by Billy Graham
Speaking of crumpled paper, I must tell also of the well-dressed man who one day entered BGEA’s London office. He told Maurice Rowlandson, the manager, that he had been manager of a bank until his life was ruined by alcohol. He lost his family and job, eventually ending up as a vagrant on the streets of London. One day he was rummaging through a trash barrel looking for something to eat when he came across a discarded copy of Decision. Intrigued by the cover story, he read the magazine straight through, and as a result turned his life over to Christ. Now, a year later, he had been reconciled to his family and was once again working in a bank.
When George Wilson heard that story, he wryly suggested to Maurice that he stuff a copy of Decision into every London trash bin!
17
Marathon in Manhattan
New York 1957
Taking a brief break from the June 1955 Paris Crusade, Grady and I were playing a few holes of golf on a course near Versailles. He looked at his watch. We were running late for a meeting back in Paris, so we cut our game short, hurried back to the locker room, and changed our clothes. As we were running out to the car, I heard someone calling my name.
“Dr. Graham, I heard you on television last night,” he said, “and my wife and I were very interested. I’m playing golf, and we have only two in our party. Would you and your friend like to join us?”
“Sir, I would like to very much,” I replied.
It was the Duke of Windsor. Few faces were as familiar to the public at that time as his, due to his abdication of the British throne to marry an American, Mrs. Simpson. He also had the reputation of living a rather meaningless life, and I could not help but wonder if that was true.
“But unfortunately I have a commitment in town,” I added. “Let me call to see if I can get it postponed.”
When I called Bob Evans, I discovered that my commitment could not be changed. As I went back to apologize to the duke, someone handed me a cable that apparently had been forwarded to the golf club. It was from George Champion, vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, who headed the evangelism department of the Protestant Council of New York. The council had voted to extend an invitation to us to hold a Crusade in New York during the summer of 1957.
No other city in America—perhaps in the world—presented as great a challenge to evangelism. My old friend Jesse Bader of the Department of Evangelism of the National Council of Churches had said once that “evangelistic work in New York is like digging in flint.” In a message to our supporters, I acknowledged that “humanly speaking, New York is the most unlikely city in the western hemisphere for successful evangelism.”
One reason New York would be so challenging was its incredible diversity, with some sixty major ethnic groups in its population—more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin, more Germans than Berlin, more Puerto Ricans than San Juan. At least one out of every ten Jews in the world lived there as well. Protestants were a distinct minority, making up only 7.5 percent of the population; many of them were only nominally committed to the Christian faith. According to our findings before the Crusade, 58 percent of New Yorkers claimed no religious identity at all.
New York was the business, financial, communication, and entertainment hub of the nation. It was also the headquarters of the United Nations, founded only a decade before. Everything that happened in New York literally touched the whole world. If New York could be reached with the Gospel of Christ, the effects would be felt in many other cities as well.
As I said in one sermon during that Crusade, New York is “the most strategic center in the world. We could have this many people [for a meeting] in Louisville, Kentucky; we could have this many people in Oklahoma City; we could have this many people even in Chicago; and it wouldn’t mean as much as New York City. . . . It becomes a stage on which we can do evangelism to the whole nation, to the whole world.”
This, I had come to believe, was also a biblical pattern for evangelistic strategy. The Apostle Paul preached in all kinds of places, including some that were insignificant, humanly speaking. But under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he had concentrated on the great cities of the Roman Empire, sensing the enormous impact that they had beyond their own areas. To the Christians in Rome he said, “Your faith is being reported all over the world” (Romans 1:8).
“No one can read the Bible even casually without sensing that God has a special interest in cities,” I wrote in This Week magazine shortly before the New York Crusade opened. “His love for Nineveh caused Him to send the prophet Jonah to warn the city of its coming destruction. Christ wept over Jerusalem.”
Jack Wyrtzen, who had an extensive evangelistic outreach to youth in New York City, had been urging me for years to come to New York. In fact, I had already turned down two previous invitations, in 1951 and 1954. This invitation, however, was different, since it represented a much broader base of church support than the previous ones had.
The official sponsor was an independent executive committee of both clergy and laity; it had been appointed by the Protestant Council of New York and represented a cross section of the city’s churches and institutions. The chairman of the committee was Roger Hull, executive vice president of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Included on the executive committee were such people as banker George Champion, industrialist and philanthropist Cleveland Dodge, business executive Edwin Chinlund (who was treasurer of the Macy’s department stores and served as the Crusade treasurer), Dr. Gardner Taylor of Concord Baptist Church, Dr. John Sutherland Bonnell of Fifth Avenue Pres-byterian Church, Dr. Richard Hildebrand of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Reverend Dan Potter, executive director of the Protestant Council. The council represented some seventeen hundred churches in the New York area; many churches that weren’t part of the council also cooperated.
Quite unexpectedly, we were able to get an option on Madison Square Garden for the summer months of 1957. The Crusade itself was scheduled to begin on May 15. Our initial plan was to conclude the Crusade six weeks later, on June 30.
I was not sure we had the organizational depth for such an effort. One possibility as director of the Crusade was Betty Lowry of Minneapolis, a highly dedicated and competent person who had directed almost single-handedly our Oklahoma City Crusade in June 1956; but Betty felt she could not take the project on for health reasons. Instead, Jerry Beavan took the position; I felt his experience with us in London and elsewhere would be invaluable. In early 1957, however—less than four months before the Crusade was to begin—Jerry resigned from the BGEA for personal reasons.
Suddenly, I found myself virtually directing the Crusade over the telephone; instead of talking two or three times a week with the local staff about preparations, as I normally did in other Crusades, I found myself on the phone every day.
My first thought after Jerry left was to prevail again on Betty Lowry to assume the position, but Roger Hull urged me instead to appoint Charlie Riggs. A tough roustabout in the Pennsylvania oilfields before coming to Christ, Charlie had been active in The Navigators and was deeply involved in our own counselor-training classes.
Dawson Trotman, the head of The Navigators (who had spent nine months in developing our counseling and follow-up program), had drowned the previous summer in a tragic boating accident at Schroon Lake, New York. His loss just as we were preparing for New York was immense, and Charlie had been filling the gap in his place, assisting Lorne Sanny, who had already taken over The Navigators.
Roger had gotten to know Charlie fairly well and respected not only his organizational ability and practical good sense but also his spiritual character. “He knows the Scripture, and he knows the Lord. Charlie Riggs is the man,” Roger stated with finality. “If anything happens in New York for God, it’s got to be by prayer. And Charlie Riggs is a man of prayer.”
Charlie later said that it “wasn’t my particular cup of tea,” but he graciously took on the responsibility and did a magnificent job. In later years, Charlie—returning to
his primary interest—directed our counseling and follow-up department, teaching tens of thousands of people across the world the basic principles of the Christian life and practical ways to share Christ with others.
Problems of a different sort came from the opposition that arose over our plans for New York City. One source was the liberal wing of Christianity. The magazine The Christian Century grumbled that “the Billy Graham campaign will spin along. . . . and an audience gladly captive to its own sensations is straining for the grand entrance . . . whether or not the Holy Spirit is in attendance.”
More thoughtful was the objection raised by one of the nation’s leading liberal theologians, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr of New York’s Union Theological Seminary. I appreciated his commitment to social concern but could not agree with his scorn of evangelism. In an article in Life magazine, he termed me “obviously sincere” but added that the message we preached was “too simple in any age, but particularly so in a nuclear one with its great moral perplexities. . . . Graham offers Christian evangelism even less complicated answers than it has ever before provided.”
I let it be known that I wanted to meet Dr. Niebuhr. George Champion called him to see if he would see me, but he declined. Not used to giving up easily, George then called the chairman of the Union Theological Seminary board, who was also a leading banker. The chairman promised that there would be no difficulty in arranging such a meeting, but he came back (as George later said) “with his tail between his legs”; Niebuhr simply refused to see me.
Opposition also came from a few in the Roman Catholic and Jewish communities, although I had made it clear I was not going to New York to speak against other traditions or to proselytize people away from them. My goal instead was to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it was presented in the Bible and to call men and women to commit their lives to Him.
During the Crusade, I met with various Jewish groups and individuals. One of these was Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, with whom I began a lifelong friendship. His advice through the years as an official with the American Jewish Committee and his personal warmth meant much to me. Many of Jewish background did come to the meetings at Madison Square Garden, and some openly declared their commitment to Jesus as their Messiah.
To my knowledge, the only vocal opposition from the Roman Catholic community came from a single article in a limited-circulation Catholic magazine. The author, an official with the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) in Washington, D.C., wrote, “Catholics are not permitted to participate in Protestant religious services.” He went on to state that for faithful Catholics, “Billy is a danger to the faith.”
Such a statement seems harsh in light of present-day Protestant-Catholic relations, but four decades ago the situation was much different. The breakthroughs in ecumenical relations heralded by the Second Vatican Council were still several years away, and in all fairness, many Protestants likewise had strong anti-Catholic views. For me the central issue has always been Christ and our commitment to Him, not our loyalty to an ecclesiastical system, important as the church is to our spiritual growth and service.
The NCWC statement attracted attention, however, precisely because it was almost the only comment on the Crusade from a Roman Catholic source. No ranking member of the Catholic hierarchy spoke out against the Crusade, and I suspect many Catholics knew of my friendship with various Catholic leaders. Cardinal Cushing of Boston had been particularly friendly to me. He wryly told the press after our meeting several years before that if he had half a dozen Billy Grahams, he would not worry about the future of his church! Many Catholics did come to the meetings, a good number stepping forward to personally commit their lives to Christ.
Much more painful to me, however, was the opposition from some of the leading fundamentalists. Most of them I knew personally, and even if I did not agree with them on every detail, I greatly admired them and respected their commitment to Christ. Many also had been among our strongest supporters in the early years of our public ministry. Their criticisms hurt immensely, nor could I shrug them off as the objections of people who rejected the basic tenets of the Christian faith or who opposed evangelism of any type. Their harshness and their lack of love saddened me and struck me as being far from the spirit of Christ.
The heart of the problem for men like Bob Jones, Carl McIntire, and John R. Rice was the sponsorship of the Crusade by the Protestant Council of New York. The council, they contended, included many churches and clergy who were theologically liberal and who denied some of the most important elements of the biblical message. It was not the first time some of them had raised their objections to my growing ecumenism, of course, but the New York Crusade marked their final break with our work. I studied and prayed over their criticisms, wanting to accept their indictments if they were right. But I came to the firm conclusion that they were not, and that God was leading us in a different direction. Ruth likewise studied the whole matter; we discussed the issue and prayed over it frequently. Her conclusion was the same as mine.
In addition, my study of the major evangelists in history also showed me that the issue was not new; every one of them—from Whitefield and Wesley to Moody and Sunday—had to contend with similar criticisms, both from the right and from the left.
Early in our work, I had tried to answer any such attacks, but I eventually decided the only course was to ignore them. The critics showed no inclination to change, and at any rate I did not have time to devote to such arguments. In a 1955 letter to Carl McIntire about an article he had written opposing our work, I admitted that “I felt a little resentment and I got on my knees and asked God to give me love in my heart. . . . Beloved friend, if you feel led of the Spirit of God to continue your attacks upon me, rest assured I shall not answer you back nor shall I attempt to harm one hair of your head. . . . My objective is to glorify our Lord Jesus Christ by the preaching of His Word to sinners.”
A year before the New York meetings, one of our Team members, Dr. Ralph Mitchell, had an extended discussion with Bob Jones. He came away convinced that Bob Jones would never change his position, which was that our work was not of God. Ralph concluded by writing me, “You must not concern yourself unduly about such critics. . . . Nevertheless, it is a fresh challenge to all of us in the whole Association to be much more in prayer.” I agreed wholeheartedly and asked God to keep us from being diverted from His work by such critics. Occasionally, my father-in-law, Dr. Bell, attempted to answer such attacks, but with little success. I often felt like Nehemiah when his enemies tried to get him to stop rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and come down to discuss the project; he replied that he was too busy building the wall (see Nehemiah 6:1–4).
My own position was that we should be willing to work with all who were willing to work with us. Our message was clear, and if someone with a radically different theological view somehow decided to join with us in a Crusade that proclaimed Christ as the way of salvation, he or she was the one who was compromising personal convictions, not we.
The more vocal the opposition, however, the more the supporting churches in the New York area rallied to our side. God had a way of taking our problems and turning them to His own advantage.
Following a month-long Crusade in Louisville, Kentucky, in October 1956, I accepted only occasional speaking engagements and no further extended Crusades until the New York meetings the following May. The main exception was a series of meetings at Yale University, where the longtime chaplain, Sidney Lovett, had invited me to speak for four evenings in February.
Like many of America’s older colleges and universities, Yale was founded as a Christian institution. One of its early presidents, Timothy Dwight, was a distinguished Christian leader; and dur-ing its first century, I heard, Yale sent 40 percent of its graduates into the ministry. Now that strong spiritual heritage has been largely forgotten.
Following the pattern set at Cambridge University, our Yale meetings included a number of assistant missioners, including Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, recto
r of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, and the Reverend Robert Raines, son of a Methodist bishop in Indiana. Each evening after the main meeting, I went to various campus fraternities for question-and-answer sessions that sometimes lasted past midnight.
One day the head of the psychology department invited me to have lunch with about twenty members of his department. They all sat with their box lunches on one side of the room, while I sat on the other; I felt at first as if I were a mental patient undergoing examination! They were especially interested in what I meant by conversion; and to our mutual surprise, there was much agreement between us, at least as far as the psychological benefits of authentic conversion were concerned.
Thomas Ruhm, a writer for a student publication called Ivy Magazine, commented that he doubted if my experiences at Cam-bridge and Oxford had prepared me “for Yale’s cultivated general indifference toward religion.” Chaplain Lovett, however, reported later that his office had follow-up contact with three hundred students who stayed for the after-meetings.
In ways I couldn’t have foreseen, the Yale meetings helped prepare me for the New York Crusade. One way was through people I met in New Haven who worked in New York or had influential contacts there—people who threw their support behind the Crusade. Another was through the comment of a student, who brought home to me in a fresh way the need for absolute clarity in presenting the Gospel message: “Mr. Graham, we hear a lot about what Christ has done for us, the value of religion, and what personal salvation is. But nobody tells us how to find Christ.” As the New York Crusade approached, I was more determined than ever to make that clear.
My time during the months leading up to the Crusade was spent in study, of course, but I also knew I needed rest and exercise to be prepared physically for the demanding road ahead of us. Those were days of peace, relaxing in the spring sun and spending time with Ruth and the children.