In the midst of distracting turmoil, Graham scheduled only three major events in 1966, but each was significant in its own way. The first, a crusade in Greenville, South Carolina, now the home of Bob Jones University, underlined the permanence of his separation from Fundamentalists. The second, a monthlong return to London, revealed that the kind of overwhelming spirit of revival that prevailed during the Harringay meetings could not be summoned at will, even by an organization whose technical skills were far more developed than they had been twelve years earlier. The third, a gathering in Berlin of Evangelical leaders from over a hundred countries around the world, set in motion a spirit and enthusiasm that played a significant role in the worldwide resurgence of Evangelical Christianity over the next two decades.
Had it not divided people who should have been friends and erected barriers where encompassing circles would have been more appropriate, the Southern Piedmont Crusade in Greenville could have been enjoyed as an amusing example of the ability of intransigent Fundamentalists to pollute almost any stream, all in the name of purity. In typical egocentric fashion, Bob Jones fulminated that the only conceivable reason Graham would come to Greenville was to attack and embarrass him. But the charges did not stop there. By consorting with Catholics, having fellowship with “rank, unbelieving agnostics,” and attending conclaves of the World Council of Churches (which Jones identified as the forerunner to “the kingdom of Antichrist”), Graham had, according to Dr. Bob, “led thousands into compromise and alliance with infidelity and Romanism” and was “doing more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man.” Jones warned his faculty and students that any who dared attend even one of Graham’s services would be fired or expelled. He acknowledged that he could not control what people did when they knelt by their beds in the privacy of their rooms, but if they wanted to speak to God on behalf of Billy Graham, he recommended they recite the following prayer: “Dear Lord, bless the man who leads Christian people into disobeying the word of God, who prepares the way for Antichrist by building the apostate church and turning his so-called converts over to infidels and unbelieving preachers. Bless the man who flatters the Pope and defers to the purple and scarlet-clothed Antichrist who heads the church that the word of God describes as the old whore of Babylon.” Dr. Bob’s warning fell mostly on deaf ears. Billy, Cliff Barrows, and the Wilson brothers, all of whom Jones attacked as BJU products gone dreadfully wrong, professed to feel disappointment at their erstwhile mentor’s attitude, but they had long since given up on winning his favor and rested content with the response that had always served them so well. Over a ten-day meeting, the Greenville crusade chalked up an aggregate attendance of 278,700, of whom 7,311 answered the invitation.
After more than a decade of holding revivals throughout the world, the 1954 Harringay crusade still stood out as the highest peak in a career that was coming more and more to resemble a mountain range. Understandably, the lure of a return visit was strong, but in London interest in another Billy Graham crusade was decidedly tepid. In 1963, when Maurice Rowlandson, who headed BGEA’s London operation, approached the leaders of the Evangelical Alliance to see if they wanted to invite Billy back for another go, they surprised him with a unanimous and categorical rejection. By rounding up a group of Evangelical laymen, however, Rowlandson cobbled together an invitation that Graham agreed to accept, at which point Evangelical Alliance leaders changed their minds and agreed to become the official sponsors.
By early 1964 most of the major committees were in place, often headed and manned by the same people who staffed them in 1954. But this was not 1954. A decade earlier, Britain had still been crawling out of the ruins of war and seemed more willing to listen to a message of solace in a world still short on earthly satisfactions. Now, prosperity and self-confidence had returned, and spiritual hunger seemed to have abated. Major denominations were suffering severe losses in membership and attendance, all denominations were short of ministers, and secularism was ascendant. John A. T. Robinson, bishop of Woolwich, had just written a book called Honest to God, in which he confessed that like many of his fellow clergymen, he no longer found much meaning in the old formulations of the faith. As the renowned Evangelical scholar and rector of All Souls, Langham Place, John R. W. Stott, put it, “The church is simply not cutting any ice in our country.” In an attempt to pierce this shield of indifference, Graham directed his team to organize the most thorough preparation ever undertaken for one of his crusades. Charlie Riggs oversaw the training of 30,000 would-be counselors. Thousands of additional volunteers attempted to distribute advertising leaflets to every household in the city. And for two solid years, Lane Adams and Robert Ferm visited with more than 4,000 British clergymen, mostly Anglicans, listening to their questions and complaints, patiently explaining the approach and rationale of the Graham crusades, and trying to enlist their support. Both men recalled that it was a hard two years. Adams felt frequent frustration at having to convince ministers that Billy Graham had any real concern for the British people. Adams himself had no doubts on that score. The night before they had left for England, he and Ferm had met with Graham, who led them in prayer. “We all three knelt down,” he recalled, “and I have often thought that if I could have had a copy or a recording of that ad-lib prayer, it would have broken the heart of Great Britain to realize that an American citizen had Britain so much in his heart, cared so much, longed so much for the best of God to come to those people.”
Robert Ferm also believed in Billy Graham; had he not, he would probably never have agreed to transfer his family to London just five days after they moved into a new home in Atlanta. Still, his correspondence from this period and his recollections years later make it clear that collaring diffident clergymen and wrestling with them like Jacob with the angel, determined not to give up until he wrested a blessing from them, had often left him weary and limping. Resistance began as soon as he hit the ground at Heathrow Airport. When he explained to the customs official who he was and why he had come to England, the man snapped, “We don’t need you in Britain. We don’t want you.” As the officer launched into a virtual harangue, threatening to prohibit the Ferms from entering the country, Maurice Rowlandson appeared to meet them and on hearing the story, drew Ferm aside and began to pray for guidance. When they finished, Rowlandson told Ferm, “The London crusade just started.” Ferm went back to the customs desk and began telling the officer of his own Christian experience and recommending that he let Jesus come into his heart. The man softened a bit and agreed to let the Ferms enter, but on one condition. “I’ll let you stay if you’ll find me one thug who was converted [during the Harringay crusade]. I want to meet him. If you can’t find one, you can stay only six months.” Rowlandson, who had done evangelistic work in prisons, was able to find a young man who almost fit the officer’s requirements. The man had not attended Harringay but had been moved by hearing Bev Shea sing “Softly and Tenderly” in a film Rowlandson had shown in Dartmoor Prison, and by the time Billy Graham finished preaching in the film, he had decided to become a Christian. He subsequently organized Bible classes among his fellow inmates. When Lois Ferm produced the young ex-thug to the customs officer, the officer initially accused him of lying, then spilled out the reason behind his own sense of spiritual alienation. During World War II, he had killed eighty-seven men and could not believe God would ever forgive such a transgression. The former convict told the story of his own crimes, suggesting that since the man had been serving His Majesty’s government at the time, God would surely not regard him as a murderer but in any case would forgive whatever sins he might have committed. Not long afterward, Bob Ferm took the man to dinner, and “right there in the airport, he accepted Christ as his savior.”
Men whose souls are stained with guilt and remorse often make better subjects for conversion than do clergymen, who are likely to be afflicted with more amiable agonies. In their thousands of conversations with ministers, Ferm and Adams had to deal less with defiant hostility than with lukewarm languor. Liberal and High Church Anglicans, including the arch bishop of Canterbury, generally remained aloof from crusade preparations. On the right, strict Fundamentalists followed their American brethren in refusing fellowship with those of impure doctrine, and doctrinaire Calvinists regarded evangelism as a kind of heresy, since it implied that free will and human effort could play some role in salvation. In the great middle, those who resisted the crusade did so out of disillusion, doubt, and disinterest. Many felt that Billy Graham was old hat. People had already caught his act and would not go see it again. In 1954, one journalist observed, Billy had been an attractive, winsome young man with “a simple [message] for simple people in simple times. His message has not changed, but the times have.” Some Britishers frankly admitted that the problem was cultural. “We don’t specially like an evangelistic organization which presents to us a face clouded with executives, experts, and mailing lists,” a Baptist paper noted. “There is a genuine difficulty of communication across an Atlantic full of differing temperament and mental habits.” To be sure, Graham was not without his defenders. The Christian, the only conservative journalistic voice in the Church of England, noted that much of the criticism of the evangelist’s organization stemmed “from that odd British notion that only the second best does for religion” and ventured that “Billy Graham’s real offense is that he has disproved one of modern churchmen’s most firmly held beliefs: that it is still possible to get crowds of people to come hear the preaching of the gospel. . . . This cannot fail to antagonize those who no longer have any gospel to preach.” The impact of that defense, however, was blunted by the fact that since 1962 The Christian had been owned and operated by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Graham, of course, was aware of the tepid response he was receiving but handled it in his usual trusting manner. Before leaving for England, he mused that the London crusade “may be the biggest disaster of my entire life. In my heart I’m ready to be laughed at. But I do feel that in Britain there are hearts whom God has prepared. I’ve prayed about going to England; I felt ‘this is of God,’ and I haven’t any doubts that we’ve made the right decision. I can do no more than just put myself in God’s hands.” Laughter, however, was not as much a problem as indifference. In sharp contrast to 1954, the secular press gave Graham and his crusade little more than obligatory coverage, and what little hostility reporters and other critics manifested was easily defused with a bit of wit or openhanded ingenuousess. When a professor asked Grady Wilson why, when Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on an ass, Billy Graham found it necessary to book a first-class cabin on the Queen Mary, Grady replied, “Well, brother, if you’ll find us an ass that can swim the Atlantic, he’ll be glad to try it.” When another man wondered if the humble Savior would go on television, Graham earnestly responded that “since He went as far as He could by foot and spoke to as many as He could by every means available because He wanted everyone to hear the message of salvation, I believe that if there had been any other way to reach more people, He would have used it.” When he was asked, as he always was, why he found it necessary to advertise himself and his campaigns so extensively, he said, as if the matter were out of his hands, “I’ve wondered about that many times. I don’t have the answer.” And when David Frost asked him during a television interview, “How do you know you’re not wrong [about the essentials of your message]?” he gave an answer that defied the usual canons of criticism: “Because I’ve had a personal experience with Christ. Because my faith is grounded in a relationship with God that has been proved in the laboratory of personal experience through these years.”
On the lone occasion when the opposition mounted a sharper attack, Graham still managed to escape with only minor wounds. Under the impression that he would be discussing and promoting John Pollock’s newly released and unfailingly flattering authorized biography, the evangelist agreed to appear on a BBC television program, Twenty-four Hours. When he arrived at the studio, he found himself facing two of his most virulent public critics, a psychiatrist who had described him as “psychologically sick . . . a man on the run from an ever-threatening sense of depression,” and George W. Target, a clever novelist who subsequently wrote an acerbic broadside in which he sought to portray every aspect of Graham’s operation as a calculated and self-serving assault on human emotions and gullibility. Though he arrived in plenty of time, Graham was offered no makeup and, in contrast to his antagonists, was described by Pollock as looking “rather unhealthy and a trifle wild.” The program’s host never mentioned Pollock’s biography but, after introductory remarks about “the great Billy Graham and his Evangelical roadshow,” turned his other two guests loose on the unsuspecting evangelist. Target criticized Graham’s heavy reliance on publicity and accused him and his team of telling “sanctified lies” to enlist volunteers and draw crowds. The psychiatrist revealed that he had gone forward at Harringay for the wrong reason—“It was you I wanted, it wasn’t the Christ behind you”—and had been emotionally damaged when he was unable to have any personal contact with Graham in the counseling room. Graham remained courteous and even-tempered in the face of the assault, and his associates ventured gamely that he had gained more than he had lost, since the public would doubtless be offended by the unfair treatment he had received, but old hands on the team still remember the program as a low point in five decades of media exposure. Its aftershocks probably had some role in stimulating Ruth Graham to dream a night or two before the crusade opened that no more than thirty people would be present for the inaugural service.
Ruth’s dream proved unprophetic. From the beginning, the crowds were quite good. Princeton Rhodes scholar Bill Bradley, later a professional basketball player and U.S. senator from New Jersey, inspired crowds by telling of his personal faith in Jesus Christ, and British pop-music and movie star Cliff Richard’s testimony was the widely covered highlight of a Youth Night that packed 30,000 people into the arena, despite the opinion of some young people that it was not really a youth night but “middle-aged people’s idea of a youth night.” On another evening, during the invitation, a sizable group of antiwar demonstrators began chanting “Pray for the souls in Vietnam,” while a contingent of their fellows dropped leaflets through ventilation holes in the ceiling, but an ensuing scuffle between the protesters and ushers was quickly brought under control by bobbies from the Christian Police Association, several dozen of whom worked as volunteer security guards each evening.
Graham made a strong effort to overcome what had been perceived as weaknesses in the Harringay campaign. Even before the crusade began, the team underlined its commitment to racial justice. When a landlady asked Howard Jones to vacate the flat BGEA had booked for him, two other team members also left in protest. Graham personally ordered that all the leases in the block be canceled and that all team members relocate to an area that would accept Jones and other black members of the team. He also paid a long visit to the mostly black Brixton neighborhood, where he visited with residents in their homes and on the street before preaching to them from the back of a coal truck. Threats of hostile disruptions by neighborhood toughs proved groundless, and while Billy sped away to tea at Lambeth Palace with the archbishop of Canterbury, counselors worked with 136 people who had made decisions at the conclusion of his sermon.
Graham had been criticized during the Harringay crusade for his ostensible lack of concern for the workingman. To offset that image, team members visited dozens of factories, where they spoke with the joint approval of management and trade-union shop stewards. Graham appeared at few of these, but when he did, he reminded workers of the contributions revivalists had made to the welfare of working people. He also addressed a crowd of approximately 12,000 East Enders at a rally in Victoria Park, where hecklers gave him a hard time for a while but eventually quieted during the heart of his sermon. Other efforts to crack London’s shell yielded little result. Graham’s Indian associate Akbar Abdul-Haqq and John Wesley White, an Oxford-educated evangelist who had joined the team to help Graham with sermon preparation, found little success when they attempted to stem the tide of ridicule and abuse that greets most presentations of the gospel at Hyde Park’s famed Speakers’ Corner. Team evangelists suffered less abuse but won few more souls during repeated forays into Trafalgar Square. In one of the most widely reported sorties against Satan, Billy Graham himself made an abortive run into the garish Soho district, where what reporters described as a “200-second sermon” came to an abrupt end when he leapt down from a car hood to avoid being photographed with a local stripper who had flounced up beside him.
However their success or failure might be judged, factory meetings and street preaching were time-honored revivalist tactics. The 1966 London crusade, however, began a new chapter in Billy Graham’s ministry in that it marked his first use of closed-circuit television to carry crusade services to audiences far from the central arena. He had, of course, pioneered the use of landline audio relays during the Harringay crusade, and his sermons had been broadcast regularly on television since the 1957 Madison Square Garden campaign, but this was his first use of television technology to beam his message into auditoriums and stadiums in cities where the ground had been prepared as if he were going to be present for a full-scale live crusade. By using all of the Eidophor projection equipment available in Britain, the team’s electronic engineers were able to supply a television feed to ten cities at a time, usually for three days running. Crowds were surprisingly good in virtually every city, often filling whatever arenas or meeting halls were available, with the largest averaging well over 5,000 souls a night. In Manchester demand for tickets was so heavy that local organizers decided to charge admission—a unique occurrence in the annals of Graham’s ministry—and still drew SRO crowds. Inevitably, technical glitches marred some of the transmissions, but the closed-circuit services displayed some singular strengths. Most notable was the heightened impact of Billy Graham’s preaching. In the absence of distracting echoes and inevitable visual diversions and in the presence of a fourteen-foot image of Graham’s head and shoulders, viewers were able to see and hear the evangelist—and thus to concentrate on his message and absorb the full impact of his rhetorical skills—far better than his live audience in London could. It was, one team member observed, as if they were “locked in with the gospel.” As a consequence, the proportion of inquirers in the satellite services consistently ran higher than at Earls Court. Other factors, of course, may have figured into this welcome result, but it was immediately and abundantly clear that apart from the understandable desire to see the famous evangelist in the flesh, closed-circuit television could provide the basis for an effective out reach in cities too small to justify an in-person crusade. From that time onward, television relays became yet another standard weapon in Billy Graham’s evangelistic arsenal.
By all the usual measures, London ’66 was a success. Total attendance (1,055,368) was only half that of the 1954 meeting, but the crusade itself was only one third as long, so that average attendance was higher. More important, 42,000 people made decisions for Christ at Earls Court, 4,000 more than at Harringay. And whereas 90 percent of the inquirers at Harringay had reported at least some connection to a church, only 76 percent of the Earls Court inquirers did so, indicating that this crusade had a greater impact among the unchurched, always a closely watched barometer of evangelistic effectiveness. As for recognition of Graham’s eminence, he was entertained by the American ambassador, honored at a luncheon hosted by the lord mayor of London, treated as a guest of honor by Princess Margaret at a charity affair attended by a thousand lords and ladies of the realm, and invited for a quiet lunch with the queen at Buckingham Palace. Against the possibility that a steady diet of royal food might cause him to forget his roots, a planeload of Nashville supporters entertained him at the Hilton Hotel with a traditional southern breakfast of Tennessee ham, gravy, sorghum molasses, and biscuits brought from home.
For all these marks of achievement, however, a slight air of defensiveness pervades team descriptions of the 1966 crusade. Graham declared it to have been “much more successful than Harringay” but acknowledged that the 1954 effort excited British Christians to a unique and unexpected degree. Admitting the resistance he met from clergy, Bob Ferm noted that “things went well when the crusade actually came off; Earls Court was not really unsuccessful, pound for pound.” Others observed that given the hedonistic character of London’s culture in the midsixties, “Billy was brave even to have it.” In his brief chronicle, Crusade ’66, John Pollock complained that with few exceptions, the British media “seemed oblivious of the Crusade’s importance to the nation’s future, and anxious to restrict news of Earls Court.” It seems doubtful the media were engaged in a conspiracy to hide Graham’s light under a bushel. More likely, it was simply that Billy Graham was a victim of his own success. There was little new the papers could say. It might be significant that Billy and his team could fill a large arena and several outlying auditoriums for a month, but it was no longer surprising. Because the novelty had worn off, media interest had waned and most of the papers seemed to agree with the Daily Mail, which ho-hummed, “We’ve grown accustomed to his faith.”
Of those who managed to keep their enthusiasm in check, none were more conspicuous than the leaders of the Evangelical Alliance (EA). As their American counterparts had done periodically since the days of Charles Finney, EA leaders had become convinced that mass evangelism was more flash and sparkle than substance, and that individual and small-group efforts were ultimately more effective at winning souls and keeping them won than were giant public rallies, which they regarded as booster sessions for believers. The heart of EA’s criticism, published in a 1968 report, On the Other Side, rested on a survey of British churches. The recurring theme of the responses from eighty-five churches in the sample was that the 1966 crusade and a 1967 follow-up effort that concentrated more on television than on the live service in London made no lasting impact on people who were outside the churches. Most of the unchurched had simply ignored the meetings; of the few who bothered to attend, only a small number had any lasting positive response. If they went forward at Graham’s invitation, they often remained confused about what they had done or why they had done it. If they found their way into church, they usually found their way out again rather quickly. As for television relays, faithful church members enjoyed them and believed they must be effective, but the impact on outsiders appeared to be minimal. Overall, clergymen who returned the questionnaires expressed a clear belief that locally based evangelism, particularly when working with young people, was more effective than crusade evangelism. Graham’s approach, they suggested, was something of a clumsy dinosaur, still throwing its weight around but unable to adapt to changing times and destined for extinction.
Because it was produced by Evangelicals, some of whom had worked diligently in Graham’s crusades, and because its approach was thoughtful and measured rather than captiously critical, the report’s conclusions were all the more devastating. In 1986 Maurice Rowlandson ventured that On the Other Side had “put crusade evangelism back at least ten years in Britain. It meant Mr. Graham couldn’t even consider coming back in that time. In fact, it was 1984 before he came again. It had an amazing influence, that book. It was a very unhappy event, and we have only just emerged from it.”
Though not everyone approved of his methods or held him in high esteem, even Graham’s sharpest critics usually conceded that he was a man of sincere commitment and unquestioned integrity, and none denied he had played a major role in revivifying and reshaping Evangelicalism, helping it to become an increasingly dynamic and self-confident movement. But to Graham, these achievements were not enough. As he came to sense the breadth of his influence, he grew ever more determined to use it not just to build his own ministry but to change the fundamental direction of contemporary Christianity. That determination showed itself in a new and momentous way in late 1966 with the convening of the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. Since his earliest days at Florida Bible Institute, Graham had longed to stand in the line of men he considered to be great servants of God. The Berlin Congress was a conscious effort both to repair and forge a link in the chain that ran back to D. L. Moody, whose spirit and career Graham admired more than any other of his predecessors.
The nineteenth century had been a great era for missions, and no one had been more supportive than Moody, who helped finance major mission conferences and whose campaigns and summer meetings at Northfield had provided inspiration and impetus for the intensely mission-minded Student Volunteer Movement in America and England and the World Student Christian Federation in Europe. One summer at Moody’s Northfield Conference, more than 2,100 college students volunteered for missionary service. One of those inspired by Moody’s example and encouragement was John R. Mott, who devoted the remainder of his ninety years in efforts to fulfill the student movement’s ambitious slogan, The evangelization of the world in this generation. When Mott saw classical soul-winning evangelism continually lose ground to a growing concern to minister to the body and to alter social structures—both of which he regarded as legitimate Christian endeavors—he spearheaded the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, at which he hoped to reconcile differences between his Evangelical and Modernist colleagues and then to rekindle their zeal for the winning of souls. To Mott’s disappointment, his plan did not work. On the surface, the conference had an Evangelical flavor, but a majority of the 1,206 participants felt uncomfortable with making the kinds of claims to exclusive truth that had given birth and purpose to the missionary movement. In two significant manifestations of this reluctance, they declined to espouse belief in an infallible Scripture, preferring instead to ground their endeavors in a more ambiguous “authority of Christ,” and they declared that Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox countries should no longer be considered as mission fields. In a further show of ecumenical spirit, they agreed not to issue any resolutions that involved “questions of doctrine or church polity with regard to which the Churches or Societies taking part in the Conference differ among themselves.” No doctrine, no principle would be more important than unity.
Upset by what they considered unacceptable compromise, the more Fundamentalist churches and agencies began to drop out of the ecumenical mission movement. By 1921, when the ever-hopeful Mott convened the inaugural meeting of the International Missionary Council (IMC), which had grown out of the Edinburgh conference, the Modernists were firmly in control and soul-winning evangelism had all but disappeared from the ecumenical agenda. Subsequent development was not in a straight line. An IMC conference in Madras in 1938, once again directed by Mott, called for a return to an emphasis on the Bible, though it explicitly rejected the orthodox Fundamentalist view of Scripture. Mott and some of the tiny remnant band of Evangelicals in the IMC tried to forge a synthesis between historical evangelism and the Social Gospel, but no one any longer talked seriously of evangelizing the world in this or any other generation. Not only was the task too big, but the ecumenists had largely abandoned the conviction that their message was intrinsically superior to that of the other great world religions. Instead, mainline missionaries, whose number was rapidly diminishing, were urged to discover and encourage the common and compatible elements between Christianity and the religions practiced by the people among whom they worked. In 1946, at the age of eighty-one, John R. Mott received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bridge gaps of misunderstanding and to bring all human beings into loving fellowship. When asked how he wished to be identified, he gave a one-word reply: “Evangelist!” He had never surrendered his conviction that all people everywhere needed the salvation that could come only through Jesus Christ, but the institutions he led had never been further from believing it was their solemn duty to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19).
The ecumenical movement reached a new milestone in 1948 with the founding of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, a meeting Billy Graham attended as an observer representing Youth for Christ. At this initial meeting, evangelism received a polite nod, but verbal proclamation of the kerygma was seen as clearly subordinate to the ostensibly more powerful nonverbal testimony of a united Christendom. Subsequent international conferences of the World Council, particularly those at Evanston in 1954 and New Delhi in 1961, acknowledged the surge of evangelistic efforts in conservative churches but explicitly marked off the differences between the council’s view of mission and the ministry of Billy Graham, which the Evanston meeting characterized as “verbalism,” claiming that it represented “an old form of evangelism,” now seen to be in decline. By the time of the New Delhi meeting, which Graham also attended, the Evangelical view that individuals and churches should “send the light and preach the word” had been rendered inoperative by “universalism,” the belief that, however one might conceive of salvation, all human beings will ultimately receive it. The mission of the church, therefore, consists of transforming sinful structures and has nothing to do with rescuing lost souls from eternal punishment in hell.
All this, of course, was anathema to Evangelicals, Billy Graham included. He attended the World Council’s meetings, rejoiced in the fellowship of renowned ecclesiastics, even when they singled him out for criticism, and “thrilled at the whole process of seeing world churchmen sitting down together, praying together, discussing together.” Even so, he felt their attitude toward evangelism was a grievous error. By the late 1950s as he reflected on his own success with the old evangelism and saw that Christianity Today had struck a responsive chord with tens of thousands of ministers in mainline denominations, he began to ponder ways of gathering Evangelicals together to recapture the vision D. L. Moody and John R. Mott had cherished. A three-day meeting of approximately two dozen Evangelical leaders at Montreux, Switzerland, in 1960 set others to thinking and exchanging ideas. Nothing happened right away, but early in 1964, during a taxi ride to the airport after a visit to the White House, Graham told Carl Henry that he wanted to convene a global conference on evangelism. To do so under the aegis of BGEA would seem too self-promoting, and he suspected “the Billy Graham Association didn’t have the intellectual respectability to gather the type of person we wanted to come—professors and presidents of seminaries and people like that.” He thought the best solution would be for Christianity Today to undertake it as a tenth-anniversary project, to be held in 1966. He also felt Henry should head the conference but agreed to give it his stamp of approval by serving as honorary chairman.
No one sitting in on the program-planning sessions would have mistaken the Berlin Congress for a meeting of the World Council of Churches, but the agenda would have delighted John R. Mott. The congress, announced BGEA executive Stan Mooneyham, would define biblical evangelism, expound its relevance to the modern world, identify and mark its opponents, stress the urgency of proclaiming the orthodox gospel through out the world, discover new methods and share little-known techniques of proclaiming it more effectively, and summon the church to recognize the priority of the evangelistic task. Christianity Today described the congress as “a Council of War,” and Carl Henry called it a “once-for-all shot” at turning back the enemies of evangelism and reasserting the validity of a mission strategy “built on the clear exclusivity of Jesus Christ.”
The 1,200 leaders invited to the congress included evangelists, theologians, scholars concerned with evangelism, and denominational and parachurch leaders from 104 nations. Inevitably, decisions as to who would attend created friction. Theologians thought it a waste of money to invite evangelists to a serious theological conference (“They are doctrinally anemic”), and evangelists doubted that a gathering of theologians would have much to say that would be useful (“They don’t know how to lead souls to Christ”). Delegates from the Third World felt the invitation list was weighted too heavily in favor of the West, and Americans anxious to participate in what promised to be a historic meeting grumbled that congress leaders had set a limit of one hundred invitees from the United States. Some evangelists and parachurch leaders who received invitations quickly exploited them in fund-raising appeals, implying that their ministers had received endorsement from the highest levels of world Evangelicalism. Eventually, an impressive and eclectic group of Evangelicals assembled in Berlin. The scope of the gathering was underlined by the presence of Kimo Yaeti and Komi Gikita, Auca Indians who had participated in the 1956 killing of five missionaries in the jungles of Ecuador but had subsequently been converted to Christ. In addition to these erstwhile heathen, the roster also included representatives from both the National and World Council of Churches, as well as from Roman Catholic and Jewish observers. It was, however, notably free of separatist Fundamentalists, an omission that would not go unnoticed. To some, the experience of sitting at a common table with this ecumenical, international, and multicultural melange was enough to transform a simple meal into a foretaste of the messianic banquet. One observer reported there was not “the slightest hint of any racial divergence as those of many colours mingled together in full and free Christian fellowship. One could almost imagine that the Rapture had taken place, and we were all at the other end of the line!”
For ten days beginning on October 28, the ultramodern Kongresshalle, on the banks of the river Spree near the Berlin Wall, rang with clarion calls for a return to old-fashioned evangelistic preaching, carried out with the latest and most efficient techniques and technology. To underscore the sense of urgency, a large digital clock in the lobby emitted a loud pulse that signaled the birth of a new baby—Another Soul to Win—somewhere in the world, remorselessly hammering home the reminder that at 150 births per minute, the population of the planet was growing ten times faster than was Christianity. “No delegate,” one journalist wrote, “can escape the significance of that clicking counter which constantly gate-crashes conversation and stabs the conscience as it emphasizes the enormity and desperate urgency of the one task we have—to communicate one gospel to the one race of all mankind.”
In his opening address to the congress, Billy Graham tried to live up to a prominent Lutheran bishop’s characterization of him as “the personification of the moving spirit of Evangelism.” Explicitly linking himself and the congress to the tradition of D. L. Moody and John R. Mott, he announced at the outset that the primary purpose of the gathering would be to dispel confusion about the meaning, the motive, the message, and the methods of evangelism, as well as about the devious strategies of “the enemy,” a category that included both natural and supernatural foes. Graham usually rested content simply to state what he believed without attacking positions that differed from his, particularly when his opponents were churchmen. On this occasion, however, he lashed out at the ecumenical advocates of universalism. The widespread but softheaded belief that God would not really let people go to hell, he said, had “done more to blunt evangelism and take the heart out of the missionary movement than anything else.” Then, lest any think he believed that men born into other religious traditions might somehow find God by following those ill-lit paths, he declared flatly, “I believe the Scriptures teach that men outside of Jesus Christ are lost! To me, the doctrine of future judgment, where men will be held accountable to God, is clearly taught in the Scriptures.” If the church could recover its conviction on these matters, he said, “it would become a burning incentive to evangelize with a zeal and a passion that we are in danger of losing.” Graham acknowledged that modern biblical criticism had sown much doubt about the veracity of Scripture and the claims it made about Jesus and salvation, but he remained unshakable in his confidence that when an evangelist proclaimed the kerygma, he wielded a sword no biblical critic could blunt. “I have found,” he assured his rapt listeners, who desperately wanted to learn whatever secrets he possessed, “that there is a supernatural power in this message that cannot be rationally explained. It may appear ridiculous and foolish to the intellectuals of our day, but it is the power of God unto salvation.”
Just prior to the opening of the congress, the World Council of Churches had sponsored a conference in Geneva on social action at which it recognized a “need for revolutionary change in social and political structures” and sanctioned the use of violence, as long as it was kept to the minimum necessary to accomplish the desired goals. Specifically aligning themselves against Billy Graham, whom they characterized as a pawn Lyndon Johnson was using to rally support for American policy in Vietnam, some participants compared “the evangelistic type” to “Nazi Christians who by insisting that the Church concentrate on ‘traditional’ concerns betrayed the cause of justice” and depicted Graham’s type of evangelist as “traitors to Christ’s cause.” Graham realized that religion reporters covering the congress would remark on these attacks and the juxtaposition of the two meetings, but he did not shrink from articulating his oft-stated conviction that “if the Church went back to its main task of proclaiming the Gospel and getting people converted to Christ, it would have a far greater impact on the social, moral, and psychological needs of men than it could achieve through any other thing it could possibly do.” To face the overwhelming magnitude of the task before them, Graham urged a spirit of openness toward every possible avenue of evangelism, including the mass media and computers, “on a scale the church has never known before.” To stick with old-fashioned methods would be to invite the wrath of God upon their heads. Finally, he emphasized the need for cooperative action, a unity based not on a desire not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but a unity that grows out of working together in a common task. “Do we want unity among true believers throughout the world?” he asked. “Then evangelize!” Was there a model for the kind of unity he envisioned? Yes, there was. “I believe,” he said, “that some of the greatest demonstrations of ecumenicity in the world today are these evangelistic crusades where people have been meeting by the thousands from various denominations with the purpose of evangelizing.” So saying, Billy Graham made it clear that he was not only pointing the troops in the right direction; he was ready to lead the way.
The handpicked nature of the assembly precluded any serious disagreement over the essentials of Graham’s address, and subsequent speakers reinforced and elaborated most of his major points in more than 180 meetings over the remaining ten days of the conference. The one gnat of contention that could not be strained out was his prescription regarding social action. The sponsoring organization itself was divided on this matter. Carl Henry and some other key people at Christianity Today (CT) had wanted the congress to devote more attention to social responsibility, and some speakers did address such issues as the relationship between Evangelism and race. But Howard Pew, who still provided major support to the magazine, firmly believed involvement in social action would spell “the end of Protestantism as a spiritual and ecclesiastical institution” and wanted the congress to stand firm against efforts by church bodies to influence economic and political institutions in any kind of direct manner. Graham took a middle position, wanting to emphasize evangelism without denigrating social action, which he thought would inevitably follow individual conversion.
Black participants generally criticized the tendency of Evangelicalism to manifest “not only passivity in social matters, but also, by default, a tacit support of the status quo.” And BGEA evangelist Howard Jones charged that racism “is the question on which the whole cause of evangelism will stand or fall in the non-white countries of the world, and we are ignoring it.” When BGEA and CT board member Maxey Jarman warned against being “tempted by the seeming strength [of] political power to force reforms and improvements among people” and recommended depending instead on “the faith and hope and love that comes from God” to effect social change, a black minister from Detroit responded, “Law did for me and my people in America what empty and high-powered Evangelical preaching never did for 100 years.” Overall, social issues received short shrift on the agenda, but the congress did issue a 950-word statement condemning “racialism whenever it appears,” asking forgiveness for “the failure of many of us in the recent past to speak with sufficient clarity and force upon the biblical unity of the human race” and asserting flatly that “we reject the notion that men are unequal because of distinctions of race or color.”
Given the tightly controlled nature of both membership and message, the Berlin Congress held few real surprises, but the unlikely appearance of three remarkably disparate men, all religious leaders in their own distinctive way, provided a dash of panache that participants recalled with wonder, and some amusement, twenty years later. To appeal to Third World participants and to lend a measure of prestige to the congress, Stan Mooneyham used Billy Graham’s name and his own ingenuity to arrange for Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and protector of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic) Church, to attend and address the opening session of the congress. Since visits by heads of state are ordinarily handled by government officials, German leaders were stunned, and a bit miffed, to learn that the emperor was coming to Berlin at the behest of a staff member of an ad hoc Evangelical conference. Berlin mayor Willy Brandt’s office moved quickly to take control of the visit, even going so far as to leave Billy Graham and other congress officials off the dais at a reception for Selassie, but the emperor gave Graham what he wanted when he told the gathering of the “great struggle to preserve Ethiopia as an island of Christianity” and urged the delegates to do all in their power to carry the message of salvation “to those of our fellows for whom Christ our Savior was sacrificed but who have not had the benefit of hearing the Good News.”
A second congress attendee stirred far more lasting interest, in large measure because his participation in the conference was not just a product of an enterprising public relations machine but had real and patently obvious long-term implications for Evangelical Christianity. When Carl Henry wrote Oral Roberts in 1965 to tell him he would soon receive an invitation to the Berlin Congress, he noted his reservations about such Pentecostal phenomena as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and healing, particularly “if these are made to be central and indispensable facets of normative Christian experience.” Roberts understood all too well that Henry and Harold Ockenga, and even Billy Graham, who had always treated him with courtesy and respect, regarded his ministry and, indeed, Pentecostalism as a whole, as a peripheral and somewhat embarrassing relative. As a consequence, he accepted the invitation with considerable misgiving, later confessing that “since the healing ministry had not been understood to be an integral part of the mainstream of the Gospel, we were not sure how our ministry would be accepted or what our contribution could be to the Congress.”
Oral’s apprehensions were not unwarranted. Mainstream Evangelicals at the congress tended to give him wide berth, and Roberts responded by spending as much time as possible holed up in his room at the Berlin Hilton. Calvin Thielman, Ruth Graham’s friendly and unpretentious pastor, made it a personal project to melt the wall of wariness that Oral and the Evangelicals had erected to protect themselves from each other. At their first encounter, which both men enjoyed, Roberts warned Thielman that being seen with him carried some risk, but Calvin pressed on. He arranged a luncheon, which he persuaded Roberts to pay for, and invited a pride of ecclesiastical lions, including the bishop of London, to sit down with the Oklahoma preacher and ask him hard questions. When Oral fielded their queries with both grace and skill, Calvin undertook to introduce his new friend to anyone who would hold still long enough to meet him.
Inevitably, word of Thielman’s activities got back to Billy Graham, who sent a note asking Calvin to come to his room. As Thielman recounted the incident, Graham was sitting up in bed when he entered the room. Looking over his glasses, he said “T.W. tells me that you’re getting together everywhere to eat with Oral Roberts.” Feeling he was about to be cautioned, perhaps even reprimanded, Calvin protested, “Well, Billy, we invited him here and he is being avoided by people. . . . They treat him like an honorary leper.” At that, Graham interrupted, his eyes filling with tears. “God bless you for that,” he said. “You tell Oral that I want him to eat with me.” Billy followed through by inviting Oral to dinner with a small gathering of conference leaders. At the end of the evening, as he spoke briefly with each of the departing guests, he asked Roberts, “Oral, when are you going to invite me to speak to your campus?” Wary he might be, but Oral Roberts recognized a public relations bonanza when he saw one, and he shot back, “How would you like to come to the campus not only to speak but to dedicate the university?” Graham declared, “I’d be honored to do it,” and Oral Roberts suddenly found himself knee-deep in the mainstream of conservative Christianity.
Roberts acquitted himself well as chair of a panel discussion on healing, but his most significant triumph came in an unplanned address to a plenary session. In a characteristically warm introduction, Graham said, “Our prayer is going to be led by a man that I have come to love and appreciate in the ministry of evangelism. He is in the process of building a great university. He is known throughout the world through his radio and television work, and millions of people listen to him. They read what he writes and they thank God for his ministry. I am speaking of Dr. Oral Roberts, and I’m going to ask him to say a word of greeting to us before he leads the prayer.” When the applause subsided, Roberts mesmerized the congregation with his humble confession that his doubts and fears had been “conquered by love.” “I shall always be glad that I came,” he said. “I needed to sit down and listen to someone else for a change.” As one accustomed to being the leading light in Pentecostal circles, he noted his amazement at realizing that he had been “out-preached, out-prayed, and out-organized” by the men in whose presence he stood. “I thank you, Billy, and Dr. Henry,” he said, “for helping to open my eyes to the mainstream of Christianity, and to bring me a little closer to my Lord. I have come to see the Holy Spirit in men who are here today. Yesterday I even had lunch with a Bishop. Can you imagine a Pentecostal evangelist eating with a Bishop of London?” Then he added, “We have talked of the glories of Pentecost in our denomination, but I wonder if we have thought enough of the unity of Pentecost. I think we Pentecostals owe a debt to the historic churches, and you might owe a small debt to us, for we have held on to Pentecost. We have learned new dimensions about it, and I thank God, Billy, and all of you for that.” After thunderous and prolonged applause, Roberts led the assembly in a moving prayer in which, among other blessings sought, he adjured Satan to keep his hands off “this man, God’s servant,” Billy Graham, and implored God to anoint Billy with the Spirit as he had never before been anointed, “that he shall speak with a new force, a new power, a new vision, to this whole generation.”
Perhaps only God knows whether Billy Graham got a new vision, but it was soon palpably obvious that Oral Roberts did, and he set out immediately to “capitalize upon our acceptance in Berlin.” For several months, he filled his Abundant Life magazine with pictures and stories of the Berlin Congress, even quoting verbatim his remarks and prayer at the triumphant plenary session. He pumped Calvin Thielman for ideas as to how he could widen the circle of friends he had made in Berlin. “You don’t realize what happened out there,” he told Calvin. “Those kind of people never spoke to me before. They have avoided me and there was no way I could ever break through it until now. This is bigger than you understand. Because you’ve lived in these circles all your life and I haven’t. I’ve been on the outside looking in.” He invited Leighton Ford and Harold Ockenga to speak at his fledgling school. And of course he held Billy Graham to his offer to give the dedication address at his university the following April. Oral knew that most of Billy’s colleagues felt he could only be harmed by the association, and the mail that came into the Minneapolis offices of BGEA confirmed that suspicion, but Graham had given his word and he kept it. Nearly 20,000 people attended the ceremony, and the media carried the word to any with eyes to see and ears to hear that Billy Graham had placed his stamp of approval on Oral Roberts and by implication on Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Roberts exploited the relationship and the endorsement for every advantage it would yield, but he had been deeply and sincerely touched by the risk Billy Graham had taken. “I knew that Billy loved me,” he told a group of his supporters, “but I don’t think the public knew it.”
A third notable swirl eddied around a man who, unlike Haile Selassie and Oral Roberts, had not been invited to the Congress. Of the Fundamentalist triumvirate of Bob Jones, John R. Rice, and Carl McIntire, only McIntire had never been personally associated with Billy Graham. He had written and published numerous critical articles about the evangelist in his newspaper, the Christian Beacon, and had sent Graham a stream of multipage letters detailing his shortcomings and calling for public renunciation of his damnable ways and apostate friends. If Graham took notice at all, he did so simply by penning a short cheek-turning note informing his attacker that “I have received your letter and have taken note of its contents. God bless you.” As one who had built a long and noisy career on rancorous confrontation, McIntire found his inability to get a rise out of Graham too much to bear and decided to smoke him out and expose him before the world Evangelical community as an appeaser of evil and error.
McIntire neither received nor expected an invitation to attend the congress as a delegate, but he was understandably stunned when Carl Henry told him he had applied too late to receive press credentials. Henry did, however, offer him observer or visitor status with the understanding that he would not be permitted to attend press conferences or interview delegates. McIntire hooted at what he took to be a legalistic ploy to exclude him and his critical perspective. He had come to report, he snorted, not to observe or visit. Denying him access to delegates meant he would not be able to document the degree to which Communist agents, posing as faithful Christians from Eastern European countries, had wormed their way onto the delegate list and planned to use the congress to spread their poisonous ideology throughout the Christian world. As a vehement anti-Communist, McIntire was incensed that speakers had been instructed to avoid attacking communism, lest they mar the “ecumenical policy and atmosphere” of the gathering. He professed shock and chagrin that Carl Henry and his henchmen would seek to thwart the free press, especially to appease the very communism Billy Graham had once courageously opposed, and he determined not to let such high-handed tactics and disreputable motives go unnoticed. He proved true to his resolution.
In an effort to put himself in the hallowed Reformed tradition of nailing theses to the door, McIntire issued a statement of protest against Billy Graham’s brand of ecumenical evangelism and taped it to the glass partitions at the entrance to the Kongresshalle. Then, for the duration of the congress, from morning till late evening, in bright sun and biting cold, the Fundamentalist fulminator stood outside the entrance, distributing mimeographed tirades against Graham and the apostate ecumenical evangelism he represented to any who would receive them, and declaring that the meetings inside were the most tightly controlled “of any non-Roman religious gathering I have ever seen.” McIntire recorded his putative ordeal and replayed the familiar Fundamentalist objections to Graham’s ministry in a self-published and self-absorbed harangue, aptly titled Outside the Gate. A lesser man might have been tempted to go along with the crowd and accept the status of observer or visitor, but Carl McIntire was not such a man. “Thank God I retained my liberty,” he wrote. “My separatist convictions begot such freedom.” His antagonists, he reckoned, would not enjoy the same purity of conscience. He felt certain their shameful treatment of him “will be a major issue hanging over this Congress and over Henry and Graham the rest of their lives.”
Though McIntire was capable of venting full fury on any deviation from his own rigid canons of orthodoxy, he saw Graham’s ecumenical tendencies as more serious than everyday apostasy simply because the evangelist’s eminent stature made it possible for him to influence so many people. In premillennial teaching, one sign of the impending arrival of the Antichrist will be the formation of a single, worldwide religion. To many Fundamentalists, the near-global reach of Roman Catholicism had long made that body seem a likely candidate to smooth the path for the coming of “the beast.” Since its founding in 1948, the World Council of Churches, which sought to bring all Protestant bodies under its umbrella, had furnished another ready suspect. In Outside the Gate, McIntire attempted to fix the yoke of guilt around Billy Graham’s neck as well. By collaborating with liberals and by downplaying differences between conservatives as if the tiniest jots and tittles of doctrine were not matters of eternal consequence, Graham and his colleagues in the New Evangelical camp were in danger of participating in what “could very easily be the church of the Antichrist, Babylon the Great, the Scarlet Woman, the Harlot Church, described in Revelation 17 and 18.” By summoning Evangelical leaders from all over the world to Berlin, and by arranging and controlling the program so that virtually all dissent over matters of doctrine was squelched, Graham was conditioning Evangelicals for eventual membership in the World Council, after which the rapture and the tribulation could not be far behind.
Carl McIntire may have accorded Billy Graham and the Berlin Congress a more pivotal role in cosmic history than they deserved, but it was not an insignificant gathering. The New York Times published daily stories about it, and scores of major daily newspapers gave it front-page treatment. The Religious News Service reported that its coverage matched that given the Second Vatican Council, and Vatican Radio itself took sympathetic notice. A Religious News Service reporter, in fact, went so far as to compare Graham to Pope John XXIII. “The spirit of Pope John,” he said, “hovered over the council. Billy Graham was physically, palpably, and inescapably present at the Congress, speaking admirably and holding together forces that would unquestionably have exploded in all directions save for his presence.” That assessment may have overstated the assembly’s potential fissiparousness, but it was certainly the case that hundreds of people who ordinarily had little or nothing to do with each other found barriers crumbling and suspicions melting as they came to feel that their shared enthusiasm for evangelism more than offset their differences over doctrine and polity. Perhaps the most important discovery came with the recognition by representatives of traditionally Evangelical denominations that even members of traditionally non-Evangelical bodies might share many of their same concerns. Religion journalist Jim Newton recalled that the Berlin Congress was “the first really big conference for Evangelicals. It was a mind-blowing experience [for Evangelicals] to meet with Methodists, Presbyterians, Coptics, and Orthodox who were concerned about evangelism. They all had this image that any church affiliated with the World Council was bound to be a liberal church and, therefore, not concerned about evangelism. Berlin shattered that stereotype. Just exploded it, as nothing had ever done before.” Carl Henry agreed that the congress “shaped a mood in which Evangelicals sensed their larger need of each other and of mutual encouragement and enrichment.” Western delegates, long accustomed to furnishing the impetus for mission efforts in non-Western countries, seemed particularly surprised and affected by what one observer called “the dynamic surge of evangelistic emphasis coming from the newer churches of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.”
Evangelicals were not the only ones stirred by the Berlin Congress. At the triennial meeting of the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches, which convened in Miami in December of the same year, Dr. Willis E. Elliott of the NCC’s Christian Life and Mission Division released a scathing denunciation of the congress, which he attended as an official observer. It had been, he said, “a promotional meeting for a party within Protestantism,” a group that under the leadership of Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry was seeking to have itself recognized as the Evangelical party within the ecumenical movement. He professed to admire Graham and to stand in awe of “his godlike transcendence over the masses, the Sistine-ceiling frowning-God eyebrows, the Olympian masculinity, you name it, he’s got it; both clarity and power of image.” But he did not admire what he saw as Graham’s obsession “with the promotion and protection of a particular angle on the Bible,” an angle he characterized as “scribal evangelism,” with an outlook that was “Biblicistic rather than Biblical” and had little room for an overtly social dimension. Recalling the reference by many congress speakers to the ever-ticking population clock, he noted that not one had suggested that Christians might assume some responsibility for damping the population explosion, and that this failure stemmed from an individualistic ideology that kept Evangelicalism from contemplating collective solutions to social problems.
Elliott called on the NCC “to establish a polar position for dialogue with the old evangelism as represented by Billy Graham,” but he hardly succeeded in turning the evangelist into an enemy. In fact, while Elliott was merely releasing a report, Billy Graham was one of the assembly’s two featured speakers, along with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. Graham described the Berlin Congress as “a step” toward greater unity among Christians. In return, an official of the World Council announced that his organization would thenceforth seek opportunities to cooperate with Graham and his colleagues in evangelistic endeavors. Carl McIntire took this to mean that the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) would soon be absorbed into a one-world church, where wheat and tares were equally valued, where Pentecostals would lie down with popes and men of scant conviction would sacrifice their souls on altars of compromise. In truth, ecclesiastical unity was not on the immediate horizon. The NAE neither disappeared nor linked arms with either the National or World Council, and the councils never quite got around to reviving the spirit of John R. Mott. Still, the Berlin Congress did prove to be a pivotal event for Evangelical Christianity, helping to create a kind of third worldwide ecumenical force alongside Vatican II and the WCC and establishing Evangelicalism as an international movement capable of accomplishing more than its constituents had dreamed possible.