Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  As a follow-up to Lausanne ’74, Congresses on evangelism, often with little or no involvement by us, were held in such places as India, Hong Kong, Singapore, and even Cuba. One of them, the 1976 Pan-African Christian Leadership Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, brought together Christian leaders from all across the continent, in spite of the racial and political differences that often divided their countries and even their churches.

  I was the only American speaker at that conference. It was held in Nairobi’s new Kenyatta indoor arena. President Kenyatta’s daughter, the mayor of Nairobi, gave a luncheon in my honor one day. I sat beside her on that occasion, and I remember asking her what kind of meat was being served. “It’s our best monkey meat,” she replied proudly. Admittedly it was delicious.

  In some ways, the most far-reaching impact of Lausanne ’74 came from its final document, known as the Lausanne Covenant. Each evening of the conference, a group of about 40 people met to go over the proposed document line by line. John Stott was deeply involved in it (though he did not write it, as some later assumed), as were Leighton Ford and others. I then reviewed the group’s prog-ress after each session. The final result, translated into many languages, has since come to be looked upon as a classic statement on evangelism.

  Particularly important was the paragraph on the nature of evangelism. “To evangelize,” it stated in part, “is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe. . . . The results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his church and responsible service in the world.”

  Throughout my ministry, I have resisted, as a matter of prin-ciple, signing manifestos or documents or petitions of any sort; they can be the cause of unforeseen problems and misunderstandings. My only exception, as I recall, was the Lausanne Covenant. It remains one of the major contributions of Lausanne ’74.

  One outgrowth of the Lausanne conference was the formation of a permanent committee to carry on the vision and work of Lau-sanne. That group, known as the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE), was formed to act as a catalyst for evangelistic strategies and programs on a continuing basis.

  To be honest, when the question of forming an ongoing organization came up in the executive committee, I did not vote for the proposal, although the majority did. I had made it clear from the beginning that it was not our purpose to set up an organization. Nevertheless, I didn’t oppose it openly. They asked me if I would chair the committee, but I declined. They then invited Jack Dain to be chairman, and I agreed to be honorary chairman.

  In the following years—under first Jack’s and then Leighton Ford’s direction—the Lausanne Committee for World Evangeliza-tion did much good in training leaders and refining strategies for evangelism. For several years the BGEA joined in supporting it until it could gain financial help from other sources. My own ministry has kept me from being involved to any significant degree in recent years.

  AMSTERDAM

  Berlin and Lausanne were unquestionably highlights of our work; and yet, in the back of my mind, those two Congresses were actually something of a diversion from what I really yearned to do: call together men and women from across the world who were involved, as I was, in itinerant or traveling evangelism.

  My Crusades overseas had left me humbled by the quality of Christian leadership in other cultures. What struck me most was that countless anonymous evangelists were rendering heroic service to the Gospel, often under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. I yearned to do something to encourage them, and perhaps to give them some tools they could adapt to their own situations.

  After much research and prayer, a plan to sponsor what we called the International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists (ICIE) began to form. The gathering would be different from Ber-lin and Lausanne, where the delegates were primarily leaders in evangelism. This next conference would be for the foot soldiers, not the generals.

  Our goal was to find at least 3,000 men and women who were involved in itinerant evangelism. Although we did not know where we would find them—no one had ever attempted to draw up a list of those involved in itinerant evangelism—we knew that most would be coming from the developing world. That meant their participation would have to be heavily subsidized. Some of them would be able to pay almost nothing because of their own personal poverty or the currency restrictions in their home countries.

  The budget would have to be raised over and above our normal ministry expenses. Although we had a large gift of $1 million from one individual to be used toward this conference, most of the budget (which totaled about $9 million, as I recall) came from small donations. (We later calculated that the average gift was around $15.)

  As we had done before, we surveyed a number of possible locations. In the end, we chose Amsterdam’s RAI Center, one of the few places that could accommodate such a large number of people. The fact that Holland had few visa restrictions contributed to our decision. If we had chosen a country requiring visas of most participants, we would have added enormously to the cost and complexity of the effort.

  The logistics of such a conference, we knew, would be staggering. Even getting word to some of the evangelists would be difficult. Many would never have traveled outside their country, and the vast cultural differences between those from so many different countries would challenge even the most thorough organizational efforts.

  The BGEA’s experienced international director, Dr. Walter Smyth, was chairman, with Werner Burklin as executive director and Bob Williams as associate director. Paul Eshleman came on loan to us from Campus Crusade for Christ as program director, with Leighton Ford as chairman of the program committee. Millie Dienert was asked to enlist prayer support, a critical part of the effort. John Corts had charge of follow-up, planning ways to maximize the impact of the conference after the participants returned to their countries. Departments were set up to deal with everything from transportation and accounting to translation and printing; dozens of staff from many countries moved to Amsterdam to plan every detail as thoroughly as possible.

  In some ways, the biggest challenge was selecting those who would come. Victor Nelson and his staff started out with about 1,000 names of men and women who we knew were involved in some type of itinerant evangelism. As time went on, we uncovered more than 10,000. We had never dreamed there were that many evangelists in the world. We developed a process to review all applications to be sure that those who were invited were actively involved in itinerant evangelism and would profit from attending such a conference.

  Before the conference opened, I went to The Hague, where I was welcomed by Queen Beatrix. I also spoke to the church leaders of Amsterdam, many of whom understandably had no idea what would happen at the conference because they had never experienced anything like it.

  I’ve seldom felt smaller or less important in my life than when I stood on the platform of the RAI Center’s Zuidhal on July 12, 1983, for our opening convocation. I saw the flags of 133 nations flying, representing the registered audience of 4,000 evangelists and 1,200 guests and observers. Most were listening on earphones to simultaneous translation of the proceedings into one of ten languages.

  Spread out before me was a rainbow of men and women with far greater dedication and gifts than I would ever have. They were black and yellow and brown and red and white; from rural villages and towns and sophisticated cities on every continent and from the islands of the sea; speaking a multitude of tongues and little-known dialects as their first language. It was a microcosm of the human race. The largest number came from India; the second-largest, from Nigeria; the third-largest, from Brazil.

  Cliff did a masterful job as master of ceremonies and choral director. Ruth was confined to a wheelchair at the time, waiting for a hip operation, but she did not miss a single session. The prayer times moved us especially
. Some delegates just bowed their heads, or leaned forward, or stood with arms outstretched; others knelt by their seats or bent low on the floor. Given all the languages being spoken in the prayers, it was thrilling to realize that God could understand them all.

  Various men and women spoke or led workshops. I felt that our daughter Anne Graham Lotz was speaking directly to me when she told the huge assembly, “It is not only your words, it is your life which is an evangelistic message to the world.” That thought haunts me even as I write these memoirs, because here in these pages my life is exposed. Where it has been inconsistent with the message I have been preaching, I must repent and ask God’s forgiveness.

  Even those who didn’t speak publicly had stories to tell. One African youth preached all along the first leg of his journey—a sixteen-hundred-mile walk from Zambia to Malawi. He joined fellow Africans from thirty-three countries who made up a quarter of the total attendance at Amsterdam 1983. An itinerant evangelist to Stone Age animists in Irian Jaya (northern West Irian) sold all the pigs that were his means of livelihood in order to raise money to attend the conference. That income got him only as far as Jakarta, however; a special offering from ICIE staff in Amsterdam helped make up the balance he needed.

  Delegates, some of them arriving barefoot and without a change of clothes, were overwhelmed with gratitude when they visited the conference clothing center. There they found shirts, pants, dresses, and children’s togs—five hundred tons in all—distributed free of charge under the auspices of our son Franklin’s organization, Samaritan’s Purse.

  Twenty-five trained counselors were available to help participants deal with personal and family problems (as well as spiritual concerns) in confidential, private sessions.

  Books and study aids were given to delegates who could not afford to purchase them; each one went away with a canvas bag filled with a small library of books to help them study the Bible, prepare evangelistic messages, and do their work more effectively. Some received, without cost, equipment that they needed—such things as overhead projectors, film projectors, tape recorders, sound systems or megaphones, and bicycles. Recognizing that many isolated areas had neither electricity nor a ready and cheap supply of batteries, some received a cassette recorder that generated its own electricity by turning a handle. It was not unusual to see participants making their way back to their hotels and dormitories in sophisticated Amsterdam with their gifts stacked high on top of their heads.

  From the kitchens of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines at Amster-dam’s Schiphol Airport, prepackaged individual meals, including fifty diverse dietetic trays, were loaded onto ten trucks for transport twice each day to the sprawling conference center miles away. The caterers thought that one evangelist from a Third World country had strange dietary needs when he asked for a supply of large vultures; it was some time before they realized he was saying lunch vouchers! Another evangelist salvaged all the cast-off trays he could for use back home as roof tiles for huts.

  But clothing, supplies, and food weren’t what the International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists was all about.

  Two hundred workshops dealt with everything from reaching business and political leaders to studying the Bible and organizing a Crusade. In a special program for wives, Ruth and others gave talks stressing the indispensable role of supportive spouses and praying mothers.

  Among the countless memorable statements made by speakers was one from BGEA associate evangelist Dr. Akbar Abdul-Haqq of India. “If the Bible had been available in an Arabic translation at the time of the prophet Muhammad,” he said, “the history of the world would have been greatly different.”

  As at Lausanne ’74, we decided in advance to issue a final document from the 1983 conference. I asked Dr. Kenneth Kantzer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to chair a small committee of scholars and theologians during the conference (including Dr. Arthur Johnston, Dr. Robert Evans, Dr. James Douglas, and Dr. John Akers) to draft a brief but comprehensive statement directed specifically to the needs of evangelists.

  The result, known as the Amsterdam Affirmations, consisted of fifteen concise but clear statements affirming our commitment to Christ and to the Great Commission, and to purity and integrity in our lives and ministries. The final affirmation was a plea to all Christians: “We beseech the body of Christ to join with us in prayer and work for peace in our world, for revival and a renewed dedication to the biblical priority of evangelism in the church, and for the oneness of believers in Christ for the fulfillment of the Great Commission, until Christ returns.”

  At the conclusion of the conference, the participants stood in a solemn moment of rededication. As each affirmation was read, they responded in their own language with the words, “This I affirm.”

  A year later, I wrote an interpretative commentary on the Amsterdam Affirmations. This book, entitled A Biblical Standard for Evangelists, has been distributed across the world.

  “These itinerant evangelists are the most important ambassadors and messengers on earth,” I said at the close of the conference. “They are a mighty army of proclaimers, energized by the power of the Holy Spirit, spreading out across the world with a renewed vision to reach their own people for Christ.”

  I never imagined the full implication of my own words until the second International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists (Amsterdam ’86) convened in July three years later in the same RAI Center outside the city. From the opening ceremony—with its torchbearers, parade of flags, and lighting of an Olympics-style “flame of salvation”—the multinational, multiracial, multilingual, multidenominational throng sang, prayed, studied, and witnessed as one in Christ.

  The delegates represented almost every conceivable kind of evangelism. Two Dutch women were evangelists to prostitutes. An Indian Airlines flight operations officer was an evangelist to lepers in Madras. Another from Singapore was an evangelist to primitive peoples in the islands off Indonesia. Still others proclaimed the Gospel amid the civil war in Sri Lanka, or under severe restrictions in eastern Europe, or against life-threatening opposition in places like Lebanon. The majority were in their thirties and forties. None had been at the first conference three years earlier; 80 percent had never attended an international conference.

  In some ways, the decision to hold a second conference for itinerant evangelists was not difficult. For one thing, of those who had applied to the first conference, 8,000 had been turned away for lack of space or financing. In addition, as word of our first conference spread, more and more evangelists were discovered. To our amazement, 50,000 names of men and women involved in itinerant evangelism were finally collected.

  Many of them, we realized, held secular jobs—they had no other way to support themselves—and yet they often gave more time to evangelism than some of their counterparts in the West. Others were pastors because in their cultures they would not otherwise be recognized as legitimate evangelists. Two hundred and twenty-five selection committees were set up in various countries to make preliminary nominations, and then our staff followed a careful process in making the final selections. Some decisions were heartbreaking: there were 3,500 applications from India alone, yet we were able to take only 500. In the end, about 8,000 delegates came to the 1986 conference.

  It was an enormous challenge. Werner Burklin, director of the 1986 conference, commented that doubling the number of delegates had probably quadrupled the work; and he was undoubtedly right. For the previous conference, we had dealt primarily with one airline; in 1986 we dealt with twenty-five. In 1983 thirty-five hotels had been used; in 1986 the number rose to eighty-five. In addition, we turned a huge exhibition hall at Jaarbeurs, about twenty-five miles away in Utrecht, into a massive dormitory for 4,000 participants. Dan Southern, one of our longtime Crusade directors, oversaw arrangements for the conference, including the facility at Jaarbeurs; his assistant, Mark Jarvis, calculated that the money saved by using that facility instead of hotels allowed another 3,000 participants to come to the conference
. I visited it twice, and the sense of fellowship among those who were housed there was absolutely contagious.

  Our budget for the 1986 conference ran close to $21 million; that was over and above our annual BGEA ministry budget. About 80 percent of the participants came from underdeveloped countries and required very substantial support. One evangelist wrote that although his monthly income (which was all he had to support his family) was the equivalent of $10, he promised to raise $100 toward the cost of bringing himself to Amsterdam.

  We heard of many examples of sacrificial giving. One woman in America who was very poor walked the highways to collect aluminum cans so that she could give toward the project. Our own employees in Minneapolis held bake sales, garage sales, and other fund-raising events in their spare time to support the conference. Many of the staff in Amsterdam walked to work instead of riding the bus, donating the savings to scholarships for evangelists. Mirac-ulously, the money all came in before the conference opened.

  Again Samaritan’s Purse set up a center to give clothing and other items to those with special needs. Up to ten garments for each person were available from a total of one hundred thousand items collected by Dutch Christians. Ruth and dozens of other volunteers helped Franklin’s staff. One day Ruth found a wedding dress piled on top of a rack of men’s clothing and took it over to Gwen Gustafson, who was supervising the women’s section.

  “Just a minute,” Gwen said, hurrying from the room. In a few minutes she returned with a man from Africa who had been praying for a wedding dress for his daughter.

  Ruth’s heart was touched by a black woman evangelist who walked in barefoot, her feet swollen. Unable to find shoes in her own country, this woman had been traveling and preaching barefoot. The volunteers found two pairs of shoes that fit her.

  Ruth also saw a small man whose left leg was painfully crippled. Traveling around to preach must have been extremely difficult for him, she knew. Franklin got him some crutches and arranged for him to see a doctor who could help him.