Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  After the Campaign, Cliff, Grady, and I drove back east. One night we stopped somewhere out in the desert for a break. The stars seemed so close, it felt like we could reach out and touch them. They were so beautiful that we lay on our backs a long time, just talking and praying.

  The next day, one of us said, “Let’s race to the top of this mountain and back to see who can win.” That was our last race; it frightened us too much when Grady collapsed and began to spit up blood. Cliff was the strongest of the three of us and would always win at any sport—except golf!

  At the time, the transition to full-scale citywide Campaigns didn’t seem to us to be a major break. It was instead a natural development of our YFC work; in reality, most of our YFC rallies were citywide and involved local committees. The primary differences were that the YFC rallies were limited mainly to youth, and they did not directly involve the churches the way our regular evangelistic Campaigns would.

  MIAMI AND BALTIMORE

  A series of meetings chaired by Ira Eshleman in Miami in early 1949 gave us even greater encouragement to develop more citywide Campaigns. Those meetings were a struggle financially, but we were able to meet in the Municipal Auditorium.

  In this and every other citywide Campaign for some years after that, we devoted one night to missions. My message that night would be on missions and the need for missionaries, and I would encourage the young people to consider dedicating their lives to missionary service. To support that message, we would give the entire offering from that service to missions.

  On mission night in Miami, Ira stepped into the elevator at the Everglades Hotel and asked Grady and me a question: “Can you explain why we’re giving an offering to missions?” he asked with a smile. “I haven’t been paid a thing!”

  “Well,” said Grady mockingly, “what about my salary?”

  And the two teased each other for the rest of the night.

  One day Ira took me to Fort Lauderdale, which was then just a small village outside of Miami. “If I were you and could get any money,” he said, “I would invest it in land all through here. It’s going to become a great city one day.”

  “Ira,” I said, “I don’t want to get into any business. I’ll just rely on the Lord to pay my way.”

  At the urging of the local leadership, we extended the Campaign from two weeks to three. A thirteen-day series in May in Baltimore’s old Lyric Theatre, which seated 3,000 people, gave us similar encouragement.

  DEATH OF AN UNCLE

  Uncle Tom Graham died in June 1949. I was in Kansas City with Bev Shea and Al Metzker preparing for a Youth for Christ rally to be held on June 11, which was a Saturday night. Our Crusade in Altoona was scheduled to begin the next day. When I learned that Uncle Tom had died, I asked Grady to begin the Altoona meetings for me. The funeral was to be the day after the rally, on Sunday, so we would have to fly out in order to make it on time. Tahlequah, Oklahoma, was well off the beaten path. I asked Al to see if he could get us a private plane. The best he could do was a singleengine Stinson Reliant. Early Sunday morning, Bev and I set out.

  When we arrived at the airport, we had a plane, but no one to fly it. The best we could do was a student pilot.

  After we took off, I asked the young man how long the trip would take.

  “Maybe an hour,” he answered. “Maybe an hour and a half.”

  We hadn’t been airborne all that long when the young pilot made a casual observation. “I don’t know if we have any fuel. The gauge isn’t working.”

  He, Bev, and I began to look for a place to land. Fortunately, we spotted a small runway in the middle of nowhere. The young man brought the plane down ably enough, but when we got out, there was nobody around.

  “It’s Sunday,” said Bev. “Everybody must be in church.”

  The young man went over to a parked car, siphoned the gas right out of its tank, and transferred the fuel to our airplane in one smooth sweep. I just stood there watching—apparently, he had done this sort of thing before. Bev and the pilot were clamoring for me to get on board and get out of there. I reached into my pocket, pulled out some bills, and ran to stick them under the car’s windshield wiper. Then, without looking back, I ran for the plane, hoping that what I had left would be enough to cover the gas and the inconvenience.

  Airborne again, I noticed that the engine seemed to be asthmatic, wheezing when it should be whirring. I leaned forward and asked the pilot a simple question. “Is car gasoline good for a plane engine?”

  “It can’t hurt,” came the reply.

  “It can’t hurt,” repeated Bev with a nod.

  We soon flew into a rainstorm. To cover my anxiety, I talked to the pilot again.

  “What do you do for a living?” I asked him.

  “I lay carpet.”

  “He lays carpet,” repeated Bev with another doubtful nod.

  The worse the storm became, the more I talked.

  “By the way, how long have you been flying?”

  “Well, I’ve been working at it, off and on, for six months,” he said proudly.

  “I suppose you have your pilot’s license?”

  “Oh, yes, sir, I have my pilot’s license,” he assured me.

  “And you have your license to carry passengers?”

  “Well, no, sir, I don’t have that yet,” he admitted.

  “Don’t have that yet,” repeated Bev, nodding in my direction.

  “Have you ever flown this plane before?” I asked, suspecting the answer.

  “Not this plane,” he said.

  “Not this plane,” repeated Bev, this time shaking his head.

  Bev and I would have jumped if only we could have found the chutes.

  We landed two more times, each time to pick up more fuel—real plane fuel, not gasoline—but we seemed to be getting no nearer to Tahlequah. Bev and I resigned ourselves to the inevitable; we were never going to get to the funeral. At the same time, we decided that we were not going to board that plane again. We walked down the road toward what we hoped was a village or a town.

  Our prayers were quickly answered. A man drove up in an ancient Chevy. “I run this little airport,” he said. “When I heard the plane, I decided to come back here to find out what was wrong.” He drove us back to the airport, filled the plane’s tank, and gave the pilot directions. Bev and I decided to try again after all.

  Our hopes rose when we spotted a runway that seemed to match the description given by our airport rescuer. The pilot buzzed the cattle off the strip and then made his descent onto the grass—which was apparently higher than the pilot had figured. We jolted down and then rolled to a quick stop. I got out and walked around the plane. The propeller and both the wheels were choked with thick clumps of green strands.

  As I looked at this problem, a word of warning was shouted from the plane. I turned around and saw a heifer with horns charging right at me. I made it over the barbed wire fence just in time, but not without a couple of scratches. When I turned around again, I noticed some farm folks who had been watching our antics in the field. I knew the answer was no, but I had to ask the question anyway.

  “Is this the airport for Tahlequah?”

  “No, sir, it’s over on the other side of town,” the man said.

  It seemed that there were two airports in Tahlequah. Since we were expected at the real airport and the bystanders could offer us no ground transportation, we decided to fly across town.

  I went back over the fence to the field and explained the situation. After we had cut away as much of the grass as we could from the wheels and propeller, the pilot was able to turn the plane around and take off.

  Not many minutes later we saw the paved runway of the other airport and noticed some cars screeching to a stop. They had heard our plane and came to pick us up. As they drove us to the church, they told us that the funeral service had already started. The minister received us with great excitement. And there was my uncle, lying in front, with the casket open. Bev went to the piano, w
here he sat down and readied himself to play. I sat down where the minister indicated I should, opened my Bible, and got ready to speak.

  “Do you know, ladies and gentlemen,” said the kindly old preacher, “what a privilege it is to have George Beverly Shea here with us today?!”

  As I said, Bev was the celebrity!

  “Instead of Mr. Shea’s singing just one song,” asked the preacher, “why don’t we prevail upon him to sing two or three?”

  Bev sang three songs, I finally said a few words, and we buried my uncle with dignity and love.

  Back at the airport, Bev and I made a deal. If the prop did not start at the first catch, we were going back on the train. It caught, though, and we flew back, with barely a wheeze, to Kansas City. We even had a beautiful sunset. It certainly felt good to get on a full-size airliner—a DC–4, as I recall—to fly to Altoona.

  ALTOONA

  There was more, much more, to learn about how to run a successful Campaign, as we soon discovered. Some of it we learned in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

  We did not keep statistics systematically in those days. Besides, numbers by themselves are never a true indication of what God accomplishes. But if ever I felt I conducted a Campaign that was a flop, humanly speaking, Altoona was it!

  The community itself seemed apathetic, competing ministe-rial associations squabbled over trivia, and organization for the Campaign was poor. There were other problems that we had not encountered before to any extent. Altoona was a center of extreme fundamentalism (and also strong liberalism), and some people yelled out in the meetings, not out of enthusiasm but to condemn me for fellowshipping with Christians they considered too liberal (and for other perceived faults). One unfortunate woman in the choir had mental problems and shouted out repeatedly in the middle of one sermon, disrupting the service. When she refused to quiet down, Cliff and Grady finally had to eject her, but she kept coming back. We could not help but sense that Satan was on the attack.

  Not surprisingly, the attendance was small when compared to the turnout we had just had in Baltimore, and the results were insignificant by my own measurement.

  Altoona was an industrial town built on coal, and I left it discouraged and with painful cinders in my eyes. In fact, I pondered whether God had really called me to evangelism after all. Maybe Altoona was sending me a signal that I had better give full time to my job as president of Northwestern Schools. At a minimum, it called into question our desire to expand from youth-oriented rallies into citywide Campaigns.

  It was not the first time I had considered leaving evangelism for education. At the same time, I still was not sure I was cut out to be a college president. I will never forget one good-looking student who decided that he wanted to go to Northwestern. Not long thereafter, I saw him on the campus and greeted him. He put his arm around me—I guess he felt he knew me because we had talked at the meetings—and welcomed me home. “Billy, you old bag of bones,” he said to me, “we’re so glad to have you back!” That was the sort of respect I generated in some of the students.

  The Augusta experience at the outset of the 1948–49 academic year left no doubt in my heart that God was blessing our work in evangelism. But back in Minneapolis, when Northwestern Schools opened for the fall 1948 term, we had the largest enrollment in the institution’s history. It thrilled me to have a part in equipping so many promising young people for ministry in church and society. Their combined outreach with the Gospel in years to come would far exceed anything I could ever envision for myself.

  By the spring of 1949, I gave serious consideration to taking a two-year leave of absence from Northwestern to work toward a Ph.D. A bachelor of arts degree hardly seemed adequate for a college president, and it did not help Northwestern in its pursuit of accreditation. I wrote to several universities to find out what would be involved in graduate study in religion, anthropology, history, or philosophy. Their answers were not encouraging. What with residence requirements and all the study I would have to do in foreign languages, it would take forever. Still, the prospect attracted me. An advanced degree, I felt, would not hurt wherever life took me, either as a college president or as an itinerant evangelist.

  To have or not to have an advanced degree was not my only dilemma. My very faith was under siege. For one thing, my friend and partner in preaching on that memorable trip to the British Isles and Europe in 1946, Chuck Templeton, had resigned from his church in Toronto to enroll at Princeton Theological Seminary. I talked with him two or three times that winter of 1948–49—his first year as a graduate student—and discovered that he was undergoing serious theological difficulties, particularly concerning the authority of the Scriptures. My respect and affection for Chuck were so great that whatever troubled him troubled me also.

  I had similar questions arising from my own broadened reading habits. I wanted to keep abreast of theological thinking at midcentury, but brilliant writers such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr really made me struggle with concepts that had been ingrained in me since childhood. They were the pioneers in what came to be called neo-orthodoxy. While they rejected old liberalism, the new meanings they put into some of the old theological terms confused me terribly. I never doubted the Gospel itself, or the deity of Christ on which it depended, but other major issues were called into question.

  The particular intellectual problem I was wrestling with, for the first time since my conversion as a teenager, was the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures. Seeming contradictions and problems with interpretation defied intellectual solutions, or so I thought. Could the Bible be trusted completely?

  If this doubt had sprung up in my student days, as it did for so many, it might have been taken as a normal development. But neo-orthodoxy’s redefinition of inspiration to allow for a Bible prone to mistakes and to subjective interpretations certainly should not have been an option for someone in my position. I was not a searching sophomore, subject to characteristic skepticism. I was the president of a liberal arts college, Bible school, and seminary—an institution whose doctrinal statement was extremely strong and clear on this point. I professed to believe in the full inspiration of the Scriptures. But did I believe in the same sense that my predecessor, Dr. Riley, had believed?

  Feeling a little hypocritical, I began an intensive study of this question. I read theologians and scholars on all sides of the issue. I also turned to the Bible itself. Paul had written to Timothy, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16, KJV). (I knew that the New Testament Greek term that translates as “inspiration” literally meant “God-breathed writings.”) There was an impenetrable mystery to that concept, as with all things pertaining to God. Yet the basic meaning was clear: the Bible was more than just another human book.

  The Apostle Peter said, “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21, KJV). Jesus Himself said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35, KJV). The internal testimony of the Scriptures to their own inspiration and authority was unequivocal. So was Jesus’ own view of the Scriptures.

  The disturbing conversations with Chuck Templeton, my confused reaction to studying influential and sometimes contradictory theologians, the quandary over a career in education versus a ministry in evangelism, and most recently the fiasco in Altoona—all these were the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional baggage I was carrying in the summer of 1949 as we began to prepare for Los Angeles, the largest citywide Campaign to date.

  FOREST HOME

  One of God’s hidden stratagems to prepare me for Los Angeles was an engagement I had made for late summer that I was not enthusiastic about keeping. At the end of August, the annual College Briefing Conference met at Forest Home, a retreat center east of Los Angeles. In my role as the then-youngest college president in America, I had agreed to speak, but after Altoona I did not feel I had much to say.

  Head of the conference
was Miss Henrietta Mears, director of religious education at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. From a wealthy background, she was always dressed in the latest fashion, and she wore tasteful makeup and fine jewelry. Always positive, she had a great love for down-and-outs. She was a former high school chemistry teacher in Minneapolis and had been a key worker in the Sunday school at Dr. Riley’s First Baptist Church. Some twenty years before, she accepted an invitation to serve at the Hollywood church. Within three years of her arrival, she had built a dynamic Christian education program, with the Sunday school enrollment rising from a fairly respectable Presbyterian 450 to an absolutely awesome 4,500; it was the talk of the West Coast. In the class she herself taught for college students, weekly attendance ran to 500 men and women who were devoted to “Teacher,” as she was called. Her enthusiasm for the Lord Jesus Christ was contagious.

  Other speakers included her own pastor at Hollywood Presbyterian, Dr. Louis Evans; my good friend and fellow seeker Chuck Templeton, who had just finished his first year at Princeton seminary; and evangelist-scholar J. Edwin Orr, who had received his Ph.D. from Oxford University and was an authority on religious revivals. As always, I felt intimidated by so many bright and gifted leaders, which just added to my generally low spirits at the time. I would just as soon have been at Forest Lawn, the famous Los Angeles cemetery, as at Forest Home.

  During the week, I had times of prayer and private discussion with Miss Mears at her cottage. Rarely had I witnessed such Christian love and compassion as she had for those students. She had faith in the integrity of the Scriptures, and an understanding of Bible truth as well as modern scholarship. I was desperate for every insight she could give me.

  By contrast, Chuck Templeton had a passion for intellectualism that had been stimulated by his studies. He made no attempt to hide his feelings about me. “Billy, you’re fifty years out of date. People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do. Your faith is too simple. Your language is out of date. You’re going to have to learn the new jargon if you’re going to be successful in your ministry.”