8
A Growing Outreach
Augusta, Modesto, Miami, Baltimore, Altoona, Forest Home 1948–1949

Following our first citywide Campaign in September 1947, in Grand Rapids, Michigan—back then we used the label Campaign rather than Crusade —we held a number of others; but Augusta, Modesto, and Altoona now stand out in my mind for various reasons, and I recall Forest Home for the most important reason of all.

AUGUSTA

It was October 1948, and we were in Augusta, Georgia, about to conclude a fairly successful two-and-a-half-week citywide Campaign. Though I had recently taken on the presidency of Northwestern Schools, I was still on the road a great deal, speaking at YFC rallies, conferences, and evangelistic campaigns.

Our Augusta Campaign clearly was not having any impact on the people in the hotel. An automobile dealers’ convention was in town that Saturday night, and around one in the morning a wild party erupted in the next room, awakening me from a deep sleep. Grady came to my room to complain.

“I can’t sleep.”

“I can’t either, and tomorrow’s a big day,” I said to him. “I’m going over there to put a stop to this.”

I wrapped my bathrobe around me and went out and pounded on their door.

“Whad’ya want?” asked the drunken man who responded to my knock.

“I want to speak to this crowd!”

I had intended just to tell my neighbors to stifle the noise, but I guess the preacher in me took over. I yelled for silence into the crowd of thirty or forty carousing men and women behind him. Startled, they quieted down.

“I’m a minister of the Gospel,” I began.

Pin-drop silence. This was a bunch of South Carolina auto dealers who knew a Bible Belt evangelist when they saw one, even in his bathrobe.

“I’m holding a revival Campaign in this town. Some of you may have read about it in the paper.”

Not a reasonable assumption.

“I daresay most of this crowd are church members. Some of you are deacons and elders. Maybe even Sunday school teachers. I know your pastors would be ashamed of you, because you’re certainly not acting like Christians.”

I got bolder: “I know God is ashamed of you.”

“That’s right, preacher,” one of them piped up. “I’m a deacon.”

“And I’m a Sunday school teacher,” a woman confessed.

Well, I stood there and preached an evangelist’s sermon to that crowd. I don’t know what happened to the party after I left, but there was no more noise for the rest of the night.

That was not my usual pattern, of course, although I have endured more noisy hotel rooms than I care to remember. But sometimes an evangelist has to be bold, and sometimes he comes across as brash!

Those meetings in Augusta were part of a series of Campaigns that marked a new departure for us. My first years with Youth for Christ had been a whirlwind of activity: I spoke at YFC rallies and churches all across North America and Europe. In February of that year, for example, I spoke forty-four times for YFC in several midwestern states, not including various church services and other related events.

However, I was beginning to think and pray about new opportunities for full-scale citywide Campaigns. Some of these were youth-oriented and closely tied to YFC. Others were invitations to hold citywide Campaigns separate from YFC, targeting the whole community. The first of these not related to YFC had been in late 1947 in my hometown of Charlotte; Augusta was our second.

As it turned out, we followed several principles in Augusta that would become the established pattern for our work in later years.

The first was to work for as broad church involvement as possible. Our citywide Campaign in Augusta was officially sponsored by the city’s ministerial association—a sort of council of churches. Such extensive sponsorship never happened before; in all previous cities, a few churches, or in some cases only one church invited us to hold meetings. In Augusta we had all-out support from virtually the entire Christian community, under the chairmanship of the pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Dr. Cary Weisiger.

Perhaps an event that occurred a few months before that Campaign, in late summer, had given me a greater desire to work with as many churches as possible. I had attended the founding session of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam. Christianity was taking on a new worldwide dimension for me. Dr. Willem Visser ’t Hooft, who was the secretary of the newly formed council, had invited me as an observer from Youth for Christ and had treated me very warmly.

Like many, I was concerned that some extreme theological liberals—persons who would not hold all the tenets of the Apostles’ Creed, which was my own basic creed—had been given prominence. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the spiritual depth and commitment of many of the participants. Furthermore, at the local level in a city such as Augusta, I could see a great advantage in a united effort that brought all the churches together around the preaching of the Gospel.

Second, we stressed that prayer was an indispensable element in preparation for a Campaign, and we sought to organize in advance as much prayer as possible. In the months before we arrived, I was told, several hundred prayer meetings brought people together in churches and neighborhoods to ask God’s blessing.

Third, special care was taken to avoid problems with finances. Money had to be raised to take care of Campaign expenses, but it needed to be done in a way that did not bring suspicion or hostility to the effort. Long before the Campaign in Augusta ended, audiences contributed enough to pay all the budgeted expenses. At that point, the sponsors stopped taking an offering at the meetings. At the last meeting, as was customary in those days, a love offering was gathered for Cliff Barrows and me. (Bev Shea we paid a weekly fee, and Grady Wilson did not come to every Campaign, but he received a stipend when he was able to come.)

Fourth, we learned the value of publicity and the importance of being honest and careful in talking about our efforts. The local committee had run ads in the newspaper, letting the public know the facts of time and place. (Such ads were essential, since our early Campaigns seldom rated any coverage in the news section.) How-ever, some of the ad copy concerned me, because it placed emphasis on individuals rather than on the Gospel message. “Hear These Famous Religious Workers,” one ad exhorted, greatly exaggerating our importance. Bev Shea was the only one who was famous; he had hordes of radio fans—in Des Moines!

On the other hand, we saw that systematic advertising clearly could increase interest in a Campaign. Ads announcing our theme as “Christ for This Crisis” seemed to stimulate media interest in the meetings. I wanted to let people know that the Gospel had a uniquely dynamic relevance to life as they experienced it here and now. Newspapers began to report on the meetings daily, with good summaries of the high points in my sermons. All of us had opportunities to speak on local radio programs too.

One newspaper article said that in my next sermon I would hold the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. I don’t know whether that was literally true, but it did symbolize my constant effort to show the timeliness of God’s eternal truths. In preaching the Gospel, I could also comment on everything current—the Communist threat, moral and social issues in the newspapers, Judgment Day.

MODESTO

Immediately after the Augusta Campaign, Cliff Barrows, Grady Wilson, and I drove across the country toward Modesto, Califor-nia, which was near Cliff’s boyhood home, for another citywide Campaign scheduled to begin in late October . . . and therein lay a tale.

Cliff and I had bought same-model Buicks. Cliff’s was pulling a trailer called the “Bonnie B. Special,” named for his baby daughter. Because I had a commitment in Augusta just after the Campaign, I could not leave right away. Grady decided to travel with me. We agreed to let Cliff go first, promising to meet him at a prearranged spot in Texas, where Grady would swap cars and share the rest of the drive with Cliff.

But we never saw Cliff! After waiting for a time at our scheduled meeting place, we gave up and went on without him, stopping (it seemed) at every Buick place on the road to inquire about a fellow driving a Buick pulling a trailer. At some point, we learned that he was only about six hours ahead of us, but we needed to stop for three or four hours’ sleep. Besides, the oil light on the dash told me that something was wrong; I had to get the oil pump fixed. By the time we stopped at the Buick place in Albuquerque, we knew that Cliff had to be way ahead of us. When we finally got to Cliff’s father’s home in Ceres, just outside of Modesto, we found a smiling Cliff waiting for us; he had arrived an hour before.

A large tent had been erected for the event. Right from the first, we were encouraged by the response. Some nights we had to turn hundreds of people away because of lack of space. Some of the Modesto leaders even urged us to stretch the original two weeks into three. I had to decide against it, however, due to pressing responsibilities at Northwestern.

But Modesto not only encouraged us to continue citywide Campaigns, it also provided the foundation for much of our future work in another way. From time to time Cliff, Bev, Grady, and I talked among ourselves about the recurring problems many evangelists seemed to have, and about the poor image so-called mass evangelism had in the eyes of many people. Sinclair Lewis’s fictional character Elmer Gantry unquestionably had given traveling evangelists a bad name. To our sorrow, we knew that some evangelists were not much better than Lewis’s scornful caricature.

One afternoon during the Modesto meetings, I called the Team together to discuss the problem. Then I asked them to go to their rooms for an hour and list all the problems they could think of that evangelists and evangelism encountered.

When they returned, the lists were remarkably similar, and in a short amount of time, we made a series of resolutions or commitments among ourselves that would guide us in our future evangelistic work. In reality, it was more of an informal understanding among ourselves—a shared commitment to do all we could to uphold the Bible’s standard of absolute integrity and purity for evangelists.

The first point on our combined list was money. Nearly all evangelists at that time—including us—were supported by love offerings taken at the meetings. The temptation to wring as much money as possible out of an audience, often with strong emotional appeals, was too great for some evangelists. In addition, there was little or no accountability for finances. It was a system that was easy to abuse—and led to the charge that evangelists were in it only for the money.

I had been drawing a salary from YFC and turning all offerings from YFC meetings over to YFC committees, but my new independent efforts in citywide Campaigns required separate finances. In Modesto we determined to do all we could to avoid financial abuses and to downplay the offering and depend as much as possible on money raised by the local committees in advance.

The second item on the list was the danger of sexual immorality. We all knew of evangelists who had fallen into immorality while separated from their families by travel. We pledged among ourselves to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. From that day on, I did not travel, meet, or eat alone with a woman other than my wife. We determined that the Apostle Paul’s mandate to the young pastor Timothy would be ours as well: “Flee . . . youthful lusts” (2 Timothy 2:22, KJV).

Our third concern was the tendency of many evangelists to carry on their work apart from the local church, even to criticize local pastors and churches openly and scathingly. We were convinced, however, that this was not only counterproductive but also wrong from the Bible’s standpoint. We were determined to cooperate with all who would cooperate with us in the public proclamation of the Gospel, and to avoid an antichurch or anticlergy attitude.

The fourth and final issue was publicity. The tendency among some evangelists was to exaggerate their successes or to claim higher attendance numbers than they really had. This likewise discredited evangelism and brought the whole enterprise under suspicion. It often made the press so suspicious of evangelists that they refused to take notice of their work. In Modesto we committed ourselves to integrity in our publicity and our reporting.

So much for the Modesto Manifesto, as Cliff called it in later years. In reality, it did not mark a radical departure for us; we had always held these principles. It did, however, settle in our hearts and minds, once and for all, the determination that integrity would be the hallmark of both our lives and our ministry.

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

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

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

MIAMI AND BALTIMORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEATH OF AN UNCLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It can’t hurt,” came the reply.

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

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

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

“I lay carpet.”

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

The worse the storm became, the more I talked.

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

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

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

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

“And you have your license to carry passengers?”

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

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

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

“Not this plane,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is this the airport for Tahlequah?”

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

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

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

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

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

As I said, Bev was the celebrity!

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

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

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

ALTOONA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOREST HOME

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

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

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

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

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

My friend Bob Evans, who had been at Wheaton with me, was also at Forest Home. He overheard Chuck say, “Poor Billy, I feel sorry for him. He and I are taking two different roads.”

This cut me to the quick; the friendship and fellowship we had enjoyed meant a great deal to me. Ironically, the Christian Business Men’s Committee of Greater Los Angeles (which was taking a great step of faith in having an unknown evangelist like me) had invited Chuck to speak in July at a “booster dinner” for the Campaign.

I ached as if I were on the rack, with Miss Mears stretching me one way and Chuck Templeton stretching me the other. Alone in my room one evening, I read every verse of Scripture I could think of that had to do with “thus saith the Lord.” I recalled hearing someone say that the prophets had used the phrase “the Word of the Lord said” (or similar wording) more than two thousand times. I had no doubts concerning the deity of Jesus Christ or the validity of the Gospel, but was the Bible completely true? If I was not exactly doubtful, I was certainly disturbed.

I pondered the attitude of Christ toward the Scriptures. He loved those sacred writings and quoted from them constantly. Never once did He intimate that they could be wrong. In fact, He verified some of the stories in the Old Testament that were the hardest to believe, such as those concerning Noah and Jonah. With the Psalmist, He delighted in the law of the Lord, the Scriptures.

As that night wore on, my heart became heavily burdened. Could I trust the Bible? With the Los Angeles Campaign galloping toward me, I had to have an answer. If I could not trust the Bible, I could not go on. I would have to quit the school presidency. I would have to leave pulpit evangelism. I was only thirty years of age. It was not too late to become a dairy farmer. But that night I believed with all my heart that the God who had saved my soul would never let go of me.

I got up and took a walk. The moon was out. The shadows were long in the San Bernardino Mountains surrounding the retreat center. Dropping to my knees there in the woods, I opened the Bible at random on a tree stump in front of me. I could not read it in the shadowy moonlight, so I had no idea what text lay before me. Back at Florida Bible Institute, that kind of woodsy setting had given me a natural pulpit for proclamation. Now it was an altar where I could only stutter into prayer.

The exact wording of my prayer is beyond recall, but it must have echoed my thoughts: “O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. There are many problems with it for which I have no solution. There are many seeming contradictions. There are some areas in it that do not seem to correlate with modern science. I can’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck and others are raising.”

I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken. At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”

When I got up from my knees at Forest Home that August night, my eyes stung with tears. I sensed the presence and power of God as I had not sensed it in months. Not all my questions were answered, but a major bridge had been crossed. In my heart and mind, I knew a spiritual battle in my soul had been fought and won.

Despite all the negotiations and arrangements we had already entered into with the Christian Business Men’s Committee of Greater Los Angeles, I still had a frightening lack of assurance that the Lord really was leading us to Los Angeles.

I had been away from home so much that year that I hated to be leaving again, even though Ruth was going to attempt to join me later. The first week in September, she and I took a short vacation drive up in the northwoods of Minnesota.

We returned to Minneapolis in time for a weekend faculty retreat at Northwestern Schools, where the fall semester was about to begin. I knew that the faculty and students had a right to expect me on campus. I also knew, though, that T.W., Dean Ed Hartill, and Mrs. Riley could capably handle everything for at least a while.

Some of my negative praying would have made even God gloomy, I guessed, if He had not known ahead what He was going to do for the glory of His name.