Amen
In the past sixty years Billy Graham has been a spiritual adviser to seven presidents and has preached in front of more than 200 million people worldwide. And though health problems have recently slowed him down, he made one thing clear when he stepped up to the microphone last October in Dallas: He is still the most powerful evangelist since Jesus.
I SELDOM GET TO CHURCH with much time to spare, but I knew I had to start early if I planned to attend the Concert for the Next Generation, a two-hour rap and rock fest that would kick off Saturday's Youth Night at Billy Graham's four-day Metroplex Mission in Texas Stadium this past October. Come again? Billy Graham and hip-hop? After all, for most of more than five decades of public ministry, Graham's services have by design been familiar and welcoming to people with more conventional notions of worship. By the nineties, however, many of those attending Graham's crusades, particularly younger people, had never been to a Little Brown Church in the Wildwood and might not regard an invitation of the hymn just to "Trust and Obey" as having much appeal. Encouraged by colleagues with teenage children of their own, Graham has recently agreed to shake up his formula. Word to your mama: The Metroplex Mission was not your grandfather's crusade.
Inside the stadium, from a giant performance structure that sprawled across one end zone and soared eighty feet upward, a vocalist from Jars of Clay greeted a venue-record 82,000 decorously raucous young folk (10,000 more who could not get in watched a JumboTron screen in the parking lot) with, "Hello, Dallas, Texas! Are you ready to have some fun tonight? Are you ready for a revolution?" That set off an explosion of screaming, pogoing, and as Scripture puts it, "revellings and such like" (Galatians 5:21), even though it seemed that lasciviousness did not come naturally to most of these kids.
The Graham-endorsed contemporary Christian musicians that followed Jars of Clay came in several styles, from soloists who demonstrated their sincerity by looking quite pained to ensembles distinguishable from secular rock, rhythm-and-blues, and hip-hop groups only by their more sanitized lyrics, which were equally indecipherable without liner notes. Most of the groups included vocalists or instrumentalists sporting goatees and wearing peculiar hats, tams, or what looked like berets turned backward, and all relied heavily on extraordinary volume and a throbbing beat to drive the joy, joy, joy, joy down in the hearts of their young fans.
The evening's final act was no exception. Kirk Franklin, a Fort Worth hip-hop Gospel dynamo, bounced and strutted around the stage as he shouted, "I want everybody in the stadium to lose your Holy Ghost mind! When I say, 'Throw your hands up!' I want everybody to just go bananas! Yo, Dallas, Texas, can you do that with me? Show the world that white people have rhythm!" Kirk then recognized he wasn't the only black person in the stadium and, after running through some of his Grammy-winning repertoire, thought it a good time for them to cross whatever barriers separated them. "To my African American brothers," he said, "I don't want you going up to somebody named Tyrone, Raul, Little Man, or T-Bone. I want you to find somebody named Keith, Toby, Tyler, Justin, Brad, or Bruce. And to all my light-skinned sisters, I don't want you to go up to somebody named Amber, Megan, Jessica, April, or Rachel. I want you to find somebody named Shaquita, Shakwandra—find somebody named Maleesha. I want everybody in this beautiful church tonight to make yourself uncomfortable and get up and hug three strangers and tell them that you love them. All over this place. Come on! All over, all over, all over! Lots of hugging. There you go; there you go; there you go!" And there they went.
When I spoke to Larry Ross, a Dallasite who has handled Graham's media relations since 1981, he acknowledged that not all the veteran members of Graham's team were easily won over to this new format. "Let's put it this way," he said. "It has been an education process. Though they were very progressive in the early days, this was a whole genre of music they were not used to," an observation underscored by watching team members remove earplugs and grimace as they tried to communicate through the noise billowing from the stage. Graham's son Franklin told me that Billy himself isn't exactly thrilled with the noise either: "Daddy is not too comfortable with the music. He doesn't like it. He won't even listen to it. But he's willing to give it a try. They're stocking the pond so he can go fishing."
Around eight o'clock, when it finally came time for 84-year-old Billy Graham to put his line in that pond, he conceded to the crowd that the music was for a generation far removed from his own, but he welcomed members of that generation warmly. At youth nights in other cities, I've heard Graham cite MTV or the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails and refer to Kurt Cobain's suicide. On this night, he stayed closer to home, preaching about the Rich Young Ruler, who had good intentions and asked the right questions but was ultimately unwilling to surrender his great wealth as the cost of discipleship. It was a simple message about surrendering those things that stand between us and God, but when he spoke the familiar words, "I'm going to ask you to come . . . ," 3,217 people, nearly 80 percent of them under age 25, streamed down the aisles and across the tarp-covered turf to stand before him to be born again, joining the great host who have made that same short journey in his meetings—more than three million at last count, and they do count.
INDEED, THE MORE THINGS HAVE changed with Billy Graham, the more they have stayed the same. My own personal relationship with the man goes back to one gray afternoon at Rice University in December 1985, when my writing career, though not seriously in need of being born again, was at least rededicated. While looking through the mail that day, I let out a whoop of surprised delight. Since I am not much of a whooper, the sociology department secretary called out, "Is that the letter from Billy Graham?" Good guess.
It was not the first time I had received a personal letter from the famed evangelist. After Texas Monthly published my comprehensive profile of Mr. Graham (a designation he prefers to "Reverend" or "Doctor") in its March 1978 issue, he wrote a note expressing his appreciation for its accuracy and fairness. Three years later, following a crusade at Rice Stadium, he wrote again to say he was sorry we had not gotten together while he was in Houston. I was surprised and responded in kind but didn't expect to hear from him again. Now I had. In his brief epistle, Graham said he thought it about time someone with appropriate credentials and from outside his circle write "a book concerning my life and ministry and any niche in history our work may have" and wondered if I would have an interest in such an undertaking. I told the secretary, "I think my life just came true."
In 1991 I completed the biography A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story, the distillation of more than five years of concentrated attention to the life and work of a singular man. Not a perfect man, but an uncommonly good one; not an intellectual, but a genius at relating to people, individually and en masse; not a theologian who will pass down a school of thought, but a proclaimer of Good News who is, if results are the measure, the best who ever lived at what he does. Billy and I—in our first meeting, he insisted that I call him "Billy"—have since maintained contact through the years with occasional letters and telephone calls, but I have not spent much actual time with him or his team, a number of whom I came to count as warm friends. About a decade ago, he was found to have Parkinson's, and he has experienced the progressive deterioration that accompanies that disease. I therefore leaped at the opportunity to attend October's Metroplex Mission, seeing it as potentially the last chance to witness the work of one of history's greatest evangelists.
I was not disappointed. On Thursday, the first night of the mission—the familiar "crusade" has been retired, partly in deference to Muslim sensitivity—Cliff Barrows, Graham's choirmaster and closest associate for more than fifty years, opened the event. "It's taken us thirty-two years to come back to Texas," he exclaimed, "but we are finally here." I'm confident Cliff had not forgotten the 1981 Houston crusade or those in Lubbock, in 1975, and San Antonio, in 1997, but was understandably putting greater significance on prior events in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It was during a month-long crusade in Fort Worth's Will Rogers Coliseum in 1951 that the crusty oilman Sid Richardson, less well known for piety than profanity, took a special liking to the young evangelist and provided him with an entrée to other rich and powerful people, including John Connally, Lyndon Johnson, and most importantly, Dwight Eisenhower, who awarded him frequent and well-publicized access to the Oval Office. Two years later the 1953 Dallas crusade, held in the Cotton Bowl, became notable both as the last time Graham allowed segregated seating in any of his meetings and the occasion of his placing his official membership in Dallas' First Baptist Church, where it remains to this day. And the 1971 crusade at Texas Stadium to which Barrows alluded—although one year off—almost never happened. With the date for its baptismal event rapidly approaching, the stadium was not quite finished, and a labor dispute that would further delay its completion appeared likely. Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry, who chaired that crusade, went personally to union leaders to persuade them not to strike. They agreed, and though not every task was completed, the meetings proceeded as planned. As soon as the crusade ended, the workers walked off the job. Unfortunately, they never did finish the roof.
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