The Power And The Glory of Billy Graham
How a towheaded kid from North Carolina became God’s best salesman.
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Billy is not just making all this up. He reads at least three newspapers a day, has a UPI Teletype in his home, and his wife and several assistants clip magazine articles for him and give him books with the good parts already underlined, so he is able to support his views with quotations from the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, from Time and Newsweek and Reader’s Digest, from the writings of Mark Twain and George Orwell and John Steinbeck and the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, from Dr. P. A. Sorokin of Harvard and the famous psychiatrist Erik Erikson and the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard, and from John Lennon and Erich Segal and Vance Packard.
Then again he gets a lot of information first-hand since he has been everywhere and knows just about everybody. People like Dag Hammarskjöld and Henry Kissinger and the President and the Pope have told him things are tough all over, as have the thousands of ordinary, troubled individuals Graham has met, who confirm that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. There is, however, some good news:
Man—distressed, discouraged, unhappy, hounded by conscience, driven by passion, ruled by selfishness, belligerent, quarrelsome, confused, depressed, miserable, taking alcohol and barbiturates, looking for escapisms—can come to Christ by faith and emerge a new man. This sounds incredible, even impossible, and yet it is precisely what the Bible teaches.
Billy not only soft-pedals the doctrines, some of them by no means minor, that divide evangelicals into denominations, but has been a major force behind a growing evangelical ecumenicity. Before he will accept an invitation to hold a crusade, for example, he insists that a strong majority of the evangelical churches in an area pledge their support. Then, during each crusade, he sponsors a tuition-free school, directed by Dr. Kenneth Chafin, pastor of Houston’s South Main Baptist Church, in which as many as 1500 ministers and selected laypeople, representing dozens of denominations, receive fairly intensive instruction in preaching, soul-winning, and church leadership.
Another aspect of Billy’s message has undoubtedly helped him. Working a combination Jesus never quite mastered, he manages to comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable. Graham appeals to affluent evangelicals who perhaps need some assurance that the needle’s-eye door to the Kingdom of God is not quite so small as they had heard, and that wealth, if honestly gotten, is not only permissible but perhaps even a sign that God has smiled on them in a special way. They, in turn, take some of the risk out of Billy’s ventures. His decision to hold a crusade in New York City in 1969, for example, was reached in the boardroom of Mutual Life Insurance of New York; the executive committee for the crusade included the board chairman at MONY, his counterpart at Chase Manhattan, and the presidents of RCA and Genessco. Billy does not, however, put a divine stamp of approval on all that is American and middle-class; on the contrary, with clenched fist and pointing finger, with glaring eyes and accusing voice, he rings thundering disapproval down on much that he sees. Still, he offers forgiveness and everlasting life to those willing to accept it, without calling on them to make great personal sacrifices. If they love Jesus as he does, they may travel first-class, as he does.
The second component of Billy Graham’s success is his superb organization. In 1950, after it became clear he was not just another temporary wonder, Graham moved to put his ministry on a solid, businesslike basis. At the suggestion of associate George Wilson, he formed the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Inc. (BGEA), a non-profit corporation headquartered in Minneapolis. Today, with Wilson as chief executive, a staff of approximately 500 processes the mail, donations, and correspondence courses, publishes and distributes Decision magazine, and provides counseling-by-mail for those who write Graham with their problems. Also headquartered in Minneapolis are World Wide Publications and the Grason Company, which distribute books and materials related to Billy’s ministry. Films from World Wide Pictures are distributed from Minneapolis, but studios and production facilities are located in Burbank, California. Crusades are planned and executed out of Minneapolis. Walter Bennett & Company in Chicago and Philadelphia handles radio and television as it has since the Hour of Decision went on the air in 1950. In addition to these, the Graham organization maintains smaller operations in London, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong, Kyoto, and Winnipeg.
Nowhere is the rationality, thoroughness, and efficiency of Graham’s organization more apparent than in the planning and execution of its crusades. Not surprisingly, he receives many more invitations to hold crusades than he can possibly accept. In the past, the strategic importance of the city in question was a key criterion. Is it a major population center? Does it have great political or economic importance? Will a crusade there win coverage in the newspapers of other cities? Today, because Graham’s crusades are nationally televised, cities are selected for their suitability as a studio. Politicians have
learned to do the same thing for the same reasons. As the Reverend Charles Riggs, one of Graham’s longtime crusade directors, explained, “Since your big audience is on television, it is smarter to go somewhere where you will get better support and where it won’t cost you as much. A crusade in the South, for example, is many times less expensive than one in the North. In the North, things cost a lot more, labor unions run the cost up, whereas down in the South you get things donated.” For these reasons, Graham has turned in recent years to cities such as Jackson, Albuquerque, and Lubbock.
Once an invitation has been accepted, representatives from the host city form
a nonprofit corporation that will be responsible for financing the crusade and developing the necessary organization. Several months before a crusade begins, the Graham association sends members of its team to open an office in the host city and involve as many people as possible in various facets of the crusade. A finance committee is charged with raising a sizable chunk of the quarter million dollars or so the crusade will cost. A prayer committee will set up daily meetings in thousands of homes. In Jackson, for example, three thousand groups averaging eight members apiece—more than 10 per cent
of the city’s total population—met daily for a month before and during the week of the crusade.
To spur these groups to keep their commitments, the crusade team sponsors a prayer program each morning at 10:15 over a local radio station and again at 8:00 in the evening for family prayers. As laymen are organizing in this fashion, the Graham team holds a series of meetings to enlist the support of as many Protestant clergymen and their
churches as possible to cooperate with the crusade, and may get over a thousand churches to participate in some way. A three-week Bible study program, classes for counselors, and a series of one-shot rallies, prayer breakfasts, and orientation sessions enable the Graham team to involve thirty to forty thousand, and sometimes as many as eighty thousand people in one or another facet of a crusade. With that accomplished before he hits town, Billy Graham really doesn’t have to worry much about drawing a crowd.
To those who attend a crusade or view it on television, the payoff of all this effort seems to come when hundreds, sometimes thousands of “inquirers” stream from the stands to make their “decisions for Christ.” Most perhaps imagine that Graham and his team have now done their job, have accomplished what they sought; but that is not at all the case.
As Graham offers the invitation, the aisles fill not only with inquirers, but also with counselors. Insofar as possible, a counselor seeks out an inquirer of the same sex and approximately the same age group and asks him or her to check the item on a decision card that most nearly matches the reason he or she has come forward—first-time commitment, rededication, special problem, etc. After a two- or three-minute review of the Gospel, the counselor presents the inquirer with a small packet of materials, which includes the Gospel according to John, a Bible study lesson, a devotional guide, and several Scripture verses printed on small cards to facilitate memorization. Finally, the counselor helps the inquirer complete the decision card, suggests they pray together, and
urges the new friend in Christ to get in touch if any problems arise during the next few days.
Within minutes, the decision cards are transferred to what is known as the “Co-Labor Corps,” a group of 200 to 300 workers housed in an armory or gymnasium and looking like the combination of a political convention, the newsroom of a metropolitan daily newspaper, and a Christian beehive. There the cards are sorted into broad categories, such as denomination and type of decision, then passed on to researchers who fill in missing items with the help of zip-code books, criss-cross directories, and special computer print-outs prepared by the crusade team. “If a person comes here from Louisiana,” a supervisor told me, “and puts down his street address, chances are we can
figure out what church and what pastor we should notify concerning his decision.”
After retyping, the card, together with an explanatory letter, is then sent to a pastor who has either been named by the inquirer, or whose church members invited him, or whose participating church is nearest the inquirer’s home, or who has been specially selected by a “decision committee” charged with making such assignments. Though Graham is not anti-Catholic, he still regards his ministry as distinctly Protestant and
does not assign cards to Roman Catholic churches. Neither would he honor a request to contact a leader of such cults as the Church of Scientology or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
These letters are then metered, sorted according to zip code, taken to a special branch of the post office, and delivered in the next morning’s mail. This means that for virtually every person who responds to Graham’s invitation in an evening service, some pastor in a sixty-mile radius will have received a letter by noon the following day, urging him to contact the inquirer, take appropriate action, and report back to a follow-up committee.
The Graham organization is sensitive to the justifiable criticism that revival fires rapidly burn out and seeks to sustain them as long as it can. Beginning the day after the crusade closes, the radio station that has carried the prayer broadcasts begins a series of morning and evening programs dealing with what it means to be saved and how to live as a Christian. Three weeks later, all inquirers are contacted by telephone and asked about any difficulties they may have had, urged to attend church and join a Bible study group, and encouraged in the continuing struggle against sin.
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