A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Graham returned to England in the fall of 1946 for a six-month tour. This time he invited Cliff and Billie Barrows to serve as his musical team. Barrows had joined YFC and was enjoying notable success not only as a singer and gospel trombonist but also as an evangelist. He intended to continue preaching but readily accepted the opportunity to assist Graham. Despite their drive, both men possessed amiable, conflict-avoiding spirits and a genuine appreciation for the other’s abilities. It was during that first trip that according to Barrows, “God really knit our hearts together in a special way.”

  The winter was bitterly cold, the worst in decades, and economic conditions had improved little since the first visit. To save money, the group frequently boarded in homes rather than in hotels, and Graham and George Wilson often slept in the same bed fully dressed and wearing shawls over their heads to keep warm. On occasion they spoke in stone churches so cold and dank that fog obscured part of the congregation from their view. These hardships, however, neither dampened their spirits nor cooled their ardor. Over a six-month period, Graham spoke at 360 meetings, with extended campaigns in Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast, and London. The Manchester effort early in 1947 marked his first true citywide campaign, but the Birmingham meetings stood out because of opposition from the local clergy, who not only refused to cooperate but persuaded the city council to withdraw permission for him to use the civic auditorium. Instead of following the venerable revivalist tradition of seeking popular support by skinning the local clergy for their hide-bound, moss-backed resistance to God’s will, Graham chose a more winsome and successful course: He spoke to his critics directly and simply melted their resistance. Armed with a list of clergymen most opposed to his efforts, he called on each one, “not to argue, only to explain, and if you don’t mind, to pray.” In almost every case, he won them over with his warmth and sincerity, humbly acknowledging his own shortcomings as a preacher and easily convincing them that his only interest was in helping them further the cause of Christ in their country. One vocal critic of “America’s surplus saints” described his own capitulation: “Billy called on me. He wasn’t bitter, just wondering. I ended up wanting to hug the twenty-seven-year-old boy. I called my church officers and we disrupted all our plans for the nine days of his visit. Before it was over, Birmingham had seen a touch of God’s blessing. This fine, lithe, burning torch of a man made me love him and his Lord.” The city council reversed its decision, and by the end of the meetings, the twenty-five-hundred-seat auditorium was packed each night for what newspapers called “the greatest spiritual revival the city had experienced in a generation.”

  From a spiritual standpoint, the key development was Graham’s encounter with Stephen Olford, an eloquent and powerful young Welsh evangelist whose missionary father had been converted by R. A. Torrey. The two men met briefly during the spring visit, and Graham had been impressed by a powerful sermon Olford had given on the work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. This time the men spent two days together, except for evening services, in the cold, drab bedroom of a miner’s home in the little Welsh town of Pontypridd, not far from Olford’s home in Newport, South Wales. In that bleak setting, Olford led Billy step by step through the process that had produced a profound spiritual renewal in him a few months earlier. “The first day we spent on the Word; not memorizing texts—he was quite good at that—but on what it really means to expose oneself to the Word in one’s ‘quiet time.’ Billy admitted that he’d never had a quiet time in the sense in which I’d described it. That seemed to make a tremendous impression. He was so teachable, so beautifully humble and reflective. He just drank in everything I could give him.”

  The effects of the first day’s conversation did not show immediately. Graham preached that evening and Olford thought, “Quite frankly, it was very ordinary. Neither his homiletics nor his theology nor his particular approach to Welsh people made much of an impact. The Welsh are masters of preaching, and the Welsh people expect hard, long sermons with a couple of hours of solid exposition. Billy was giving brief little messages. They listened, but it wasn’t their kind of preaching.” The crowd was small and response to the invitation meager. The next day in the bedroom, Olford concentrated on the work of the Holy Spirit. “I gave him my testimony of how God completely turned my life inside out—an experience of the Holy Spirit in his fullness and anointing. As I talked, and I can see him now, those marvelous eyes glistened with tears, and he said, ‘Stephen, I see it. That’s what I want. That’s what I need in my life.’” Olford suggested they “pray this through,” and both men fell on their knees. “I can still hear Billy pouring out his heart in a prayer of total dedication to the Lord. Finally, he said, ‘My heart is so flooded with the Holy Spirit,’ and we went from praying to praising. We were laughing and praising God, and he was walking back and forth across the room, crying out, ‘I have it. I’m filled. This is the turning point in my life.’ And he was a new man.”

  Whether this experience was ultimately more critical than Billy’s decision at Mordecai Ham’s tabernacle or his surrender on the golf course at Temple Terrace is impossible to measure, but it clearly had an impact, and his Welsh audience seemed to sense it. That evening, Olford recalled, “for reasons known to God alone, the place which was only moderately filled the night before was packed to the doors. As Billy rose to speak, he was a man absolutely anointed.” Perhaps conscious that it was a significant moment, or perhaps short of sermons, Graham preached an old favorite, based on the biblical story of the Feast of Belshazzar, and the normally unemotional Welsh jammed the aisles as soon as he began his invitation. “Practically the entire audience responded,” Olford remembers. “My own heart was so moved by Billy’s authority and strength that I could hardly drive home. My parents were still alive then, and when I came in the door, my father looked at my face and said, ‘What on earth has happened?’ I sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘Dad, something has happened to Billy Graham. The world is going to hear from this man. He is going to make his mark in history.’ His response was absolutely wonderful. He said, ‘It won’t be the first time America has taken a lead in evangelism.’” Others shared Olford’s sense that Graham’s preaching had taken on a new dimension, that he was not simply delivering sermons but speaking of a God whom he knew in a close, personal way. Chuck Templeton also noticed that Billy’s preaching “seemed to be taking on, more and more, a largeness and authority in the pulpit, to be going for a certain magnificence of effect. It became fascinating, really impressive, to watch him.”

  By mid-1947, Youth for Christ and the similar Southern Baptist Youth Revival movement it spawned constituted a phenomenon sufficiently significant to attract the attention of secular and theologically liberal critics. With memories of the Hitler Youth fresh in their minds, some feared that these patriotic, Fundamentalist rallies, which by now were attracting perhaps a million young people each week, could easily become authoritarian, protofascist gatherings, manipulated by political opportunists whose hand-painted ties barely covered hearts of darkness. To these, the young who streamed into auditoriums and stadia in over a thousand cities were simply “dumb sheep,” differing little from those who had flocked to hear the fanatical bleating of Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long, anti-Semites Gerald Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith, and various spellbinding Communist orators. William Randolph Hearst’s appraisal of YFC as a “good and growing thing” that “will never be good enough or big enough until it involves all of our young people in this country” served only to confirm their troubled suspicions. Insofar as YFC had a political orientation, it was indeed largely conservative, but apart from a decided anticommunism and a strong patriotic strain, politics was neither its manifest nor hidden agenda. It was, as it purported to be, a religious movement, a resurgence of the Fundamentalism that had been licking its wounds for two decades, awaiting just such an opportunity to challenge the liberal Protestantism that had held undisputed sway since the mid-1920s.

  Billy Graham had at leas
t some self-conscious inkling of what was happening. He declared that his travels had convinced him that Modernism was on the ropes and that Evangelicals had a real chance to deliver a knockout blow, not only in America but around the world. To a nation that had emerged victorious from war on two far-flung fronts and welcomed whatever help it could get in its efforts to redrop its anchors and reattach its roots, his bold and confident assertion that a virile, athletic, victorious, freedom-creating Christ was the answer held enormous appeal. Though he remained largely unknown outside Evangelical circles, song sheets from his rallies scarcely exaggerated when they described him as “America’s foremost youth leader . . . whose ministry God is blessing more than any other young man in his generation.” As a YFC headliner, Graham was widely sought for rallies throughout the country, but the addition of dozens of full-time staffers and evangelists enabled him to obtain some respite from the grueling round of travel. He used this opportunity to move into a more general kind of evangelism, remaining under the aegis and on the payroll of YFC but holding longer campaigns aimed not just at youth but at the general public. Still, a 1947 publicity brochure for his first American citywide campaign, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, contained a strong pitch to youth, calling him “A Young Athlete with a Twentieth-Century Gospel Message” and promising “terrific programs paced to a teenage tempo . . . fastmoving . . . enjoyable . . . captivating.”

  The key campaign of the 1947 fall season took place in Charlotte. The invitation, from the same Christian Men’s Club that had invited Mordecai Ham a dozen years earlier, arrived while he was in London. The committeemen failed to take the six-hour time difference into account and telephoned him in the middle of the night, but he accepted without hesitation. As the day approached, however, anxiety seized him and he began to fear that the honor achieved abroad would be without profit in his own country. Almost obsessively determined not to fail at home, he drove his advance men to a thorough job of preparation and spent heavily on a professional saturation-advertising campaign that included airplane-drawn sky banners and leaflet bombings, regular press releases to thirty-one local newspapers, and five thousand telephone calls a day, in addition to the standard run of brochures, billboards, bumper stickers, bus cards, radio spots, window placards, and personal appearances at civic clubs and school assemblies. He also plumped up the services with a gaggle of gospel variety acts that included a Salvation Army band, a brass quartet from Bob Jones College, a child piano prodigy, and the “world’s foremost marimba player.” On opening night Gil Dodds ran an exhibition race against a miler from the University of North Carolina. As the rubber-soled tennis shoes of the two harriers flapped around the wooden floor of the armory, Grady Wilson, not easily embarrassed by incongruity, thought to himself, “This is awfully silly. This is really a little absurd.” But the crowd seemed impressed when Dodds mounted the platform and said, “I wonder how many of you here tonight are doing your best in the race for Jesus Christ,” and when Graham gave the invitation, an unusually high number of young people responded. The eighteen-service campaign drew 42,000 people and marked the first time the original Graham team—Billy, Cliff, Grady Wilson (“We didn’t really ask Grady to come with us,” Graham recalled; “he just joined us and we paid him a little salary”), and Bev Shea—-worked together in a campaign. Because he wanted to keep Shea with him, Billy persuaded the Charlotte committee to raise the singer’s pay twice during the meetings.

  The Charlotte campaign marked one of the first recorded instances of Graham’s warnings against communism, a theme that would occupy a major place in his preaching over the next decade. The local boy who had toured a ravaged Europe himself and who regularly received firsthand reports from YFC colleagues in other lands warned the home folks that “Communism is creeping inexorably into these destitute lands; into war-torn China, into restless South America. . . . You should see Europe. It’s terrible. There are Communists everywhere. Here, too, for that matter.” The only hope, he thundered, is worldwide revival. “Unless the Christian religion rescues these nations from the clutches of the unbelieving, America will stand alone and isolated in the world.” He also struck another note that he would sound again and again in this age that thrilled (or shuddered) at the words and deeds of such titans as Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower: the deep-seated need for an exemplar, a hero. “American youth must have a hero,” he proclaimed. “It may be a football player, a general in the army, or some other glamorous person.” This perception doubtless underlay the packing of evangelistic services with appearances by Christian celebrities, but their task was, like his own, to point beyond themselves to the Star of Stars, the Hero of Heroes: “Jesus Christ is the Hero of my soul and the coach of my life.”

  One further momentous and largely unsought accomplishment remained for 1947. When the YFC evangelists spoke at George Wilson’s rallies at the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, the church’s old and ailing pastor and Fundamentalist patriarch, William Bell Riley, always made it a point to attend the services, observing from a wheelchair or, when weather permitted, from a convertible pulled into a doorway. Well past eighty, Riley was actively seeking someone to take the reins of his Northwestern Schools, which consisted of a Bible school, a seminary, and a brand-new liberal arts college, touted in Evangelical publications as having a “course and bearing [that will] save our young people from the poisonous sting of pagan philosophies which have become the devil’s substitutes, and which have been palmed off under the high-sounding and yet empty phrase of: ‘EXACT SCIENCE.’ The college is coeducational, fundamental, and millennial.” Riley talked to both Graham and Torrey Johnson about becoming president of the schools. When Johnson made it clear he was staying with Youth for Christ, the old man turned all his attention to Graham, whose career he had followed since their first meeting at Florida Bible Institute. He broached the subject on several occasions, but Billy balked, objecting that he had little talent or inclination for administration and could not hold evangelistic campaigns and run the schools at the same time, a point Torrey Johnson had made. Riley countered by pointing out that the crusades would feed students and money into the schools and that when his glory days on the revival circuit passed, as they surely would, he would need a permanent home base. Graham professed to be flattered but continued to insist he did not feel led of God to accept the opportunity. “I have been waiting for Heaven’s signal,” he wrote. “I have not received it.” Privately, he also harbored doubts about the wisdom of assuming a mantle stiffened by Riley’s intransigent Fundamentalism—in many ways, the very kind of pugnacious dogmatism the National Association of Evangelicals was seeking to avoid—and stained with anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic bile foreign to Billy’s irenic spirit.

  Accustomed to getting his way and quite willing to invoke the authority of heaven in support of his position, Riley summoned Graham to his sickbed during the summer of 1947, pointed a bony finger directly at him, and, as portentous lightning and thunder streaked and crashed outside the window, declared imperiously, “Beloved, as Samuel appointed David King of Israel, so I appoint you head of these schools. I’ll meet you at the judgment-seat of Christ with them.” Unable to resist the combination of biblical precedent, deathbed dramatics, and celestial fireworks, Graham relented, but only to the point of agreeing to serve as interim president if Riley died before July 1, 1948, which would cover the next academic year. When the old man died on December 6, 1947, Billy Graham became, at twenty-nine, the youngest college president in America. After six months as interim and six more as acting president, Graham accepted full-time status, but he drew no salary and spent little time on campus. Fearing the job would divert him from evangelism, and opposing it from the outset, Ruth showed no interest in being the first lady to a husband unlikely to spend more time in Minneapolis than he was spending in Montreat. When a school administrator called to ask when she would be moving into the president’s mansion, she gave a clipped and accurate answer: “Never.�
� A few months later, shortly after the birth of a second daughter, Anne, she borrowed $4,000 to buy a small house across the street from her parents in Montreat.

  As a largely absentee president, Graham established a pattern of leadership he would follow throughout his career: He raised money, enlisted boosters, stayed in touch by telephone, left the day-to-day administrative work to a coterie of trusted associates, and occasionally complicated their jobs by making decisions and commitments based more on well-meaning impulse than on informed understanding of relevant facts and issues. In one of his first moves, he persuaded T. W. Wilson to become Northwestern’s vice-president and de facto chief administrator. Wilson was understandably hesitant. One of YFC’s most successful evangelists, he wanted to pursue his career. Moreover, he realized he was no more qualified than Graham to run a college. “I told him,” Wilson recalled, “that I would be a miserable flop, but he called me every night for about ten nights, wanting to know if I had made up my mind yet.” Then, as later, Graham tended to identify making up one’s mind with accepting his wishes; T.W. finally caved in under the pressure and moved to Minneapolis. George Wilson was already on hand as business manager, and Graham quickly put his confidence in Gerald Beavan, a professor of psychology, theology, and Hebrew whom he appointed registrar. When he discovered that Beavan also had experience in advertising and journalism, he enlisted him to prepare publicity for his preaching campaigns and to make sure that news of his successes reached the relevant media.

  Graham had little feel for the way academic institutions operate. He began his first letter to the faculty with the salutation “Dear Gang.” He awarded raises without consulting department chairmen, deans, or financial committees. He hired a man trained in English to teach math. “He hired him because he liked him,” T.W. explained. “Some of the students knew more about math than he did. We had to make some adjustments there.” He appeared at board meetings to discuss issues or projects that would normally require weeks or months of research and discussion by faculty and administrative committees and expected the board to reach a decision in time for him to catch a plane. When he felt he had given the matter all the time he could spare, he would look at his watch and tell his faithful vice-president, “T, you better do the rest. Good-bye.” Several of Graham’s associates from this period have tactfully observed that “Billy was called to be an evangelist, not an educator,” but his tenure at Northwestern was by no means a failure. His growing prominence in Evangelical circles attracted students to all three schools, causing a jump from eight hundred to approximately twelve hundred students. On the map of American higher education, the schools were little more than an obscure dot, but in the parochial universe of Fundamentalist Christianity, they were rising stars. And their leader’s lack of appropriate academic credentials was soon papered over with the first four of what would become a stack of honorary doctorates. Ironically, one of the first schools to honor the Reverend Dr. Graham was Bob Jones College. YFC had funneled hundreds of students to the college, and Dr. Bob was duly grateful. In a reciprocal gesture of reconciliation, Graham invited Jones to speak at Northwestern’s 1948 commencement, the first to be held during his presidency.