In addition to his studies, Billy continued to preach at every opportunity, and the opportunities multiplied as his skills and reputation grew. Under the auspices of the Wheaton Christian Student Union, which he served as president during his senior year, he spoke at numerous small churches across the upper Midwest, establishing himself as a dynamic and popular speaker: “A Young Southern Evangelist with a Burning Message You Will Never Forget!” As an indication of his stature, when President Edman resigned his post as the regular preacher at Wheaton’s United Gospel Tabernacle, known as the Tab to the students and faculty who made most of its membership, he asked Billy to replace him. During these years, Billy also enjoyed the encouragement of old friends Jimmie Johnson, who decided he needed some more education, and Grady Wilson, who ran afoul of Dr. Bob and, after a period on the evangelistic field, transferred to Wheaton with the encouragement and financial support of R. G. LeTourneau, an Evangelical industrialist who admired his preaching but felt he needed more schooling. LeTourneau, known in Evangelical circles as “America’s Number One Christian Layman,” had spoken at John Minder’s Tabernacle during Billy’s tenure as assistant pastor. Impressed with Billy, he was pleased to help Grady follow the same path. The reunion of these young men, who had learned to preach from the same books and had practiced their sermons on each other, had its comic aspects. Once, when Jimmie Johnson filled a local pulpit a week after Billy spoke there, he preached the identical sermon—Scripture, text, outline, illustrations, and all.
Early in 1943 a local businessman named Robert Van Kampen, head of a large printing and publishing company, spoke in the Wheaton chapel. Afterward, he fell into conversation with Billy, who told him he planned to be a preacher. Van Kampen invited him to speak at a small and struggling Baptist church he attended in nearby Western Springs. The church’s physical plant consisted of nothing but a roofed basement, the first installment of what its several dozen members hoped might eventually become a full-fledged edifice. Billy’s first sermon, delivered at his usual speed and volume level, bounced off the stucco walls and wooden theater seats like a fusillade from a Gatling gun, but it impressed his listeners and led to an offer to become pastor of the church upon graduation at a salary of forty-five dollars a week. Other churches had shown an interest in Billy, but with the prospect of having to support a wife looming large, he accepted the offer without consulting Ruth, an oversight that led to a spirited discussion of the distinction between authority and thoughtfulness. At least part of her irritation stemmed from her fear that a pastorate would deter Billy from evangelism. She need not have worried. He apparently never intended to stay in Western Springs for long. The war had stirred his patriotic fires, and he decided to enlist. When his professors persuaded him he could do more good as a minister, he applied for commission as an army chaplain, stating a preference for a battlefront assignment. Twice, the army rejected his application on the grounds that he lacked pastoral experience and was underweight.
After their wedding in Montreat on Friday the thirteenth of August, Ruth caught a chill on the trip back to Western Springs from their seven-day honeymoon at a tourist home in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Instead of calling to cancel a routine preaching engagement in Ohio so that he could stay at the bedside of his brand-new bride, a reason his hosts would surely have accepted graciously, Billy checked her into a local hospital and kept the appointment, sending her a telegram and a box of candy for consolation. She felt hurt at this apparent lack of concern for her condition and feelings but soon learned that nothing came before preaching on her husband’s list of priorities and that this would not be the last time he would leave a hospital bed (including his own) or miss key moments of sorrow or celebration because of a promise to preach.
Despite the brevity of the only eighteen months he would ever spend as a pastor, Billy displayed talents and received opportunities at Western Springs that proved crucial in his rise to national prominence. He had come to think of himself as a Baptist—indeed, he had stirred Ruth’s ire by suggesting that if Dr. Bell were a true Christian, he would also become a Baptist—but he was unwilling to draw lines that would limit his reach and persuaded the deacons to change the name of the Western Springs Baptist Church to the more inclusive Village Church. He launched a businessmen’s dinner series at which prominent Evangelical speakers addressed as many as five hundred men. He also helped the church begin a mission program, retire a long-standing mortgage, and make plans to add an above-ground sanctuary. He was not, however, particularly skilled at such staples of pastoral work as personal visitation and managing conflict within the congregation. “Billy’s not a pastor,” a close friend from this period observed. “This kind of thing was very difficult for him—not to do, but to like. He’d rather preach, and be in association with other men who were preaching.” One man who recognized this most clearly was Torrey Johnson, the enterprising and extraordinarily persuasive young pastor of Chicago’s thriving Midwest Bible Church. Johnson knew Graham through Wheaton and the National Association of Evangelicals. He had heard him preach on several occasions and was impressed with his prowess; in fact, he had countered Billy’s desire to get additional theological training with a classic soul-winner’s admonition: “Get in there and preach. That’s the theological school you need.” Johnson produced a popular Sunday-evening radio program, Songs in the Night, aired over the fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel station WCFL from Chicago. When the crush of his pastoral duties and another radio program proved too great a burden, he approached Billy about taking his place on Songs in the Night. Billy immediately recognized the possibilities and convinced the church to take up the challenge, even though the program’s weekly budget of nearly $150 would exceed the congregation’s pledged income.
Billy’s instincts proved correct. With a confidence bordering on gall, he persuaded bass-baritone George Beverly Shea, already well-known among Evangelicals in the Chicago area for a program on the Moody Bible Institute station (WMBI), to become the show’s primary musical performer. Beginning in January 1944, from ten-thirty to quarter past eleven every Sunday evening, the program originated live from the basement sanctuary of “the friendly church in the pleasant community of Western Springs.” Between Bev Shea’s unadorned yet rich renderings of hymns and gospel songs and the peppier trillings of a girls’ quartet known as The King’s Karrolers, Billy, sitting at a table outlined in colored lights to provide a dramatic aura for the live audience, offered brief meditations. Many of these pointed out the relevance of the Christian message to various contemporary problems and situations: the loneliness of families separated by war, the need for courage and confidence in the face of danger and fear, the perils of succumbing to the lures of alcohol and licentiousness, the relevance of biblical prophecy for understanding world events. Back in Charlotte, too far from Chicago for the Philco in the Grahams’ den to pick up the program unless the weather cooperated, Frank and Morrow sat in their car long past their regular bedtime, turned on the Plymouth’s stronger radio, and strained through the static to hear that familiar and increasingly distinctive voice. “Imagine!” they sometimes said. “That’s our Billy Frank.”
The program caught on quickly, and contributions from listeners relieved the church of any financial burden. Requests for sheet music of Bev Shea’s songs led Robert Van Kampen to launch the Van Kampen Press, which eventually grew into a major Evangelical publishing house whose substantial profits supported a variety of Evangelical missions. The program also boosted Billy’s reputation, generating more invitations to speak at churches throughout the region, a result that irritated parishioners who felt a pastor needed to be at home, tending the sheep. Ever his defender, Bob Van Kampen helped keep the criticism from getting out of hand. Once, after accompanying Billy on a two-week tour through the Midwest, he reported to the deacon’s meeting that “there is only one thing that I can say, and that is that God has laid upon Billy a special gift of evangelism and someday he could be another Billy Sunday or D. L. Moody.” Recal
ling this occasion decades later, Van Kampen observed, “That’s in the minutes of the church. I wasn’t being prophetic. It was obvious.” For his part, Billy was beginning to understand that a free-lance ministry of the sort that seemed to fit his talent and ambition might flourish best when free of the inevitable parochial concerns of a conventional congregation. While his parishioners chafed, he began to move in directions that would change the course of his career and, indeed, of Evangelical Christianity.
Meanwhile, Evangelical Christianity was moving in new directions of its own. During the height of Billy Sunday’s popularity, Fundamentalism had appeared to be in reasonably good shape. It had a coherent view of Scripture to defend against Modernist critics, it was riding a crest of patriotism, and it had shared in what was ostensibly a stunning moral victory by helping to bring about Prohibition, which went into effect in 1920. Yet, within ten years, this formidable movement was devastated by defeat and dissension. At the Scopes trial in 1925, famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow failed to have his client acquitted for the crime of teaching evolution in the Dayton, Tennessee, high school, but he and the world press still managed to make Fundamentalists look like monkeys. On the heels of that embarrassment, Princeton Theological Seminary and several major denominations—most notably the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Northern Baptists—repelled the Fundamentalist challenge to modern biblical criticism and, in effect, drove most Fundamentalists from their midst. As a final symbolic blow, Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Fundamentalism, it appeared, had been defeated and relegated to a minor position in American culture. Its tendency toward intellectual rigidity, its propensity for attracting and lending support to anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and other nativist and right-wing political elements, and its often uncritical equation of Christianity and Americanism had all helped its decline, a decline many observers felt would continue inexorably until the last Fundamentalist had withered and died with a sour whimper.
Fundamentalism did indeed pass through a wilderness, but it did not enter the grave. It not only failed to disappear during the 1930s but underwent a transformation that left it in a reasonably strong position by the end of the decade. That transformation involved shifting, realigning, and reorganizing its base. Instead of trying to fight off liberals within mainstream denominations, Fundamentalists began to form themselves into large independent congregations, usually centered around a notable preacher, and to join alliances such as the World Christian Fundamentalist Association. An even more significant development was the substantial increase in the number of Bible colleges and institutes favoring impeccably orthodox teaching and practical instruction in Christian service over the liberal arts they felt had undermined commitment to truth more narrowly conceived. The model, of course, was Moody Bible Institute, which had trained more than 69,000 students by 1930. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) enjoyed a similar status on the West Coast. By 1940 more than a hundred such institutions had sprung up all over America. Fundamentalists also made extraordinarily wide use of publications and radio; by 1943, BIOLA graduate Charles Fuller’s programs were carried by over a thousand stations, and generous donations from loyal listeners enabled him to found Fuller Theological Seminary, which would become one of the most respected and influential of Evangelical schools.
Not only had dozens of Fundamentalist editors and radio ministers kept Evangelical doctrines before the people but they had made it clear that unnumbered legions still built on the firm foundation, still walked on the ancient pathways, and would teach their children to do the same. In 1941 two new organizations were formed, representing the extreme and moderate branches of the movement. The American Council of Christian Churches, founded by the cantankerous archconservative, Carl McIntire, banned from its membership churches or denominations that had truck with Modernists or belonged to the liberal Federal Council of Churches. Reacting against this extreme separatist position, a more temperate coalition established the National Association of Evangelicals. A third organization, formed during this period to save young people from modernists, communists, and worldliness, called itself Youth for Christ International. Youth for Christ produced many new and dynamic leaders, but none of its young stars would outshine Billy Graham.
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“Geared to the Times, Anchored to the Rock”
The social, economic, and psychic dislocations created by the twenties, the Great Depression, and global war generated enormous concern over the welfare of the young. Conservative Christians shared with many Americans the struggle to keep food on the table and the fear that their adolescent sons might soon be facing enemy guns in Europe or in the Pacific, but what troubled them more deeply was the possibility that their beloved children would abandon faith in God, would live and die outside the community of the redeemed, and thus spend eternity in a hell of fire and brimstone, where thirst is never slaked and the worm dieth not. To ward off this specter, Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders all over the country began holding Saturday-night rallies designed to offer young people, especially young soldiers and sailors stationed far from the safe harbor of their homes, a blend of wholesome entertainment, patriotic fervor, and revivalist exhortation.
Because significant efforts were beginning almost simultaneously, the chronology of this movement is a bit imprecise, but certain key leaders stand out. Clearly, one of the first and most important was Jack Wyrtzen, a New York City bandleader-turned-minister whose Word of Life radio broadcast and rallies began in 1940 and by 1944 were packing Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. In Toronto a handsome, spellbinding young preacher named Charles Templeton enjoyed comparable success, as did alert and enterprising leaders in Indianapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and other cities throughout the United States and Canada. Though less a commanding public figure than these men, one of the most enterprising participants in the rapidly spreading movement was George Wilson, a layman who owned a Christian bookstore and served as business manager for William Bell Riley’s Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis.
Torrey Johnson had attended rallies in Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis and determined to start a similar program in Chicago, where Bev Shea had been urging him to do something for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed in the Chicago area and spending their weekends aimlessly wandering its downtown streets. Johnson leased the three-thousand-seat Orchestra Hall, next door to the USO, and invited Billy Graham to speak at the inaugural rally of the Chicagoland Youth for Christ. On May 27, 1944, ten days before D day, the young pastor got his first real taste of mass evangelism. Backstage before the service, as he paced back and forth, biting his nails and fearing in equal measure that no one would show up to hear him or that he would fail in front of a large crowd, he suffered what he remembers as “the worst fit of stage fright of my life.” His anxiety did not abate when he stepped onstage before a huge crowd of almost three thousand, by far the largest audience he had ever faced. But when he began to preach, fear departed and fire roared. He electrified the gathering with his exuberance and command of Scripture, and when he gave the invitation, forty-two people responded.
Torrey Johnson had made no provision to funnel these young trail hitters into churches or to put servicemen in contact with military chaplains, but he satisfied his conviction that such rallies could stir the hearts of the young and serve as a catalyst for revival. The Orchestra Hall meetings continued all summer (until the Chicago Symphony reclaimed the building for its fall season) and proved popular not only with servicemen but also with sheltered young people who relished the excuse and opportunity to be downtown on Saturday night. In October, following a rally that drew a capacity crowd of nearly thirty thousand to Chicago Stadium, the series moved into the Moody Church, where crowds grew so large that Johnson often scheduled two identical programs back-to-back. Similar meetings were occurring in at least two hundred other cities, and Torrey Johnson, now being called the “Bobby-Sox Evangelist” and “the Second Moody,” spent much of his time o
n the telephone trying to help ministers across the country get still more programs under way.
Just as these meetings were giving Billy a glimpse of what the future might hold, the army finally accepted him for the chaplaincy and gave him a commission as a second lieutenant. As he prepared to leave for the government’s chaplaincy training program at Harvard Divinity School, he contracted a severe case of the mumps, “with all the complications.” During six extremely painful bedridden weeks, his temperature reached 105 degrees, he suffered bouts of delirium, and at times it seemed doubtful he would survive. Even after the crisis passed, doctors told him he might never have children. When listeners to Songs in the Night learned of his condition, one compassionate woman sent him a hundred dollars, with the request that he and his wife spend it on a restful convalescence. A few days later, he and Ruth drove to Miami to spend a few days in the Florida sun. Torrey Johnson happened to be in Miami at the time and offered to take Billy fishing. On the boat, where no telephone calls could interrupt his sales pitch, Johnson laid out a plan. If he could get Chuck Templeton and George Wilson and other young leaders to cooperate, he wanted to coordinate existing youth programs and establish new ones under the aegis of a single organization, to be known as Youth for Christ International. With compelling conviction and persuasiveness, Johnson convinced Billy that if they could sweep young people into a great tide of revival, they could place Evangelical Christianity at the heart of a movement to revitalize American culture. “If I can swing it, will you come join us?” he asked. “We’ll pay you seventy-five dollars a week.”
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