For all these marks of achievement, however, a slight air of defensiveness pervades team descriptions of the 1966 crusade. Graham declared it to have been “much more successful than Harringay” but acknowledged that the 1954 effort excited British Christians to a unique and unexpected degree. Admitting the resistance he met from clergy, Bob Ferm noted that “things went well when the crusade actually came off; Earls Court was not really unsuccessful, pound for pound.” Others observed that given the hedonistic character of London’s culture in the midsixties, “Billy was brave even to have it.” In his brief chronicle, Crusade ’66, John Pollock complained that with few exceptions, the British media “seemed oblivious of the Crusade’s importance to the nation’s future, and anxious to restrict news of Earls Court.” It seems doubtful the media were engaged in a conspiracy to hide Graham’s light under a bushel. More likely, it was simply that Billy Graham was a victim of his own success. There was little new the papers could say. It might be significant that Billy and his team could fill a large arena and several outlying auditoriums for a month, but it was no longer surprising. Because the novelty had worn off, media interest had waned and most of the papers seemed to agree with the Daily Mail, which ho-hummed, “We’ve grown accustomed to his faith.”
Of those who managed to keep their enthusiasm in check, none were more conspicuous than the leaders of the Evangelical Alliance (EA). As their American counterparts had done periodically since the days of Charles Finney, EA leaders had become convinced that mass evangelism was more flash and sparkle than substance, and that individual and small-group efforts were ultimately more effective at winning souls and keeping them won than were giant public rallies, which they regarded as booster sessions for believers. The heart of EA’s criticism, published in a 1968 report, On the Other Side, rested on a survey of British churches. The recurring theme of the responses from eighty-five churches in the sample was that the 1966 crusade and a 1967 follow-up effort that concentrated more on television than on the live service in London made no lasting impact on people who were outside the churches. Most of the unchurched had simply ignored the meetings; of the few who bothered to attend, only a small number had any lasting positive response. If they went forward at Graham’s invitation, they often remained confused about what they had done or why they had done it. If they found their way into church, they usually found their way out again rather quickly. As for television relays, faithful church members enjoyed them and believed they must be effective, but the impact on outsiders appeared to be minimal. Overall, clergymen who returned the questionnaires expressed a clear belief that locally based evangelism, particularly when working with young people, was more effective than crusade evangelism. Graham’s approach, they suggested, was something of a clumsy dinosaur, still throwing its weight around but unable to adapt to changing times and destined for extinction.
Because it was produced by Evangelicals, some of whom had worked diligently in Graham’s crusades, and because its approach was thoughtful and measured rather than captiously critical, the report’s conclusions were all the more devastating. In 1986 Maurice Rowlandson ventured that On the Other Side had “put crusade evangelism back at least ten years in Britain. It meant Mr. Graham couldn’t even consider coming back in that time. In fact, it was 1984 before he came again. It had an amazing influence, that book. It was a very unhappy event, and we have only just emerged from it.”
Though not everyone approved of his methods or held him in high esteem, even Graham’s sharpest critics usually conceded that he was a man of sincere commitment and unquestioned integrity, and none denied he had played a major role in revivifying and reshaping Evangelicalism, helping it to become an increasingly dynamic and self-confident movement. But to Graham, these achievements were not enough. As he came to sense the breadth of his influence, he grew ever more determined to use it not just to build his own ministry but to change the fundamental direction of contemporary Christianity. That determination showed itself in a new and momentous way in late 1966 with the convening of the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Since his earliest days at Florida Bible Institute, Graham had longed to stand in the line of men he considered to be great servants of God. The Berlin Congress was a conscious effort both to repair and forge a link in the chain that ran back to D. L. Moody, whose spirit and career Graham admired more than any other of his predecessors.
The nineteenth century had been a great era for missions, and no one had been more supportive than Moody, who helped finance major mission conferences and whose campaigns and summer meetings at Northfield had provided inspiration and impetus for the intensely mission-minded Student Volunteer Movement in America and England and the World Student Christian Federation in Europe. One summer at Moody’s Northfield Conference, more than 2,100 college students volunteered for missionary service. One of those inspired by Moody’s example and encouragement was John R. Mott, who devoted the remainder of his ninety years in efforts to fulfill the student movement’s ambitious slogan, The evangelization of the world in this generation. When Mott saw classical soul-winning evangelism continually lose ground to a growing concern to minister to the body and to alter social structures—both of which he regarded as legitimate Christian endeavors—he spearheaded the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, at which he hoped to reconcile differences between his Evangelical and Modernist colleagues and then to rekindle their zeal for the winning of souls. To Mott’s disappointment, his plan did not work. On the surface, the conference had an Evangelical flavor, but a majority of the 1,206 participants felt uncomfortable with making the kinds of claims to exclusive truth that had given birth and purpose to the missionary movement. In two significant manifestations of this reluctance, they declined to espouse belief in an infallible Scripture, preferring instead to ground their endeavors in a more ambiguous “authority of Christ,” and they declared that Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox countries should no longer be considered as mission fields. In a further show of ecumenical spirit, they agreed not to issue any resolutions that involved “questions of doctrine or church polity with regard to which the Churches or Societies taking part in the Conference differ among themselves.” No doctrine, no principle would be more important than unity.
Upset by what they considered unacceptable compromise, the more Fundamentalist churches and agencies began to drop out of the ecumenical mission movement. By 1921, when the ever-hopeful Mott convened the inaugural meeting of the International Missionary Council (IMC), which had grown out of the Edinburgh conference, the Modernists were firmly in control and soul-winning evangelism had all but disappeared from the ecumenical agenda. Subsequent development was not in a straight line. An IMC conference in Madras in 1938, once again directed by Mott, called for a return to an emphasis on the Bible, though it explicitly rejected the orthodox Fundamentalist view of Scripture. Mott and some of the tiny remnant band of Evangelicals in the IMC tried to forge a synthesis between historical evangelism and the Social Gospel, but no one any longer talked seriously of evangelizing the world in this or any other generation. Not only was the task too big, but the ecumenists had largely abandoned the conviction that their message was intrinsically superior to that of the other great world religions. Instead, mainline missionaries, whose number was rapidly diminishing, were urged to discover and encourage the common and compatible elements between Christianity and the religions practiced by the people among whom they worked. In 1946, at the age of eighty-one, John R. Mott received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bridge gaps of misunderstanding and to bring all human beings into loving fellowship. When asked how he wished to be identified, he gave a one-word reply: “Evangelist!” He had never surrendered his conviction that all people everywhere needed the salvation that could come only through Jesus Christ, but the institutions he led had never been further from believing it was their solemn duty to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matt.
28:19).
The ecumenical movement reached a new milestone in 1948 with the founding of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, a meeting Billy Graham attended as an observer representing Youth for Christ. At this initial meeting, evangelism received a polite nod, but verbal proclamation of the kerygma was seen as clearly subordinate to the ostensibly more powerful nonverbal testimony of a united Christendom. Subsequent international conferences of the World Council, particularly those at Evanston in 1954 and New Delhi in 1961, acknowledged the surge of evangelistic efforts in conservative churches but explicitly marked off the differences between the council’s view of mission and the ministry of Billy Graham, which the Evanston meeting characterized as “verbalism,” claiming that it represented “an old form of evangelism,” now seen to be in decline. By the time of the New Delhi meeting, which Graham also attended, the Evangelical view that individuals and churches should “send the light and preach the word” had been rendered inoperative by “universalism,” the belief that, however one might conceive of salvation, all human beings will ultimately receive it. The mission of the church, therefore, consists of transforming sinful structures and has nothing to do with rescuing lost souls from eternal punishment in hell.
All this, of course, was anathema to Evangelicals, Billy Graham included. He attended the World Council’s meetings, rejoiced in the fellowship of renowned ecclesiastics, even when they singled him out for criticism, and “thrilled at the whole process of seeing world churchmen sitting down together, praying together, discussing together.” Even so, he felt their attitude toward evangelism was a grievous error. By the late 1950s as he reflected on his own success with the old evangelism and saw that Christianity Today had struck a responsive chord with tens of thousands of ministers in mainline denominations, he began to ponder ways of gathering Evangelicals together to recapture the vision D. L. Moody and John R. Mott had cherished. A three-day meeting of approximately two dozen Evangelical leaders at Montreux, Switzerland, in 1960 set others to thinking and exchanging ideas. Nothing happened right away, but early in 1964, during a taxi ride to the airport after a visit to the White House, Graham told Carl Henry that he wanted to convene a global conference on evangelism. To do so under the aegis of BGEA would seem too self-promoting, and he suspected “the Billy Graham Association didn’t have the intellectual respectability to gather the type of person we wanted to come—professors and presidents of seminaries and people like that.” He thought the best solution would be for Christianity Today to undertake it as a tenth-anniversary project, to be held in 1966. He also felt Henry should head the conference but agreed to give it his stamp of approval by serving as honorary chairman.
No one sitting in on the program-planning sessions would have mistaken the Berlin Congress for a meeting of the World Council of Churches, but the agenda would have delighted John R. Mott. The congress, announced BGEA executive Stan Mooneyham, would define biblical evangelism, expound its relevance to the modern world, identify and mark its opponents, stress the urgency of proclaiming the orthodox gospel through out the world, discover new methods and share little-known techniques of proclaiming it more effectively, and summon the church to recognize the priority of the evangelistic task. Christianity Today described the congress as “a Council of War,” and Carl Henry called it a “once-for-all shot” at turning back the enemies of evangelism and reasserting the validity of a mission strategy “built on the clear exclusivity of Jesus Christ.”
The 1,200 leaders invited to the congress included evangelists, theologians, scholars concerned with evangelism, and denominational and parachurch leaders from 104 nations. Inevitably, decisions as to who would attend created friction. Theologians thought it a waste of money to invite evangelists to a serious theological conference (“They are doctrinally anemic”), and evangelists doubted that a gathering of theologians would have much to say that would be useful (“They don’t know how to lead souls to Christ”). Delegates from the Third World felt the invitation list was weighted too heavily in favor of the West, and Americans anxious to participate in what promised to be a historic meeting grumbled that congress leaders had set a limit of one hundred invitees from the United States. Some evangelists and parachurch leaders who received invitations quickly exploited them in fund-raising appeals, implying that their ministers had received endorsement from the highest levels of world Evangelicalism. Eventually, an impressive and eclectic group of Evangelicals assembled in Berlin. The scope of the gathering was underlined by the presence of Kimo Yaeti and Komi Gikita, Auca Indians who had participated in the 1956 killing of five missionaries in the jungles of Ecuador but had subsequently been converted to Christ. In addition to these erstwhile heathen, the roster also included representatives from both the National and World Council of Churches, as well as from Roman Catholic and Jewish observers. It was, however, notably free of separatist Fundamentalists, an omission that would not go unnoticed. To some, the experience of sitting at a common table with this ecumenical, international, and multicultural melange was enough to transform a simple meal into a foretaste of the messianic banquet. One observer reported there was not “the slightest hint of any racial divergence as those of many colours mingled together in full and free Christian fellowship. One could almost imagine that the Rapture had taken place, and we were all at the other end of the line!”
For ten days beginning on October 28, the ultramodern Kongresshalle, on the banks of the river Spree near the Berlin Wall, rang with clarion calls for a return to old-fashioned evangelistic preaching, carried out with the latest and most efficient techniques and technology. To underscore the sense of urgency, a large digital clock in the lobby emitted a loud pulse that signaled the birth of a new baby—Another Soul to Win—somewhere in the world, remorselessly hammering home the reminder that at 150 births per minute, the population of the planet was growing ten times faster than was Christianity. “No delegate,” one journalist wrote, “can escape the significance of that clicking counter which constantly gate-crashes conversation and stabs the conscience as it emphasizes the enormity and desperate urgency of the one task we have—to communicate one gospel to the one race of all mankind.”
In his opening address to the congress, Billy Graham tried to live up to a prominent Lutheran bishop’s characterization of him as “the personification of the moving spirit of Evangelism.” Explicitly linking himself and the congress to the tradition of D. L. Moody and John R. Mott, he announced at the outset that the primary purpose of the gathering would be to dispel confusion about the meaning, the motive, the message, and the methods of evangelism, as well as about the devious strategies of “the enemy,” a category that included both natural and supernatural foes. Graham usually rested content simply to state what he believed without attacking positions that differed from his, particularly when his opponents were churchmen. On this occasion, however, he lashed out at the ecumenical advocates of universalism. The widespread but softheaded belief that God would not really let people go to hell, he said, had “done more to blunt evangelism and take the heart out of the missionary movement than anything else.” Then, lest any think he believed that men born into other religious traditions might somehow find God by following those ill-lit paths, he declared flatly, “I believe the Scriptures teach that men outside of Jesus Christ are lost! To me, the doctrine of future judgment, where men will be held accountable to God, is clearly taught in the Scriptures.” If the church could recover its conviction on these matters, he said, “it would become a burning incentive to evangelize with a zeal and a passion that we are in danger of losing.” Graham acknowledged that modern biblical criticism had sown much doubt about the veracity of Scripture and the claims it made about Jesus and salvation, but he remained unshakable in his confidence that when an evangelist proclaimed the kerygma, he wielded a sword no biblical critic could blunt. “I have found,” he assured his rapt listeners, who desperately wanted to learn whatever secrets he possessed, “that there is a supernatural power in this message
that cannot be rationally explained. It may appear ridiculous and foolish to the intellectuals of our day, but it is the power of God unto salvation.”
Just prior to the opening of the congress, the World Council of Churches had sponsored a conference in Geneva on social action at which it recognized a “need for revolutionary change in social and political structures” and sanctioned the use of violence, as long as it was kept to the minimum necessary to accomplish the desired goals. Specifically aligning themselves against Billy Graham, whom they characterized as a pawn Lyndon Johnson was using to rally support for American policy in Vietnam, some participants compared “the evangelistic type” to “Nazi Christians who by insisting that the Church concentrate on ‘traditional’ concerns betrayed the cause of justice” and depicted Graham’s type of evangelist as “traitors to Christ’s cause.” Graham realized that religion reporters covering the congress would remark on these attacks and the juxtaposition of the two meetings, but he did not shrink from articulating his oft-stated conviction that “if the Church went back to its main task of proclaiming the Gospel and getting people converted to Christ, it would have a far greater impact on the social, moral, and psychological needs of men than it could achieve through any other thing it could possibly do.” To face the overwhelming magnitude of the task before them, Graham urged a spirit of openness toward every possible avenue of evangelism, including the mass media and computers, “on a scale the church has never known before.” To stick with old-fashioned methods would be to invite the wrath of God upon their heads. Finally, he emphasized the need for cooperative action, a unity based not on a desire not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but a unity that grows out of working together in a common task. “Do we want unity among true believers throughout the world?” he asked. “Then evangelize!” Was there a model for the kind of unity he envisioned? Yes, there was. “I believe,” he said, “that some of the greatest demonstrations of ecumenicity in the world today are these evangelistic crusades where people have been meeting by the thousands from various denominations with the purpose of evangelizing.” So saying, Billy Graham made it clear that he was not only pointing the troops in the right direction; he was ready to lead the way.
A Prophet with Honor Page 49