When the original edition of this book appeared, the story closed on Billy Graham’s seventy-second birthday. No other major evangelist in Christian history had enjoyed a significant ministry of comparable length, and no one would have faulted Graham had he decided to enter into quiet retirement, especially after his growing problems with trembling and weakness were diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease. But Bob Williams had been correct when he predicted, “He won’t stop.” Indeed, some of the most impressive achievements of Billy Graham’s entire ministry would come during his last decades.
The most ambitious and logistically complex accomplishment was undoubtedly the completion of Mission World. The first phase, in 1989, had gone from London to more than 30 countries in Africa. The second phase, Mission World Asia, dispatched the Christian gospel, translated into 45 languages, from Hong Kong to more than 70,000 satellite and video crusades in 30 countries in Asia and the Pacific. Each Crusade was prepared as if Graham were coming personally; more than 400,000 counselors were trained and 10 million pieces of follow-up literature were printed in 30 languages. As in all subsequent Mission World efforts, the programs were culturally adapted, with pre-produced musical segments and testimonies designed to appeal to audiences in given regions. Although a precise count was impossible to obtain, available reports indicated that the goal of reaching 100 million people with each program had been met. It was clearly the largest single outreach in over 40 years of Billy Graham’s international ministry.
Two years later, in November 1991, Crusade services originating in Buenos Aires reached an estimated 65 million people in 20 countries of South America, Central America, and Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean. The European edition of Mission World, dubbed ProChrist 93, called for greater technological sophistication than the three previous efforts. For some time, German Christians had wanted to sponsor a Billy Graham mission, but, perhaps still anxious to avoid association with the Nazi rallies of the 1930s and 1940s, wanted the evangelist to tour 20 cities over a 30-day period instead of holding a standard crusade in a large stadium. Graham’s health and stamina precluded such an exhaustive undertaking, but the Mission World format provided a satisfactory alternative. From a 7000-seat hall in Essen that served as a studio, Graham’s sermons, delivered alongside a German interpreter but translated simultaneously into 44 other languages, were transmitted by satellite to 386 remote sites in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In addition, eight uplink trucks beamed up to 14 daily transmissions of the program via various satellites to more than a thousand venues in 56 countries and territories in 16 time zones. An estimated 2 million people attended the services nightly and countless others viewed them later in thousands of video crusades, including many throughout the former Soviet Union. This venture brought the total of countries reached through Mission World since 1989 to 141, involving at least 95 different languages.
By 1995, what had seemed unfeasible, perhaps even impossible, when Billy Graham first began to dream about preaching to the entire world at once, now seemed achievable. Bob Williams, still serving as director of the project, spoke of “a double-hung window of opportunity,” referring to a relaxation of government restrictions in many areas and the dramatic reduction in the cost of satellite technology. Some things, of course, had not changed; one of those was time zones. Apart from being able to boast that the gospel had been preached to all nations at the same moment, actually trying to do so made no sense. As Mike Southworth, BGEA manager of satellite services, observed, “For Christians to get up in the middle of the night to go to a program is difficult enough. To ask non-Christians to do that is next to impossible, [and they] are really the ones we want to reach.”
Instead, culturally adapted programs, molded around sermons Billy Graham preached in Hiram Bithom Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on March 16–18, 1995, were—after translation into 116 different languages—-bounced off 30 separate satellites to 3000 downlink sites in 185 countries in all 29 time zones, to be viewed at appropriate hours. In addition to stadiums, theaters, churches, and village gatherings at which the programs were projected onto bed sheets tacked to walls, the three programs were aired over national television networks in 117 countries and seen in the U.S. over several cable television systems and in national syndication. BGEA, not given to exaggerated claims regarding its audiences, estimated that more than a billion people heard at least one of the programs. With the possible exception of the Olympics, this project, dubbed Global Mission, may well have been the most technologically complex example of worldwide communication ever attempted.
As with all of Billy Graham’s evangelistic endeavors, precise assessment of Global Mission’s effectiveness is impossible. That said, one can share the wonder expressed by David Barrett, co-author of the World Christian Encyclopedia and widely regarded as a top authority on world missions. “How,” Barrett asked, “can you envisage one man speaking to a billion people? I think there are only two people in the world who could have attained this: Billy Graham and John Paul II.” Future students of world religion, Barrett thought, would view Mission World “as one of the most significant events in the worldwide spread of Christianity.”
Heartened by the success of Global Mission and unwilling to abandon the hundreds of thousands of contacts involved in that immense effort, BGEA followed it in 1996 with two additional globe-girdling initiatives known as the World Television Series. Both efforts made use of satellite transmission and national television networks, but instead of trying to attract people to stadiums and other large-scale gatherings, they enlisted approximately one million churches worldwide to help set up video house parties to which church members could invite their friends and neighbors. Reminiscent of Operation Andrew, in which Christians bring their friends to stadiums to hear Graham preach, this was called Operation Matthew, after the tax collector (and, subsequently, apostle and gospel writer) who invited his friends to his home to meet Jesus.
In a second innovation, instead of the traditional format of music and testimony followed by a sermon, the entire program was based upon a sermon during which Graham’s message was illustrated and amplified by music and drama, often quick-cut in MTV style, and by statements from such internationally famous figures as Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and President Jimmy Carter. Prior to these home meetings, hosts were provided with discussion guides, follow-up materials, and literature to distribute to guests. In all, approximately 450 million pieces, culturally adapted and in dozens of languages, were sent to more than 150 countries for each of the two programs. BGEA estimated that between 30 and 40 million house parties were held and that more than 2 billion people watched at least one of the programs.
On a more modest scale, Graham continued to press his attempts to preach the gospel in lands still dominated by or barely emerging from the shadow of communism. In 1986 Alexander Haraszti had said, “We don’t expect that Billy Graham will ever be able to preach in public in Moscow.” The next five years, of course, confounded most expectations about what would happen there. While other developments understandably attracted greater worldwide attention, the relaxation of restrictions on religious organizations, particularly those other than the Russian Orthodox Church, was certainly a significant indicator of sweeping change. In July 1991 Billy Graham engineered a breakthrough for Russian Evangelicals by gaining permission to hold a full-fledged school of evangelism in Stadium Druzba, an annex of Lenin Stadium. Almost 5000 pastors and lay leaders not only were permitted to attend the school, but also were housed and fed in dormitories at Moscow State University. As a further indication that Graham’s careful cultivation of Russian secular and religious authorities in earlier years had convinced them of his integrity, he was urged and agreed to warn participants to watch out for false teachers and exploiters from the West who would split indigenous churches and exaggerate accounts of their visits in order to raise money for their own use back home. During his time in Moscow the evangelist met with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. He reported that he had found both men to be interested in spiritual matters and said that his long conversation with Yeltsin had been primarily about moral and religious subjects.
A fuller answer to Graham’s 1959 prayer for revival in Red Square (p. 264) came the following year, with Vozrozhdeniye (Renewal) 92, hailed by Decision magazine as “Something beyond all expectations.” With the support of 150 churches in the Moscow area and 3000 more from elsewhere in Russia, Graham proclaimed the gospel of Christ in the huge indoor Olympic Stadium. The stadium’s previous attendance record of 38,000, set at the 1988 Goodwill Games, was surpassed at each of the three services. At the final meeting on Sunday, 50,000 people jammed into the stadium and an additional 20,000 watched the proceedings on a large screen outside. More than a quarter of the audience responded to the invitation at each service. The cooperation of Russian authorities and institutions echoed that of Graham’s 1989 Hungary mission. The Moscow postal system distributed 3.2 million promotional leaflets, enough for every home in Moscow; Isvestia ran an in-depth interview; and Graham appeared on several national television programs. At one service the famed Russian Army Chorus sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” bringing the audience to its feet for the refrain, “Glory, glory hallelujah/His truth is marching on.”
A few months before the Moscow mission, Graham had finally cracked through the shell surrounding the most closed of communist societies, North Korea. Once a country that contained so many Christian churches that it was sometimes called “The Jerusalem of the East,” Korea had ruthlessly repressed virtually all religious expression for more than half a century. Now only a tiny percentage of the population still identified itself as Christian; indeed, the capital city of Pyongyang had only two church buildings, one Protestant and one Catholic. Still, perhaps aware of Graham’s efforts on behalf of religious freedom in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, the Korean (Protestant) Christians Federation and the Korean Catholics Association, with governmental approval, invited Graham to visit, with the understanding that his appearances would be quite limited. After gaining approval from President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Graham accepted the invitation.
In Pyongyang, Graham preached at both of the city’s churches and spoke to about 400 students at Kim Il Sung University, laying out the basics of Christian faith and telling them something of the role religion had played in American history. He also met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and, more importantly, with the aged and iron-fisted President Kim Il Sung. North Korean television, which featured their meeting as its lead story, described the conversation as “warm and cordial” and noted that President Kim had expressed hope that “a new spring will come in the relations between our two countries.”
Two years later, Graham received a second invitation, once again coming from the two Christian associations. Graham announced that his primary reason for going was to preach the gospel of Christ, but acknowledged a willingness to explore more fully President Kim’s hope for “a new spring.” Graham spoke at the same venues as during his first visit and also to a public meeting that included some of the nation’s top leaders. But the centerpiece of this trip was a three-hour meeting with President Kim. This time Graham brought a message from the new American president, Bill Clinton, holding out hope of a warmer relationship once North Korea formally agreed to allow international teams to inspect its nuclear weapons facilities.
According to Stephen Linton, an expert on Korea who accompanied Graham on the trip and was present at this meeting, Kim responded in an agitated fashion, shaking his fist and declaring that “President Clinton had the logic reversed: first the two presidents should establish a relationship. Then they could talk about the problems.” Linton described the conversation as “two old men bantering,” with Kim Il Sung loud and emotional, and Graham trying to assure him that Clinton, who “represents a new generation of Americans,” was “doing the best he can, under the circumstances.” Linton reported that even though Kim Il Sung did not agree with Clinton’s approach, he was open to the possibility that the young American president was sincere. Graham’s phrasing, Linton discerned, was “a polite way for one old man to tell another old man that they were dealing with young men, and that young men can sometimes be brash.” This “provided an explanation for the U.S. position in a way that made sense to an old village elder like Kim Il Sung” and also served as “a character reference for the young United States administration.”
Once again, Billy Graham’s informal diplomacy may have had a significant impact. President Kim made no commitment at the time, but a few weeks later he formally agreed to allow international inspectors to visit North Korea’s nuclear sites. In Linton’s view, Graham’s explanation “provided a motive for allowing the inspections that didn’t hurt Kim Il Sung’s pride. It made it more a favor that he was bestowing than a concession that had been wrung out of him.”
Graham’s efforts in China did not progress far beyond his earlier visits, but he did visit again briefly in early 1994, just prior to his second trip to North Korea. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited the U.S. in 1997, he requested a meeting with the evangelist in Los Angeles, where they reportedly discussed religious life in both the United States and China, including issues of human rights and religious freedom.
As indicated by his government-approved visits to Pyongyang, Billy Graham retained his position as Chaplain to the Nation and occasional ambassador without portfolio. The media still sought his opinion on matters of state, and he still managed to provide transparent support for his political friends, as when he commended Ronald Reagan in 1991 by observing that “one of his greatest achievements was having the wisdom and courage [to choose] George Bush as his running mate.” When the nation proved unwilling to choose his old friend George Bush to fill a second term in the White House, Graham found much to admire in Bill Clinton and was pleased to lead prayers at both of his inaugurations, giving him the distinction of participating in eight inaugurations for six presidents—more than any other figure in American history except John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835.
Graham maintained his friendship with Ronald Reagan, visiting him on occasion and noting with regret the toll Alzheimer’s disease was taking on another Great Communicator. When Richard Nixon died in 1994, Graham presided over the internationally televised services and also at the more private graveside committal of his complex and controversial old friend’s body, a fitting end to a relationship that had drawn him further into the political vortex than any other of his flirtations with power and, in the process, had shown him the dangers of trying to swim in a whirlpool. In another manifestation of his role as the People’s Pastor, Graham joined President Clinton in a moving prayer service in the aftermath of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal office building in April 1995.
In May 1996 the U.S. Congress honored Billy and Ruth Graham by presenting them with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow on a citizen. The first citizen to receive the award was George Washington; only 112 others had been so honored in more than two centuries. This was only the second time the award had gone to a clergyman, and the third time it had been given to a couple. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who hosted the event attended by more than 700 congressional, diplomatic, and religious leaders, called Graham “one of the great civic leaders of the 20th century” and lauded him and Ruth for having “given up their lives as a model for serving humanity, and [standing] as role models for generations to come.” Gingrich added, “By receiving this medal, you join about as exalted a group of citizens as we have in this country, and you frankly honor us by being here to receive it.” Physically frail and obviously moved by such tribute, Graham responded by saying, “As Ruth and I receive this award, we know that some day we will lay it at the feet of the One we seek to serve.”
In addition to the several phases of Mission World and despite progressive physical decline brought on by what was thought to be Parkinson’s, Graham maintained a relatively full schedule of crusades during the last decade of the century, though most of these lasted only three to five nights instead of the eight days that had been customary in the 1980s. On what amounted to a decade-long farewell tour, he brought his team and his message to New Jersey, New York, three cities in Scotland, Philadelphia, Portland, Pittsburgh, Tokyo, Cleveland, Toronto, Minneapolis, Charlotte, San Antonio, Ottawa, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Nashville, and Jacksonville, breaking stadium records in almost every city.
None of these gatherings drew more national attention than “An Afternoon in the Park with Billy” on September 22, 1991. As the conclusion to a three-year Mission New York that began in Buffalo and included major events in Albany and on Long Island, Graham climaxed a successful crusade at the Meadowlands in neighboring New Jersey—topping popular singer Bruce Springsteen’s former record turnout for that venue by more than 10,000 people—with a three-hour music and message extravaganza on the 15-acre Great Lawn of Manhattan’s Central Park.
At least one New York City official scoffed at hearing that Graham and his team were hoping for as many as 50,000 people to show up for the event. “Surely their draw in the Northeast is not what it’s going to be in the South,” he said, “but this is New York City.” Evidently unaware of Graham’s earlier success at bringing the gospel to Gotham—and Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other locations far from the Bible Belt—this gentleman also failed to recognize that, if BGEA representatives were publicly setting a goal of 50,000, they probably had already confirmed bus reservations for at least 75,000. It was never their practice to set themselves up for public disappointment, and they certainly did not intend to do so in full view of the nation’s major media. Preparation had been extensive. Beyond the standard measures, 2.5 million brochures had been distributed house-to-house in all five boroughs of the city. In contrast to 1957, when Catholics were urged to stay away from Billy Graham’s Madison Square Garden Crusade and priests were provided materials to help them counter Evangelical teaching, on this occasion in 1991 John Cardinal O’Connor, Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and Bishop Thomas V. Daily of the Diocese of Brooklyn wrote to their priests in 630 Catholic churches, urging them to invite their parishioners to go hear Billy Graham, and encouraged the distribution of brochures to hundreds of daily visitors to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In addition to greater participation by African-American churches than in earlier years, at least a hundred Chinese churches actively promoted the event to their members.
Once again, thorough planning, extravagant publicity, and the prospect of hearing the world’s most famous evangelist preach from the front porch of America’s cultural capital produced an astonishing result. By police estimates, 250,000 people turned out for what the New York Daily News called “the largest religious assembly in New York City history.” It was also more than twice as large as any audience ever to hear Graham in the United States. Mayor David Dinkins called it “perhaps the most multi-cultural revival meeting the world has ever seen.” More than 200 reporters crowded into the press area. The New York Times gave it glowing front-page coverage, and the Wall Street Journal exclaimed that “we live in a time when . . . such a large gathering turning out for a religious message is a phenomenon.”
No other domestic event matched the Central Park rally in terms of a live audience, but the crusades of the 1990s were not simply formulaic reprises of what had gone before. Increasingly, crusade budgets included $50,000 to $100,000 in funds for distribution through social service agencies; collections of food and other items for the hungry and homeless became standard. At the Philadelphia crusade in 1992, 100,000 pounds of food was donated for distribution through local agencies, and 35,000 personal-care kits containing a variety of hygiene products were assembled and distributed to homeless people in Philadelphia and in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey. That crusade also continued a growing emphasis on developing a multicultural appeal, as the 7,400-voice choir sang hymns in English and Spanish and Korean.
While these changes were significant, they were mild compared to what, starting in Cleveland in 1994, would become a hallmark of Billy Graham crusades during the last years of his public ministry. Recall that Graham first gained national and international attention with Youth for Christ, which featured vital young men dressed in loud clothes and accompanied by contemporary music and such novelties as a horse that could tap out the number of Jesus’ apostles or the number of persons in the Trinity. As Graham and Neo-Evangelical Christianity matured and entered the mainstream, this youthful exuberance disappeared. The Graham team made a conscious effort to fashion services that would be thoroughly familiar to their middle-class constituency and would reassure backsliders and those who had never made a Christian commitment that coming forward at a Billy Graham crusade would plug them back into a community and cultural experience quite similar to what most of them had known in their youth. By the 1990s, however, high proportions of those attending the crusades—and, more importantly, of the younger generations Graham particularly wanted to reach—had never been to a “Little Brown Church in the Wildwood” and would not likely regard an invitation “just to trust and obey” as a particularly appealing offer.
As Graham spoke of what Evangelicals call a “burden” for young people in his grandchildren’s generation, he found a receptive spirit in Rick Marshall, a crusade director with several teenage youngsters. Marshall had felt for some time that crusade services were not meeting the needs of young people and that a crucial step would be to introduce more music of the sort they enjoyed. Predictably, Billy Graham had no feel for the contemporary music scene, but he observed that when he went into different countries and cultures, he often needed an interpreter to put his message into a language people could understand. If popular music, however jarring to his own ears, could serve as a medium of translation, he was willing to give it a try.
The experiment was launched in June 1994, in Cleveland’s venerable Municipal Stadium. Marshall enlisted popular Christian musicians Michael W. Smith and rock group dcTalk and publicized the event on MTV and the two most popular rock stations in the Cleveland market. Instead of having these artists simply sing a number or two and give a brief testimony, the idea was to have them present a full concert of high-energy music, then follow that with a message from Billy Graham, a caring adult who would attempt to let them know that he understood their world and wanted to help them find purpose and meaning in their lives. Tedd Smith, who by this time had assumed the lead role in producing the actual crusade program, admitted that “we didn’t know what was going to happen in Cleveland. I think there was some hesitation. Is this going to work? People who had been around so many years and had not been in a concert atmosphere wondered, ‘Are they going to behave?’”
The answer to the first concern—“Will they show up?”—came early. Five hours before the concert was to start, an estimated 50,000 kids were waiting to get into the stadium. That sight hardly eased the concerns about behavior. Larry Ross, who now had primary responsibility for Graham’s public relations, recalled that Roger Flessing, by then in charge of BGEA media but still something of a free spirit, had provided his crew with T-shirts that read, “The Billy Graham It-Seemed-Like-a-Good-Idea-at-the-Time Tour.” In a similar spirit of giddy anxiety, Ross and several others sported clip-on earrings backstage. As the time for Graham to go on approached, Ross peeked out from backstage to see a mass of young humanity “pogo-ing” in front of the stage and a “wave” whipping around the upper deck of the stadium. Later he remembered thinking, “‘There is no way we are going to get control of this crowd. What are we going to do?’ But then, when Mr. Graham got up to speak, they settled down and you could hear a pin drop. Whether it is the grandfatherly image or the respect for his generation, I don’t know, but it was amazing. And it’s like that everywhere we go.”
Tedd Smith gave a similar account. “We’ve never had anything like drugs,” he observed. “When the music is on, the kids are listening, doing what they do at a concert. Then here comes granddaddy on stage. The musicians give Billy Graham a hug. The kids say, ‘Oh, gee, these guys are hugging him. He’s a good person.’ And all of a sudden, they become very, very quiet. We have found that in every single city. What he says is very much what they want to hear.”
Clearly, the experiment was a success, and Youth Night became a standard feature of Graham crusades, as did a Saturday morning Kidz Gig, aimed at younger children and often drawing upwards of 20,000 kids and their parents for a Christian music review featuring Psalty the Singing Songbook, a cartoon character popular in Evangelical circles. In a remarkably short time, Michael W. Smith, Kirk Franklin, dc Talk, Jars of Clay, Third Day, Steven Curtis Chapman, Crystal Lewis, Ricky Skaggs, the Gaither Vocal Band, the Tommy Coomes Band, Dennis Agajanian and the Praise Band, and other young Christian musicians were just as likely to be part of a Billy Graham crusade as were Sandi Patti or Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash.
Ross acknowledged that not all of the old guard were easily won over. “It has been tough. Let’s put it this way—it has been an education process. Though they were very progressive in the early days, this was a whole genre of music they were not used to,” an observation underscored by watching team members remove ear plugs and grimace as they tried to communicate through the noise coming from the stage. The team was not alone. Franklin noted that “Daddy is not too comfortable with the music,” or, more pointedly, “Daddy doesn’t like it. He won’t even listen to it. But he’s willing to give it a try. They’re stocking the pond so he can go fishing.”
The old evangelist was also willing to adjust his preaching to a new audience. Instead of hauling out a classic sermon about King Manassas, “The Wickedest Man Who Ever Lived,” he preached about Solomon, “the richest, most powerful, and sexiest man of his time,” moving somewhat beyond strict exegesis of Scripture to assert that Solomon had several Ph.D.s from the universities of his day and used drugs, not to mention all those wives and concubines, but still could not find happiness in pleasure and power. Instead of quoting Reader’s Digest or a world leader he had personally known, he cited MTV and shared nuggets of disillusionment from the lead singer of Nine-Inch Nails and the rapping Notorious B.I.G., or referred to Kurt Cobain’s widely publicized suicide.
In city after city, Youth Night not only consistently drew the largest crowd for the crusade, but set stadium records in almost every venue—78,000 in Atlanta, 73,500 in Toronto, 82,000 in Minneapolis, 88,000 in Charlotte, 75,000 in San Antonio, 70,000 in Jacksonville. And so it went. In 1996 a special Youth Night television special was translated in 48 languages and sent to 160 countries. While asserting that “these programs have become not only a hallmark for his ministry, but a model for pastors who are trying to reach this generation,” Larry Ross admitted that the phenomenon continued to amaze him. “Sometimes,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head, “they will chant, ‘BILL-Y, BILL-Y, BILL-Y’ for a minute or two before they settle down. And then they hang on every word. To have an 82-year-old evangelist setting stadium attendance records on Youth Night—go figure. I think it just confirms the search for meaning.”
The Youth Night programs had another quite visible effect on Billy Graham crusades. To accommodate the bands and such high-tech items as the JumboTron screens, the stage settings underwent radical transformation. Before Youth Nights began, the standard setting was a simple draped platform with several rows of chairs for key committee personnel, local clergy, and various dignitaries. Sometimes, in outdoor venues, a small canopy might be erected over the pulpit to protect the evangelist from sun or rain. In the new arrangement, the stage resembled those erected for major rock concerts, with a huge boxlike superstructure that stretched, with the screens and protective fencing, almost completely across the end zone of a football stadium and extended eighty feet upward. This provided protection from the elements and lent a much more theatrical air to the event. The rows of chairs for dignitaries were gone; only the few people with key roles appeared on the stage. Musicians entered through a curtain at the rear and performed before large screens that could be illuminated in dramatic ways, then lifted out of the way by cables when the performance ended. Billy Graham still spoke from a simple pulpit—a tiny, even lonely figure on a huge sound stage. Yet, as he summoned his strength and began to preach, it was easy to forget the new trappings and to remember the old days when he dominated the platform, even though that memory would have been far dimmer had his audience not been able to view him on the huge screens on each side of the stage works. As had been the case for more than a half-century of public ministry, the old evangelist was still anchored to the rock, geared to the times.
Apparently Graham’s appeal to youth was not limited to Evangelical circles. In 1999 two addresses at Harvard drew capacity crowds. At the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he spoke on “The Relevance of God in the Twenty-first Century,” he received a long standing ovation from students and faculty after his address and forty-minute question-and-answer session. The demand to hear him was so great that a lottery system was used to select those allowed to attend the event. The only other person to require such a measure that year was Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. During the same visit Graham spoke at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. No lottery was used, but many students spent the night on the front steps of the church to make sure they could get seats the next morning. The Rev. Peter Gomes, a university minister and himself an unusually able and eloquent preacher, said Graham’s sermon on the meaning of the cross was one of the highlights of his twenty-five-year career at Harvard. The visit received extensive positive coverage in the college newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, not usually regarded as an Evangelical organ.
Of all Billy Graham’s efforts to encourage the spread of the Christian gospel throughout the world, it is possible that none meant more to him, or ultimately will prove to have greater impact, than the mammoth Amsterdam conferences for itinerant evangelists. The 1983 and 1986 conferences described earlier in this book, together with numerous smaller regional conferences organized along the same lines, have trained tens of thousands of evangelists from all over the world in the arts, crafts, and commitment required to fulfill their calling in an effective manner. Glowing reports from participants in these programs regarding the efficacy of this training continue to support the view that the answer to the oft-asked question, “Who will be the next Billy Graham?” is not a single towering figure, but the thousands of men and women trained by BGEA to carry on his kind of ministry, not in great stadiums or via synchronous-orbit satellite, but in the highways and byways of the world, largely unknown outside their modest spheres. It was fitting, then, that the capstone to Billy Graham’s ministry was Amsterdam 2000, an expanded version of the earlier conferences.
This nine-day gathering, held in July and August 2000, involved 10,732 participants from 209 countries and territories. It was undoubtedly the most international conference in the history of the world. Three-fourths of these men and women—while women constituted only eight percent of the total, they were still present by the hundreds—were from developing nations and most of these, approximately 7000 in all, lived in the same mass dormitory in Utrecht that had been used in the earlier conferences. Once again, preference was given to evangelists in the presumed prime of their careers, between ages twenty-five and forty-five, and to those whose formal educational opportunities had been limited. The twenty-two plenary sessions featured many of the familiar luminaries—Ravi Zacharias, Billy Kim, Luis Palau, Stephen Olford, J. I. Packer, John Stott, Bill and Vonette Bright, Charles Colson, Franklin Graham, Anne Graham Lotz, and George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, among others. Hundreds of other Evangelical stalwarts led 130 seminars and more than 200 workshops. To his great disappointment, and certainly to that of the participants, Billy Graham himself was unable to attend, due to a setback in the treatment of his disease, now re-diagnosed as hydrocephalus, which produces Parkinson’s-like symptoms. He did, however, watch the plenary sessions over the Internet, and Franklin delivered the message his father had prepared for the opening session of the conference.
In addition to the larger enrollment, Amsterdam 2000 went beyond its two predecessors by widening the scope of its concern to include elements addressed by the other BGEA-supported international conferences, Berlin and Lausanne. (See pp. 325ff. and 439ff.) Echoing the concerns of the 1966 Berlin Conference, a Church Leaders Task Group focused on ways churches might become more evangelistic and cooperate more effectively with independent evangelists. Recalling the 1974 Lausanne Conference’s call for a greater sensitivity to cultural differences, a Theologians Task Group concentrated on problems encountered by evangelists trying to proclaim a uniform gospel message in a pluralistic world. A third contingent, the Strategists Task Group, focused on ways of implementing more fully Jesus’ Great Commission, developing specific strategies to plant churches by the end of 2002 in each of 253 population groups designated as “unreached peoples.” At the end of the conference these task groups produced what they called the “Amsterdam Declaration: A Charter for Evangelism in the 21st Century,” comprising a list of fourteen pledges they urged upon those called to evangelistic ministry. Like the previous conferences, the final session of Amsterdam 2000 included a massive communion service. Richard Bewes, Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, who officiated at that service, did not exaggerate when he called it “the most internationally representative Christian service of all time.”
The thousands of participants for whom Billy Graham was a legendary hero were understandably disappointed at not having a chance to see him in person. The BGEA family itself, however, suffered a greater sadness. Bob Williams, who had played a major role in all three of the Amsterdam conferences, had contracted pulmonary fibrosis, a serious lung disease, during the course of his travels for the association as director of international ministries. Although seriously restricted by this condition, Williams remained heavily involved in the planning and oversight of this last great effort, all the while wearing a special pager that would notify him the moment a lung became available for transplant. The call never came. Bob Williams, age fifty-one, died on August 7, one day after the close of Amsterdam 2000.