness than the 2 million we had touched in twelve weeks in London. And the response to the Gospel by recorded inquirers, which numbered some 38,000 in London, went beyond 52,000 in Scotland. As mass figures, these were somewhat numbing, but they were indeed “vital statistics” when you heard the individual stories.


  Like the woman who told her hairdresser that she owed her new permanent to Billy Graham. Her husband, after being converted at the Crusade, brought home all of his paycheck instead of holding out much of it for drinking and gambling.

  Or like the cabby who was led to Christ by my old friend Dr. John R. Rice, editor of The Sword of the Lord newspaper. Rice had enthusiastically participated in the Crusade for a week after an American businessman gave him an airplane ticket to fly over. When he got back, he described his Scotland visit in The Sword as “seven miracle days.”

  Or like the devout, churchgoing husband and wife in a small Irish town, listening over the radio to the Crusade broadcast from Kelvin Hall; they decided on the spot to trust “the Man on the Cross” for their salvation and held to their decision in the face of strong local criticism and family opposition.

  Sometimes we hear about the impact of a Crusade only much later. Almost forty years after this particular Crusade, in 1991, I returned to Scotland for a Crusade in several cities. Two years later, in 1993, I addressed a Scottish School of Evangelism on television via satellite from the United States. At the school, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Dr. Hugh R. Wyllie, who had been Moderator at the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly, introduced me. In his remarks, he noted that in 1955 he had hoped to hear me in person in Kelvin Hall but was able only to listen on landline at Elgin. But my words had crystallized the commitment of his parents to Christ and hastened his own response to the claims of Jesus Christ, resulting in his call to full-time service in the church.

  Almost immediately after Glasgow, we had another Crusade in London, at Wembley Stadium. It rained every single night except the last, which was the coldest night of the year!

  In the months following Glasgow and Wembley, we held rallies throughout West Germany, at the largest stadiums and arenas available in the cities of Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Kaiserslautern, Mann-heim, Stuttgart, Nürnberg, Darmstadt (where I had the privilege of meeting with the great hero of resistance to the Nazis, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller), and Dortmund.

  Other meetings were scheduled in Oslo, Norway; Gothenburg, Sweden; Århus, Denmark; and Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I also made visits to Zürich, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. Before returning to the United States, I preached at a worship service at the U.S. military installation at Verdun in France and addressed for the first time the Baptist World Alliance meeting in England.

  COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

  Ever since my days at Northwestern Schools, youth in general and college students in particular have been a special concern for Ruth and me. In fact, this concern went back to our days with Youth for Christ. As we evaluated and prayed over invitations to speak and preach, colleges and universities often took priority.

  I have often felt inadequate in such settings. At the same time, I have discovered that in the midst of the contradictory philosophies and ideologies competing for attention on the average university campus, there is something compelling (and even life-changing) for many students about the person of Jesus Christ. Many of them have developed a vaunted intellectual approach to life. But of these, few have ever seriously examined the record of Jesus’ life or considered the evidence for His claim to be the One who alone can give ultimate meaning to life and death.

  I have already described our spring 1950 tour of New England, which included speaking engagements at a number of colleges and universities. Our experiences there convinced us that we needed to devote more time to campuses in the future, but during the next few years our Crusade schedule was so intense that we had little time, except for schools in the Crusade cities.

  Princeton Seminary 1953

  One exception was an invitation to speak at Princeton Theological Seminary in February 1953. I almost did not accept it. How could I address ministerial students at one of the most respected seminaries in the United States when I had not been to seminary myself?

  As houseguests of President and Mrs. John Mackay, Ruth and I were treated with unrestrained warmth. And even though the students were not predisposed toward our ministry, I couldn’t have asked for more respectful treatment. That did not mean they were not candid or direct during the question periods following my talks; they certainly were! These were dedicated and intelligent students, not about to be taken in by the cult of personality that they perceived the media had developed around me. (Perhaps they were disarmed by finding out that the so-called cultism concerned me more than it did them.)

  At that time, the Scottish-born Dr. Mackay was a giant in American church circles. The unhurried private talks we had together revealed to me that he was a man who had a deep heart for God. He also seemed to appreciate the opportunity to talk about his deepest concerns with someone outside his immediate context.

  His comments in a letter written after our visit were encouraging: “Your presence on this campus has meant more for the spiritual life of Princeton Seminary and for the creation of a spirit of unity in the student body than anything that has taken place during the nearly seventeen years that I have been President.”

  Cambridge University 1955

  Of a much different nature was our experience the first time we held an extended series of meetings focused on one specific university. Those meetings took us back once again to Great Britain.

  Following our meetings in London in 1954, we received an invitation to hold an eight-day mission at Cambridge University under the auspices of the student-led Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU); it had 800 members out of the university’s student body of 8,000. After much prayer, we accepted the invitation for November 1955.

  Unexpectedly, the invitation unleashed a storm of controversy in nothing less than the editorial pages of the Times. Between August 15 and August 27, the newspaper printed twenty-eight letters to the editor about the proposed mission. So intense was the interest in the topic of our visit that the paper later reprinted those letters in a separate booklet. The series of letters began with one from a liberal Anglican clergyman from Durham, Canon H. K. Luce.

  “The recent increase of fundamentalism among university students cannot but cause concern to those whose work lies in religious education,” he wrote. “Is it not time that our religious leaders made it plain that while they respect, or even admire, Dr. Graham’s sincerity and personal power, they cannot regard fundamentalism as likely to issue in anything but disillusionment and disaster for educated men and women in this twentieth-century world?”

  The issue was complicated by the fact that the CICCU’s student leaders had obtained permission to use the official university church, Great St. Mary’s, for the meetings. “This does not mean that the University Church endorses fundamentalist views,” the church’s vicar, Mervyn Stockwood, wrote to the Times.

  We later became good friends, Mervyn and I, in spite of our theological disagreements. But during the next ten days, a flurry of letters went back and forth in the pages of the newspaper. Some ranking clergymen and scholars, including some affiliated with Cambridge, strongly defended the mission; others just as strongly decried it. Still others attempted to define the exact theological meaning of the term fundamentalist; it didn’t have quite as negative a connotation in Great Britain as it had in America, referring in England mainly to someone who held to the essential tenets of the historic Christian faith as found in Scripture.

  “Does not Canon Luce,” one writer chided, “underestimate the intelligence of undergraduates who, one may suppose, have reached an age when they begin to sift knowledge gained and to form their own opinions?”

  In late August, I expressed my doubts in a letter to my trusted friend John Stott, vicar of All Souls, Langham Place, in London; as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had won a double first (modern languages and theology). “I have been deeply concerned and in much thought about our Cambridge mission this autumn,” I wrote John candidly. “I do not know that I have ever felt more inadequate and totally unprepared for a mission. As I think over the possi
bility for messages, I realize how shallow and weak my presentations are. In fact, I was so overwhelmed with my unpreparedness that I almost decided to cancel my appearance, but because plans have gone so far perhaps it is best to go through with it. . . . However, it is my prayer that I shall come in the demonstration and power of the Holy Spirit, though I am going to lean heavily on you, Maurice, and the others.”

  A copy of my letter to John Stott went to another close friend and supporter, the bishop of Barking, Hugh Gough, himself a Cambridge man. Hastily, he wrote me a letter of encouragement from on board ship as he was about to depart from Canada: “I can well understand your feelings of apprehension about Cambridge, but Billy do not worry. God has opened up the way so wonderfully & has called you to it & so all will be well. . . . Do not regard these men as ‘intellectuals.’ Appeal to their conscience. They are sinners, needing a Savior. Conviction of sin, not intellectual persuasion, is the need. So many preachers fail at this point when they speak to university men. So, Billy, keep to the wonderful clear simple message God has qualified you to preach.”

  In spite of his admonition, I worked as diligently as I knew how to put the Gospel into an intellectual framework in eight messages.

  Rumor had it that traditional interschool rivalry with Oxford University would lead some Oxford “blues” to kidnap me. The day I was to arrive at Cambridge—Saturday, November 5, 1955—was Guy Fawkes Day; the holiday commemorated the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, a plan by Catholics to blow up Parliament and kill the king. As celebrated in England in general, and no doubt at Cambridge as well, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, “pennies for the Guy” were collected by children, and fireworks were set off. Kidnapping me might just top off the festivities.