During the conference, Billy Graham and his stalwart band of associates from around the world sounded the great themes of the gospel message, each elaborating on one of the Amsterdam Affirmations, a set of fifteen brief principal statements agreed upon by participants at the 1983 conference. Graham himself gave four plenary addresses, though not at his own insistence. Prior to the conference, he repeatedly, and apparently quite sincerely, argued for a smaller role. “I raise the money rather than do the work,” he said. “It has not taken much of my personal time. I have a great staff, and I was able to delegate responsibility and leave them alone almost from the beginning.” Because he had not done the work, he seemed to feel he had not earned the right to take a major role. “We polled people who are coming to this conference,” Walter Smyth said, “to see what they wanted to hear. Ninety percent of them want to hear from Billy Graham, to learn how he does it. And we have had the hardest time getting the poor man to speak. He keeps saying, ‘Look, I don’t want to dominate this. This is not a Billy Graham show.’ But we have had to say to him, ‘Billy, these evangelists look to you. They want to hear you. They will listen to others, but nobody is going to take your place in this conference.’ It’s like pulling teeth to get him to speak more than once.” John Corts told a similar story: “You see the dynamic preacher out front,” he observed. “I see the guy sitting in his hotel room in his baseball cap and dungarees, asking, ‘What am I supposed to say to these people? How am I supposed to answer their questions?’”
As powerful a presence as he inevitably was, Graham was far from being the whole show. Argentine Baptist leader Samuel Libert held forthably with a discourse on “The Evangelist’s Authority: The Word and the Spirit,” and evangelist/professor Ravi Zacharias spoke eloquently of “The Lostness of Man.” Billy Kim thrilled the assembly with an electrifying, if often quite funny, explication of the conditions required to bring about “The Revival We Need.” Gottfried Osei-Mensah spoke on “The Great Commission,” Moody Bible Institute president George Sweeting described “The Evangelist’s Passion for the Lost,” Nilson Fanini stressed the importance of “The Evangelist’s Commitment to the Church,” and Franklin Graham spoke movingly about “The Evangelist’s Ministry Among Situations of Human Need.” Layered in with these exhortations to action were sermon after sermon on the importance of the character of evangelists. Stephen Olford issued a thundering summons to “The Personal Life of Holiness,” and in a stunning display of a genetic gift for capturing the attention of a great assembly, Graham’s daughter Anne Lotz delivered a riveting address on “The Evangelist’s Faithfulness,” driving her points home with the same two-pistol hand gesture and hammering cadence her father had used so effectively for forty years.
Each plenary address was set in the context of a worship service. In addition to prayers and congregational singing, most sessions featured “Up with Jesus” music from the Continental Brass and Singers, a talented group of young people in Miami Vice clothes who served as the house band, or from one of more than twenty other multinational groups and soloists, including a fifteen-member choir from the Moscow Baptist Church. At least once each day, a dramatic troupe known as The Lamb’s Players and headed by Walter Smyth’s son Bob presented brief playlets closely geared to the theme of that session. One skit, on the pitfalls that lie on the path of charismatic leaders, drew knowing laughter and self-conscious winces as it presaged the scandals that would explode within the world of television evangelism a scant few months later.
The plenary sessions gave “the little guys” a chance to see “the big guys,” and for the most part, the big guys showed why they were at the top of their profession. But much of the most important work of the conference, the detailed transmission of pragmatic instruction, went on in more than 160 seminars and workshops. Every participant was obliged to attend five seminars, one each on “Preparation for an Evangelistic Event,” “Preparation and Delivery of an Evangelistic Message” “Giving the Evangelistic Invitation,” “Counselor Training,” and “Follow-up Methods.” While the plenary sessions were delivered in English and translated simultaneously into fifteen languages, any one of which could be tuned in on the headphones attached to wireless receivers available to all participants, the seminars were broken into nineteen language and regional groups to enable materials developed by “master teachers” to be adapted to a wide range of situations.
The workshops were far more varied in content and more limited as to the number of languages in which a given topic was discussed, but few participants had difficulty finding topics of interest among the two dozen or so dealt with each day, ranging from “Working with Pre-literates” to “Getting on Secular Television and Radio Talk Shows,” and including a host of sessions on such themes as open-air preaching, writing for publication, working with prisoners and the disabled, preaching to Muslims, management techniques for an evangelistic ministry, and training other evangelists. Women evangelists and wives of male participants were free to attend any session they wished, but a limited “Women’s Program” was also available. The most memorable session on that agenda was led jointly by Cliff and Billie Barrows’s daughter, Bonnie Barrows Thomas, and by Ruth Graham, who talked frankly and engagingly about the high and low points of the life of an evangelist’s wife, drawing warm appreciation for such frank and commonsensical observations as “I find Christian parents without problem children can be stuffy. If you have a prodigal, you will love all prodigals.”
John Corts and other program organizers often pointed out that they were following a “technical education model” in the seminars and work shops, dealing with concrete technique far more than abstract theory. To help participants implement their new knowledge more readily, 7,000 evangelists from Third World countries received canvas knapsacks filled with books, sermon outlines, and other preaching aids, cassette recordings of sermons by Graham and others, and to play them in villages and homes where electricity was nonexistent and batteries unobtainable, a hand-cranked tape player. As a logical extension of that pragmatic approach, the next-to-last afternoon of the conference was designated a “Day of Witness” on which participants tried to put into action what they had learned in face-to-face confrontation with the unsaved. “It’s a little phony,” Corts admitted, “because, let’s face it, they don’t speak Dutch, but it’s an attempt to give them an experience of going out into the street and seeing what it means to use what they have learned in a real situation.”
The Netherlands had surely never experienced such a concentrated display of concern for its lost condition. After a brief demonstration to let them know what kind of responses they might expect, evangelists clambered onto 120 chartered buses that dispatched them to 68 locations in 49 Dutch cities and villages. Predictably, many encounters misfired, as when an American evangelist who approached a group of women engaged in animated conversation soon found himself the target of the evangelistic efforts of the Lesbian Collective to Get the U.S. Out of Nicaragua. A small but imaginative band of Latin American messengers met with no greater success when they assayed to bring Christ to nude bathers on a beach at Scheveningen. Billy Graham himself, ostensibly camouflaged in dark glasses, windbreaker, and baseball cap, spent time in Amsterdam’s sprawling Vondel Park. When he was able to avoid the efforts of unwary ICIE delegates to convert him, he spoke with several small groups, one of which asked him to leave them alone and another whose members seemed more interested in what they were smoking than in what he was saying. Some evangelists met negative, even abusive, reactions, but most seemed encouraged by the experience. When results were tallied at the end of the day, they were told that the gospel had been communicated to more than 40,000 people on that single afternoon, and that more than 300 firm commitments were known to have been made, the firstfruits of the great harvest expected from Amsterdam ’86.
In many respects, Amsterdam ’86 bore little resemblance to the first major Graham-sponsored conference at Berlin, but the two did share at least one notable feature:
Carl McIntire came to both, uninvited and unwelcome. Well past eighty but still capable of red-eyed fury, McIntire set up a booth in the lobby of a large hotel adjacent to the RAI center and offered FREE BILLY GRAHAM BOOKS to the many evangelists quartered there and to any others who dropped in on their way to a nearby train station. The books were free, and they were about Billy Graham. They were also, of course, highly critical of the evangelist whom McIntire had long characterized as “the greatest disappointment in the Christian Church.” With fellow Graham basher Edgar C. Bundy nodding agreement at his side, McIntire reported that in the week he had been at his post he had talked to “dozens and dozens” of evangelists who were “astonished at what I told them.” He fumed that Graham had allowed a Russian chorus to sing and identified a Russian evangelist at the conference as “a hard-core KGB strong man who has broken necks and killed people.” He pointed to the large numbers of Pentecostals and charismatics at the conference as evidence that Graham’s lack of concern for pure doctrine was leading to a one-world church, just as predicted in the book of Revelation. And, though he grudgingly conceded that “Graham does know how to raise money and put on a conference,” he made it clear he thought the $21 million BGEA had spent on the conference was a damnable bit of stewardship. “They spent $2 million just on food—food and hell!”
After a moving communion service that despite the use of a wine substitute tasting remarkably like strawberry Kool-Aid inevitably summoned images of a messianic banquet, the conference ended on Sunday evening, July 20. Billy Graham preached on the Second Coming, and 10,000 Evangelical Christians from the ends of the earth prepared to depart for their homelands, fully aware that most of them would never meet again unless and until that longed-for Advent actually came to pass. As a final galvanizing act, Graham read the fifteen Amsterdam Affirmations and the largest gathering of evangelists ever to assemble in one place fairly shouted “We affirm!” in response to each. Then six torchbearers lit their lamps from the flame that had burned throughout the conference and headed back toward the world’s six continents. As the bearers of 173 flags followed in train, Graham solemnly intoned, “You are witnesses to that Light. Go preach the Good News to your nations. You are His messengers. . . . The glory of the Lord is upon you, for the Lord has turned our darkness into light, that we may proclaim the salvation of our God to all the nations. Do the work of an evangelist!”
Had Billy Graham and BGEA done nothing further than send 12,000 fully charged and freshly prepared evangelists back to their homelands, the results of the Amsterdam conferences would probably have a significant impact on hundreds of thousands of individual lives before the wheels set in motion there finally rolled to a stop. But three and a half years later, the model developed for these gatherings was being emulated in dozens of smaller gatherings throughout the world. In 1988 26 “Mini-Amsterdams” were held in Latin America alone, culminating in a Los Angeles gathering that drew 6,000 evangelists working with Latins in both North and South America. Other meetings drew between 2,000 and 3,000 participants, and at the beginning of 1990, John Corts reported that BGEA had supported and helped organize 88 such conferences, with an aggregate attendance of more than 46,000 evangelists from 97 countries. There were no plans to discontinue the program.
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The Constituted Means
Dramatic and pathbreaking as they were, Graham’s visits to the Soviet bloc nations and the Amsterdam conferences did not long divert him from the well-worn crusade trail. During the early 1980s, he held crusades in Canada, Japan, Mexico, Baltimore, Boston, Boise, San Jose, Houston, Spokane, Chapel Hill, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Tacoma, Sacramento, Anchorage, Oklahoma City, Hartford, and Anaheim. In 1984–85 he conducted a highly successful two-stage Mission England that included seven full-scale campaigns in major cities other than London and live-link satellite video meetings in fifty additional cities. In 1986 he followed up the Washington, D.C., crusade with a meeting in Tallahassee and with Mission France, an effective effort that originated in Paris in the midst of terrorist bomb scares and sent the gospel flying by satellite to thirty-one cities throughout that nation. In 1987 he opened the season in Columbia, South Carolina, in the same stadium where Henry Luce had first heard him thirty-seven years earlier, then checked off all the remaining parts of the country in which he had never held crusades in a five-state Peaks to Plains barnstorming tour that wound up in Denver’s Mile High Stadium. He closed that year with an encouraging campaign in Helsinki. Then, as the decade ended, the premier evangelist of the second half of the twentieth century consciously sought to associate himself with his counterpart from the first half of the nineteenth by beginning a series of crusades that would take him to the same cities in upstate New York where Charles Grandison Finney had stamped his indelible mark on American revivalism.
With forty years of experience in the vault, Graham’s crusade team unquestionably had its act together, so that when an invitation to hold a crusade was received, pondered, and accepted, it could roll into a city and roll out a crusade along well-established lines, pursuing what Charles Finney called “the right use of the constituted means.” Most of the time its accomplishments were quite predictable, within a modest range of variance, although the results were often not exactly what the sponsoring churches expected or what the Graham team implied, and the process was not quite the automatic, self-contained, flawless operation it may have appeared to be from the outside. Still, a Billy Graham Greater Anywhere Crusade, however much it may have depended on the Spirit of God for its success, was a remarkable exercise in rational organization and action.
Team members did not want to appear as manipulators of ostensibly spiritual phenomena and were invariably careful not to relegate Deity to the sidelines, but Sterling Huston, director of North American crusades, freely acknowledged that “yes, we have a plan. We know one way, and it will work for local congregations if they will follow it. We try to be flexible and adapt the plan to a local situation, but when they invite Mr. Graham to come, this is the only plan we know that really works. We want it contextualized, but the skeleton, the principles, the goals don’t change.” The degree to which the plan was followed varied somewhat with the personality of the particular crusade director assigned to a given campaign, but David Bruce, a Denver pastor who worked with the follow-up program on numerous crusades, noted that “there is a sense in which, because you have a short time line, you almost have to come in and say, ‘Look, we’ve done this for forty years. This is the game plan. Get on board with us.’” This approach often worked better at home than abroad. In the 1986 Mission France, resistance to what French churchmen dubbed an entreprise parachutée—a complete system dropped from an American gospel transport plane—made it necessary to give more control to local leaders. The resulting blend of local custom and imported practice was both successful and amusing. In Strasbourg, the lovely old Alsatian city near France’s northeastern border with Germany, satellite-service organizers saw nothing incongruous in having concessionaires sell beer and sausage or in allowing worshipers to smoke during the services, and the Graham people apparently felt no need to complain about these breaches of American pietistic practice, as long as the soccer-stadium scoreboard proclaimed that “Jésus dit, ‘Je suis Le Chemin, La Vérité, et La Vie,’” and the book tables had plenty of copies of La Paix avec Dieu and Un Monde en Flamme. But some American Evangelicals felt the Graham method was too inflexible. One pastor who had worked in several Graham crusades over the years charged the team with putting on “a dog-and-pony show with little evidence of struggle or growth or ambiguity. The concern for people is great, no question about that. But there is some going through the motions. It would seem that there is such a dramatic difference between Spokane, Boise, Houston, and Boston that there’s got to be some reflection of that, and that a great organization like BGEA ought not to be just transplanting the same thing in every community.” Instead he felt the team and “the plan” had “developed a kind of rigidity that does not li
sten. Most of the crusade directors have done this so often that they are weary of [it].” John Bisagno, pastor of Houston’s 21,000-member First Baptist Church, agreed that greater flexibility was needed but conceded that “when you have a thirty-year track record of the most successful evangelism in the world, why should they [let] local committees come in and get them to change their plans?”
Graham’s remarkable record did indeed enable him to overcome obstacles that would surely thwart a lesser figure. Seldom was this more clearly in evidence than in Mission France. To help the evangelist gain permission to use the sparkling new 15,000-seat Palais Omnisport de Paris-Bercy, U.S. ambassador Joe M. Rodgers, a former Tennessee contractor who had attended Graham’s crusades in both Knoxville and Nashville, successfully interceded with Paris mayor Jacques Chirac. Rodgers, it happens, was not acting entirely on his own. With some bemusement, he observed that two years into his term as his country’s ambassador to France, President Reagan had given him only two assignments, one of which was to help Billy Graham get the use of Bercy. The other was to arrange a meeting between Graham and President François Mitterrand. Similar cooperation obtained at other levels. When terrorists initiated a frightening series of bombings in public places a few days before the crusade opened, the city responded by providing Graham and his team with bullet-proof automobiles and deploying 2,500 heavily armed policemen and soldiers to stand guard at the arena and search everyone who entered each night of the crusade.
A Prophet with Honor Page 82