by Billy Graham
“We have early-morning Bible studies,” he said. “Of course, we would like you to preside, but because you have several other things during the day, if you want to send one of your associates, we’ll accept that.”
“Maybe Charlie or Cliff could take that meeting,” I replied. “By the way, how many people do you expect?”
“About 100,000,” he said without hesitation.
“Well, I believe I’ll take that meeting after all,” I managed to say.
When Charlie, Cliff, and I were shown to our quarters in the government house, we were introduced to Nihuli; he was the person who would handle our baggage, make us tea, and do whatever else needed doing. He took our shoes to wipe the mud off them.
“We can do that,” I told him.
“No, please let me,” he said.
As he was brushing the shoes, I asked him about the early-morning service. I especially wanted to know, I said, who would be teaching the Bible before I arrived.
He didn’t reply. When I pressed him further, he admitted that it was he who would be teaching the Bible to that huge crowd. The man cleaning my shoes had just taught me a lesson on the servant attitude and spirit of ministering so often adopted by Christ Him-self. I have never forgotten it.
When I went to bed that evening, I could already hear the crowd assembling and praying in the darkness.
Next morning, as I looked down from the platform, I saw that many of the people were attired in tribal dress. On their faces they wore different colors, and in their hands they carried spears and guns. Some of them, from as far away as Nepal and China, had walked for two weeks to hear me interpreted in perhaps fourteen, perhaps as many as seventeen, languages.
Charlie, T. W., and Cliff also assisted in teaching the classes. During the Wednesday morning service, gunfire broke out nearby. The crowd stayed calm, but one man had been killed a short distance away. We knew permission to stay longer might not be granted.
At the final service that afternoon, more than 100,000 people jammed into the stadium in the hot sun, with many thousands more outside. At a closing reception that evening in the chief government minister’s home, we sampled some local delicacies. Cliff asked for a second helping of the hors d’oeuvres.
“What kind of meat is this?” he inquired.
“Dog meat.”
“And what are these?” he asked, pointing.
“Fried hornets.”
“Oh,” he said, looking a bit queasy. After that, Cliff only pushed the food around on his plate.
Mrs. Gandhi had told me that she would be following the trip with great personal interest and warned me of some particular dangers. She ordered two helicopters to pick us up at the conclusion of our meetings. It was Thanksgiving Day back in the United States, so they had put some cold chicken on board for us. The helicopters were Russian-built and had a huge fuel tank sitting in the middle of the cabin like an old country stove. When we took off, the machine vibrated terribly; the blades didn’t seem to synchronize. The pilot, who sported a handlebar mustache, noticed that I was somewhat tense.
“We’ll be flying over one of the most dense jungles in India, and there are lots of tigers down there, Dr. Graham,” he said. “You may even get to see one of them. But don’t worry. We’ll get you through.”
As we bumped along above some of the most rugged jungle in the world, I could not help but praise God for the privilege of allowing us to share in the lives of those remarkable people. We were grateful that several years later a treaty brought a measure of peace to the region.
At Dimapur we boarded a plane for the flight to New Delhi. When we got up to cruising altitude, the pilot asked me to come up front and see him. As I entered the cockpit, he turned around and kissed my hand. As a Hindu, he apparently saw me as a holy man and wanted to show respect. He pointed out that it was a beautiful evening and we would be able to see Mt. Everest. “It will be out of our way,” he said, “but if you would like to see it, we will go that way.”
I said I would very much like to.
He turned the plane and went two hundred miles out of the way to show me the absolutely magnificent sight just at sunset (although I have to admit I was never quite sure which of the many peaks was Everest!). Then he banked sharply and resumed his course for New Delhi.
IRAN
On our return to the United States, we had a stopover in Tehran, the capital of Iran, where I visited with the shah. As I stepped out of the car at the hotel afterward, I was surrounded by an angry group of students. Why, they wondered, had I, a well-known Christian, gone to see the shah? I did not know much about religion in Iran; I did know, though, that in addition to Islam there were still some Nestorians in the country, survivors of an ancient form of Christianity dating back many centuries.
“This is an Islamic country, and we are going to make this an Islamic state,” they shouted. “The shah is standing in our way, and America is behind the shah.”
I told them that the shah had been kind enough to invite me to visit him if ever I was in Iran. I did not get into an argument with them. I really didn’t know enough of their political situation to get into even a discussion. I did manage to tell them of Persia in biblical times, especially of Queen Esther. They quieted down eventually and finally left the hotel. But they made me aware for the first time of dissent in that country. And I was reminded once again of how difficult it was for a visitor to grasp the politics of a country other than his own.
Later, during a visit to Washington, I heard a late-night knock on my hotel-room door. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
“I want to thank you for appointing me ambassador to India,” he said.
“I didn’t have you appointed,” I protested. “I just passed on to Mr. Nixon a message from Mrs. Gandhi.”
“I’m sure you had me appointed,” Moynihan insisted. “I’m a Catholic,” he went on, “but would you have a prayer with me?”
I was in my pajamas; but he got down on his knees and I got down on mine, and I prayed with him that God would lead and direct and help him in his new responsibilities.
16
The Power of the Printed Page
“My Answer,” Books, Christianity Today, Decision
The exposure the media gave us during the first few years of the 1950s was unquestionably decisive in bringing our work before the public. And yet all along, another question kept surfacing in my mind: If the media could be used to promote our ministry of evangelism, could it not also be used directly for evangelism?
As I have already noted, this led us first into radio and films. Before long, however, we turned our attention to the printed page. Once a radio program or a film is over, its impact is largely finished. Books and magazines, however, go places a spoken sermon will never reach, and they can continue to have an impact long after their author is gone.
WRITING A NEWSPAPER COLUMN
Only a few months after The Hour of Decision radio program started in 1950, the Chicago Tribune–New York News syndicate approached Walter Bennett about the possibility of my writing a daily syndicated column dealing with practical problems from the standpoint of the Bible. The interested parties then came to see me in Montreat. After some discussion, I said I was willing if they would allow others to assist me in writing the column, under my supervision, whenever I could not do it personally. They replied that most columnists faced the same problem and agreed that I or my wife (or someone else I trusted) would approve each one and that each one would represent my own answer to the question of the day. Thus the “My Answer” column was born, with a daily circulation soon exceeding 20 million readers.
Homer Rodeheaver, who had been Billy Sunday’s song leader, told me about a gifted man named Lee Fisher who was directing his youth ranch. We approached Lee, and soon he and his wife, Betty, moved to Montreat. For many years, Lee helped me with suggested scripts for the column; he also did background research for sermons and other messages. My father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, also helped me grea
tly in this area. Other staff people, including Dr. Robert Ferm (the former dean of Houghton College) and his wife, Dr. Lois Ferm, the Reverend Bob Featherstone, Dr. John Akers, and our associate evangelist Dr. John Wesley White, have also put their gifts of scholarship and editing at my disposal over the years.
It has always been helpful to talk over with others an article or special speech while I was drafting it. At the same time, I have always adapted and digested material until it was part of me. And I have never been able to have others help me do my evangelistic sermons, nor have I had others ghostwrite the books I have written. Sometimes, though, I have used others to provide research and help organize my thoughts, provide a rough draft, and edit the final manuscript. I have always acknowledged these talented people in my books.
VENTURING INTO BOOKS
During a Crusade in Dallas in 1952, an editor with Doubleday, Clement Alexander, heard me and felt that my messages might be turned into a book. When I told him I did not think of myself as a writer, he said they could assign someone in their organization to assist me. We reached an agreement, but unfortunately, that person turned out to be in spiritual and intellectual turmoil personally and did not understand my perspective. After a short time, I took the project in hand myself.
I worked on that first book, on and off, for the better part of a year. I dictated the first draft in about ten days on an Ediphone, a machine using bulky wax cylinders. It was one of those times in my life when I sensed the direction of God in an extraordinary way. I wrote it out of a burning conviction that a book presenting the Gospel in a simple but comprehensive way was what people who had little or no religious background needed. Ruth was my greatest helper in giving me ideas; she has always been a storehouse of illustrations and stories. I sent that first draft to a few people, including my friend Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, for suggestions. The final draft I got into the publisher’s hands by August 1953. Peace with God, as it was titled, was published in late October and became an immediate best-seller. Millions of copies have been distributed in the intervening years, and it has now been translated into fifty languages.
The royalties from almost every book I have written—about a dozen and a half to date—have been given to various Christian organizations and ministries. Occasionally, a small portion has been set aside for our children’s, and now our grandchildren’s, education.
ENVISIONING Christianity Today
In mainline denominations where a significant number of leaders had liberal leanings, many rank-and-file clergy and lay leaders held more orthodox views and felt discontentment with the status quo. But they had no flag to follow. They had no counterbalance to the views presented in publications such as The Christian Century.
Joe Blinco, Cliff, and I often met these concerned Christians when we visited homes during Crusades; we spent hours talking with them, sometimes sitting on the floor for our “bull sessions.” Back then I had the strength and stamina to stay up to all hours in lively discussions with pastors and theologians. I wanted to call these servants back to the Bible, back to the priority of evangelism and missions, back to a freshened ethical understanding of the ways to relate our Christian faith to the issues of the day.
For seventy years, Protestant liberalism had enjoyed a platform through The Christian Century magazine. Founded in 1884 by the Disciples of Christ denomination, it became a force in religious journalism in 1908 when Chicago clergyman Charles Clayton Morrison took it over. For the next four decades, it was a flagship of Protestant liberal theology, social action, and even politics. With equal vigor, it judged as outdated, even obnoxious, the views of conservative Christianity—or fundamentalism, as they labeled it. As Dr. Martin Marty, a distinguished church historian at the University of Chicago who has been long associated with The Christian Century, wrote at its centennial, “The editors saw fundamentalism as a backwoods, over the hill, jerkwater phenomenon that had already outlived its time.”
Partly because of the efforts of The Christian Century, conservative Christianity had fallen into disrepute. The nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin had spilled over into other fields of learning, including theology, where it threatened the traditional views of the integrity and authority of the Bible. Conserva-tives (who were more often called evangelicals) of that era fought to define and defend the “fundamentals” of the faith; hence, the term fundamentalist.
The Christian Century waged war on the liberal side, contending that Scripture was open to what it called “higher” criticism. In this view, the Bible, although it had religious value, was not the inspired Word of God or the objective standard of truth for our faith and practice. Instead, it was a book of human origin, to be approached the same way any other human book was approached—which is to say, critically and even skeptically.
The periodical’s philosophy was progressive, inclusive, optimis-tic, and relatively humanistic, within a loose framework of Christian concepts. “Modernism” was the vaunted label it wore. It counted on human effort to bring in the kingdom of God on earth. Even the magazine’s title expressed its founders’ optimism that human nature was basically good and that the twentieth century would be a time of unparalleled progress and peace. The primary mission of the church was to help shape this “Christian century” through direct and indirect social action. At the same time, theological distinctives were downplayed and evangelism was redefined—or dismissed as unimportant or irrelevant to the work of the church.
The Christian Century guided the thinking of a large number of American clergy and, in turn, their church members. But the De-pression and war were hard for liberals to coordinate with their optimistic philosophy. Even Morrison himself began rethinking his position. On November 8, 1939, he wrote the following in the magazine: “I had baptized the whole Christian tradition in the waters of psychological empiricism and was vaguely awaking to the fact that, after this procedure, what I had left was hardly more than a moralistic ghost of the distinctive Christian reality.”
With World War II followed so closely by the Korean War, general disillusionment became epidemic. Many clergy were desperate for tenable alternatives. However, “fightin’ fundamentalism” was not what they were looking for.
About two o’clock one night in 1953, an idea raced through my mind, freshly connecting all the things I had seen and pondered about reaching a broader audience. Trying not to disturb Ruth, I slipped out of bed and into my study upstairs to write. A couple of hours later, the concept of a new magazine was complete. I thought its name should be Christianity Today. I worked out descriptions of the various departments, editorial policies, even an estimated budget. I wrote everything I could think of, both about the magazine’s organization and about its purpose. I stated that it should have the best news coverage of any religious magazine and even specified that it should be located in Washington, D.C., which might give it a measure of authority in the minds of some; that crucial location would also keep its editors and staff in contact with the latest news. I wanted it also to be a focal point for the best in evangelical scholarship, for I knew that God was already beginning to raise up a new generation of highly trained scholars who were deeply committed to Christ and His Word.
My idea that night was for a magazine, aimed primarily at ministers, that would restore intellectual respectability and spiritual impact to evangelical Christianity; it would reaffirm the power of the Word of God to redeem and transform men and women. As I had witnessed, the Gospel of Jesus Christ had that effect everywhere around the world.
A relatively short time passed before the magazine became a reality. When it did, in 1956, I believe a force was released that has helped change the profile of the American church. It was to become another example of the power of the press.
The idea also came to me that night that we should raise enough money in the beginning to send a free subscription to every pastor and every seminary student and professor in the United States, and a stack of them to every seminary, Bible school, a
nd Christian college in the country. I was convinced that most clergy didn’t care where their reading material came from if it was good material; many of them were already used to receiving gift subscriptions.
I was not the man to be the editor, though. Such a magazine would require spiritual and intellectual leadership and professional skills I didn’t have. We needed someone who could win the respect and support of weary and wandering preachers and seminary professors, the kind Martin Marty called “chastened liberals.”
The first man I shared my vision with was my father-in-law, Dr. Bell. His wisdom served as a compass. It amazed me to learn that a similar idea for a magazine had often occurred to him. He became a key person in developing Christianity Today. One of the first things he did was to take soundings about the magazine idea among ministers and professors; he found the reaction overwhelmingly positive.
Next I turned to Dr. Wilbur Smith, a well-known evangelical leader and professor at the recently established Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. I flew to California and outlined my plan to him. To my surprise, he began to weep. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been dreaming and praying about something like this for years.” Although he eventually declined my invitation to serve as editor, he gave invaluable counsel.
Dr. Bell already had extensive experience in writing and editing, having been instrumental in starting a magazine called The Presbyterian Journal, which had been organized to uphold biblical theology and practice within the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Later he gave up his successful surgical practice in Asheville, North Carolina, to work full-time at the task of launching Chris-tianity Today. He also became its executive editor, commuting regularly to Washington from his home in Montreat and writing “A Layman and His Faith,” a regular (and very popular) column in the magazine.