A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Burklin estimated that at least 90 percent of the invitees who descended on the cosmopolitan Dutch city in July 1983—most of them supported in part or whole by BGEA funds—had never previously attended any kind of conference; many, perhaps most, had never traveled outside their own countries. The inevitable clash of cultures produced both poignant and comic moments. A Third World participant who was taken by bus to the convention center for registration, then directed to board another bus for a ride to his hotel, refused to leave the center. Though he could not speak English or any other language represented at the registration desk, he finally managed, with tears filling his eyes, to make clear that after having come so far and gotten so close, he feared he was about to be deported. On the first day of the conference, several participants unfamiliar with the concept of a coffee break abashed Western colleagues by drinking directly from the cream pitchers. And in a similar misreading of cues, a group of Africans, told to “relax and dress casually” during a day off at the midpoint of the conference, startled unwary tourists by lounging barefoot in the lobby of the downtown Marriott hotel. Other contrasts between the affluent, sophisticated West and the world’s poorer nations made the West seem incredibly prodigal. An Indian man who operated a mission school in Kashmir was appalled to see thousands of plastic water cups thrown into the trash after each coffee break and meal. His little school used similar cups but, instead of throwing them away, it managed to make them last as long as three years. With the aid of a food-service consultant, he took a large supply of the precious once-used vessels back to his village. With a similar eye for utility, several Africans sacked up large quantities of the rectangular food dishes used by KLM caterers to serve airline-type meals to the participants. The dishes, they explained, would make marvelous roof tiles for their homemade dwellings.

  The ten-day conference, held during a scorching heat wave, featured dozens of plenary addresses by the redoubtable workhorses in Billy Graham’s stable of associates—Stephen Olford, Luis Palau, Bill Bright, Gottfried Osei-Mensah, E. V. Hill, Akbar Abdul-Haqq, Charlie Riggs, Charles Colson—-and more than a hundred workshops on such practical topics as “Finding and Securing New Sources of Financial Aid,” “Effective Street Preaching,” and “The Evangelist’s Family Life.” At the opening session, Graham himself repeated advice distilled from his own decades of preaching. At a special wives program—“for those who fill the important role of homemaker for itinerant evangelists”—Ruth Graham spoke of “growing beautiful, not bitter, in adapting to a husband’s needs,” and Bill Bright’s wife, Vonette, contrasted the roles and attitudes of the “secular woman” concerned primarily with self-image, personal achievement, and professional success with those of the “spirit-filled woman” who looks to Jesus Christ for her identity.

  When Graham and his colleagues first began to plan for Amsterdam ’83, they expected it might attract as many as 2,000 evangelists. When actual attendance nearly doubled that, with thousands more having to be turned down and additional thousands writing to plead that another conference be held as soon as possible, the bureaucratic machine that had produced the first conference barely stopped to refuel before getting into gear to organize a 1986 sequel that would be even grander in scope and impact. This time around, organizers knew they would not have trouble drawing a crowd; they did not, however, anticipate the flood of applications generated by announcement of a second conference. By soliciting church leaders around the world for the names of active itinerant evangelists who might benefit from such a meeting, ICIE organizers soon had a list of nearly 62,000 potential invitees, from whom less than 10,000 would be chosen. Interestingly, thousands of those—-perhaps as many as a third of the total number—had been encouraged to become evangelists by alumni of the 1983 conference. According to Associate Conference Director Bob Williams, who served as the major hands-on organizer for the gathering, the winnowing-out process was a heartbreaking endeavor. “We sent applications to 48,000 people,” he explained. “We wrote the other 14,000 and told them we had received so many applications from their part of the world that there was no point in raising their hopes falsely. To get the kind of spread we wanted, we had to set quotas and cut off some countries after the number of applications reached a certain point. We might send an application to someone in a country whose quota had been filled if he came highly recommended, but he’d nearly have to be able to walk on water. From those 48,000, we received 28,000 applications, and we could only take 9,000.”

  Applicants were rated according to a point system designed to favor those likely to benefit most from such a conference, rather than those who already had effective ministries. Those between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five received more points than either younger or older candidates. Those affiliated with “known, solid Evangelical” denominations scored higher than those from “known non-Evangelical” groups. Those with “some education” (up to completing high school) outpointed those who had attended college as well as those with little or no education. Those engaged in full-time itinerant evangelism ranked above those who spent only part of their time preaching. The selection committee also favored applicants with a commitment to effective follow-up of their preaching over those who thought it sufficient to preach a few sermons and move on to the next town. In addition, applicants could receive bonus points if they had been recommended by a person known and trusted by the committee, and “general response” points, “according to how the Holy Spirit leads.”

  Not all of the selection was done around a table in Amsterdam. Whenever possible, usually while following up the results of the 1983 conference or building support for the 1986 meeting, Williams and his associates made site visits, verifying that applicants were indeed legitimate evangelists engaged in ministries whose aims and ethos were in harmony with those of Billy Graham’s. During a 1985 trip to Nairobi, Williams decided to check out a man reported to be an effective open-air preacher. When he came to a city square where he expected to find the man, he was dismayed to hear a preacher ranting and raving in front of a small band of hecklers (“It was not the kind of preaching we want to encourage”), then relieved to learn that the man he sought was holding forth on the other side of the square before a crowd of over a thousand people. “He gave an invitation,” Williams recalled, “and at least fifty people came forward. Afterwards, we asked him how he accounted for his success. He said, ‘In 1983 a friend of mine went to Amsterdam ’83 and attended a workshop on how to do open-air campaigns. Three years ago I was doing what that guy on the other side of the square is doing, with no success. No one was paying any attention, except to laugh at me. From my friend I learned a few basic techniques about how to gather a crowd, how to keep their attention, how to preach a message in a few minutes—because a lot of people walk up for five minutes and leave—and how to get church members to work with me. Simple, practical things that people had been using for years, but that were new to me. I just applied them, and they worked.’”

  On the same trip, Williams decided to visit an alumnus of the 1983 conference who reportedly had won 8,000 people to Christ since returning home from Amsterdam. “That sounded,” Williams said, “as if he might be ‘speaking evangelistically’—they stretch it sometimes. So we went down to see about it. We flew in a little Missionary Aviation Fellowship plane, and a missionary met us at a mission hospital about 200 miles from Nairobi. We said, ‘Tell us about this man. We hear that he has had 8,000 decisions since 1983. Is that true?’ The missionary said, ‘No, it’s not true. It’s 8,000 each year since 1983.’ We asked him if he could document it, and he said he could. They had followed up on every one of them. We learned that before Amsterdam ’83, he had approximately 130 decisions over a 10-year period. When we found the man, we asked him what he was doing differently. He picked up a notebook he had gotten at the 1983 conference. ‘I’ve been doing this and this before I start preaching,’ he said, pointing to different sections in the notebook. ‘And when I preach, I do this and this and this.’ We
asked him, ‘What about follow-up?’ and he said, ‘This and this and this,’ just pointing to sections in his notebook. Sometimes we get so technical, and it’s all so basic.”

  When the final selections were made, more than three fourths of the nearly 8,200 invitees were from the Third World. Africa was most heavily represented, with 2,337 evangelists from 49 countries. In keeping with the principles of the unreached- peoples strategy articulated at Lausanne, effort was made to cover as many subgroups as possible within each country. In Nigeria, for example, at least one evangelist was selected from 136 of that nation’s 137 major tribes. “We looked hard for an evangelist from the last tribe,” a recruiter said, “but we just couldn’t find one.” Asia and Latin America each furnished approximately 1,500 envoys. The North American contingent numbered 1,361, and 32 countries of Eastern and Western Europe provided 1,009 delegates. The remainder of the contingent came mainly from the Middle East, Oceania, and the Caribbean. Graham was unable to obtain permission for twenty evangelists from the People’s Republic of China to attend, but two PRC representatives, neither of whom were evangelists, were present. In the last accounting, evangelists streamed into Amsterdam from 173 countries—more, it appears, than had ever been represented at any gathering, religious or secular, in the history of the world.

  The selection committee had made a few mistakes. One man identified as a witch doctor was sent home as soon as his true colors were discovered. Several others used the conference to run a minor-league scam—collecting names of Westerners, writing them later to request donations of Bibles and reference books for the libraries of their mission schools, then selling the books and pocketing the money for themselves. But some who showed up felt that they, not the selection committee, had been deceived. On registering, each delegate was tagged with a hospital-type wrist strap, to be worn throughout the ten-day conference. Printed on it was an emergency telephone number: 42-51-51. At least two delegates left for home after noticing that each pair of numbers added up to six, making it seem plausible that these straps were the dreaded mark of the beast and that the conference itself was a major step in setting up the one-world church that would be the tool of the Antichrist.

  After due allowance for the inevitable tares among the wheat, it was an enthusiastic, dedicated, and extraordinarily variegated group of men and women who gathered for the conference. Some were crusade evangelists who moved from town to town holding revivals in the conventional and time-honored fashion. Others specialized in working with young people, prisoners, hospital patients, refugees, migrant-worker camps, military personnel, lepers, or even, as in the case of two Dutch women, the prostitutes who ply their trade in Amsterdam’s notorious red-light district. Of 7,604 participants who responded to a survey, approximately one third had some college or seminary training, but 601 had no formal training whatever. “These are not high-powered TV evangelists,” a conference staffer observed. “These are guys walking twenty or thirty miles to share the gospel, going to Borneo and South Africa and Papua New Guinea” The overwhelming majority were in the favored age range of twenty-five to forty-five, with thirty-one the average age. Most of the older evangelists came from the Orient, where respect for age made it difficult to persuade prospective delegates that the available slots should go to younger men. More participants came from Baptist backgrounds than from any other single denomination, but in striking testimony to Billy Graham’s commitment to fellowship with those outside the old Evangelical pale, members of various Pentecostal groups outnumbered even the Baptists. In another adjustment to changing times, approximately five hundred participants were women.

  Most evangelists from North America and Western Europe paid their own travel and lodging expenses. Third World preachers were encouraged to raise some portion of their expenses, as a token of commitment, but BGEA underwrote most of their costs, as well as the substantial expense involved in planning the conference and in renting the sprawling RAI exhibition complex where it was held. When all the bills were tallied, the association had demonstrated its commitment to world evangelism by contributing approximately 21 million dollars toward Amsterdam ’86. Nearly all of it came from regulation-size donations. No foundations or wealthy donors were approached; when a friend of the ministry offered a donation of 2 million dollars a few days before the conference opened, Graham told him, “It’s already paid for. Give your money to something else.” In typical BGEA fashion, conference organizers paid great attention to doing things as economically as possible. Graham’s hometown travel agency arranged bargain flights from all over the world. Staff members negotiated favorable rates with eighty-five Amsterdam hotels and saved great sums by housing 4,000 men in a makeshift dormitory set up in the Jaarbeurs exhibition center in Utrecht, twenty-five miles away. Special arrangements were made with Amsterdam’s elaborate public-transportation system so that anyone wearing an ICIE armband was allowed to ride anywhere the system’s carriers went, without buying a ticket. Equally typical, however, was a disregard for trouble or expense when a grand gesture was needed. A two-hundred-person delegation from Argentina and Uruguay found itself stranded in Buenos Aires by a pilots’ strike. Because it was the height of the tourist season, staffers had to scour the world looking for a suitable aircraft to charter and send for the stranded evangelists. Eventually, they located a DC-8, described as “the only airplane free in the entire world,” and dispatched it from New York to Buenos Aires. The plight of the Argentine contingent became a dramatic focus for the conference during its opening sessions. Graham’s announcement that a plane had been found met with thunderous applause. When a heavy fog made it impossible to land in Buenos Aires, thousands of fog-dispersing prayers flew upward. And when the weary Latins finally walked into the great hall where the plenary sessions were held, they were greeted as if they had been the last load to make the rapture. It was marvelous drama, and the Argentines became the darlings of the conference. It also cost a half-million dollars, causing one of Billy Graham’s staunchest admirers to volunteer that “one cannot help wondering if the money might not have been better spent.”

  Some participants overcame even greater obstacles than the Argentines. A Sri Lankan evangelist spent forty hours dodging gunfire and bombs and picking his way around land mines as he crossed sixty miles of civil-war zone on his way to the airport in Colombo. Others bore the scars of persecution inflicted by people hostile to them and the gospel they preached. Still others spoke matter-of-factly of the perils they faced in trying to carry out the Great Commission. “We cannot go easily into the Muslim areas to preach and spread the gospel,” a Lebanese evangelist explained. Why not? “Because they will kill us.” On several occasions Billy Graham personally greeted delegations as they arrived at the RAI center by bus. At one such encounter, a knot of diminutive Indian evangelists was obviously stunned to find the tall, tanned evangelist, who seemed to them more a legend than a flesh-and-blood person, suddenly plunging into their midst, pumping their hands, and thanking them for coming. They were not alone in being moved. A few days later, Graham told a press conference that when he met men who had gone to prison and been beaten and reviled for trying to do what he had been able to do with great reward and honor, “I felt like a worm.”

  Even in cosmopolitan, polyglot Amsterdam, the sheer variety of the visitors drew attention. Dutch television carried stories of African men who began digging latrines shortly after arriving at Jaarbeurs, and of blacks astonished to see white stewards bring breakfast to their bedsides, not realizing such a thing could occur anywhere in the world. The participants themselves were staggered at the experience of seeing so many Christians from so many other parts of the world. “They suddenly realized,” Werner Burklin remarked, “that we are all one in Christ. We have the same Savior, the same gospel, the same call.” One man, an African bishop accustomed to and expecting more plush accommodations, decided to stay on at Jaarbeurs a day or two before arranging for something a bit less Spartan. After imbibing the rich spirit of the multicultura
l fellowship for a short time, however, he chose not to leave, declaring grandly that “this place is like heaven!”

  The conference began with Olympic-style pageantry as six runners, symbolizing the six continents, carried torches from the far reaches of the great Europehall and together lit a central flame that would burn throughout the conference, symbolizing the Light of the World that participants were preparing to reveal more brightly. Then, as Cliff Barrows read the names of the 173 countries represented in that assembly and a brace of trumpets filled the air with the stirring strains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” stewards bearing the flags of those countries crisscrossed the vast auditorium, itself already festooned with maroon and gray banners bearing the legend DO THE WORK OF AN EVANGELIST in dozens of different languages. Iraqi and Iranian Christians, both representing tiny minority populations, stood alongside each other, their eyes glistening with tears, as did Jewish and Arab Christians from Palestine and evangelists from both South and North Korea. A white South African embraced his black countryman and brother in Christ. Though it is unlikely anyone missed the symbolism, a narrator reminded the diverse assembly that “we are not strangers or enemies but fellow citizens of a heavenly kingdom.” As they joined together to sing “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” some holding hands, many shedding tears of joy, almost all were caught up in a transcendent unity of spirit.

  Though Graham has been remarkable in his ability to stimulate response around the world by preaching essentially the same sermon, ICIE organizers did not believe a one-size-fits-all approach would be effective for the average native evangelist. “We cannot adapt to the culture,” Program Director John Corts said, “to the extent that we change the message, but we need to be sensitive to it, so that we will not seem to be demanding an American, Western, high-tech kind of approach. For example, only two African countries have a literacy rate as high as 65 percent. Distributing Bibles may not be the key factor in such a country. We can’t tell people to ‘write to Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota, that’s all the address you need.’ They live in an entirely different world, and we have to be sensitive to that. I’ve been part of Billy’s big American crusades, with the highly polished formats. I’ve helped shape that. But that is not what we are doing here. I have never served out in the bush, but I’ve been there and I know what goes on in that setting. I’ve seen what they are doing, and I have tried to listen to what they are saying as we set up this program.”