MIAMI ROCK FESTIVAL
It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, but I was most definitely not in church. Instead, to the horror of some, I was attending the 1969 Miami Rock Music Festival.
America in 1969 was in the midst of cataclysmic social upheaval. Stories of violent student protests against the Vietnam War filled the media. Images from the huge Woodstock music festival that took place just six months before the Miami event near Bethel, New York—for many a striking symbol of the anti-establishment feelings of a whole generation of rebellious youth—were still firmly etched in the public’s memory.
Concert promoter Norman Johnson perhaps hoped my presence would neutralize at least some of the fierce opposition he had encountered from Miami officials. Whatever his reasons, I was delighted for the opportunity to speak from the concert stage to young people who probably would have felt uncomfortable in the average church, and yet whose searching questions about life and sharp protests against society’s values echoed from almost every song.
“I gladly accept your kind invitation to speak to those attending the Miami Rock Festival on Sunday morning, December 28,” I wired him the day before Christmas. “They are the most exciting and challenging generation in American history.”
As I stepped onto the platform that Sunday morning, several thousand young people were lolling on the straw-covered ground or wandering around the concert site in the warm December sun, waiting for such groups as the Grateful Dead and Santana to make their appearance. A few were sleeping; the nonstop music had quit around four that morning.
In order to get a feel for the event, for a few hours the night before I put on a simple disguise and slipped into the crowd. My heart went out to them. Though I was thankful for their youthful exuberance, I was burdened by their spiritual searching and emptiness.
A bearded youth who had come all the way from California for the event recognized me. “Do me a favor,” he said to me with a smile, “and say a prayer to thank God for good friends and good weed.” Every evening at sunset, he confided to me, he got high on marijuana and other drugs.
“You can also get high on Jesus,” I replied.
That Sunday morning, I came prepared to be shouted down, but instead I was greeted with scattered applause. Most listened politely as I spoke. I told the young people that I had been listening carefully to the message of their music. We reject your materialism, it seemed to proclaim, and we want something of the soul. Jesus was a nonconformist, I reminded them, and He could fill their souls and give them meaning and purpose in life. “Tune in to God today, and let Him give you faith. Turn on to His power.”
Afterward two dozen responded by visiting a tent on the grounds set up by a local church as a means of outreach. During the whole weekend, the pastor wrote me later, 350 young people made commitments to Christ, and two thousand New Testaments were distributed.
As I have reflected on my own calling as an evangelist, I frequently recall the words of Christianity’s greatest evangelist, the Apostle Paul: “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known . . .” (Romans 15:20). Paul not only spoke in houses of worship, but also felt equally at home preaching to crowds in the central marketplace in Athens, small groups on a riverbank or in a jail cell in Philippi, curiosity-seekers in a rented public hall in Ephesus, and fellow passengers on the deck of a sinking ship off the Italian coast. I once told an interviewer that I would be glad to preach in Hell itself—if the Devil would let me out again!
My visit to the Miami Rock Festival was not an attempt to add variety to my schedule. True, it was not a typical setting for our ministry, but neither was it an unexpected setting, especially in light of the times. In some ways, in fact, it was symbolic of much of our ministry during the 1960s and early 1970s.
No doubt future historians will debate endlessly about the causes of the social upheaval that shook America during that tumultuous period, particularly among the youth. The word counterculture entered our national vocabulary during that time, as a whole generation questioned the values and ideals of their parents, often searching for meaning in bizarre ways—or giving up the search altogether. The tragic assassinations of President Kennedy in 1963 and five years later of his brother Robert and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led to widespread disillusionment and cynicism. The growing civil rights movement made us aware of America’s moral failure in the area of racial equality and enlisted many in the fight to end segregation, often through demonstrations and protests. The sexual revolution and the rise of the drug culture likewise influenced an entire generation.
On the international front, events like the Cuban missile crisis and the seemingly endless war in Vietnam contributed to an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, confusion, and even mindless escapism. The political upheaval surrounding Watergate likewise undermined the confidence of many youth in traditional institutions and values.
As I look back, our schedule during those years was as packed as at any other time in our ministry, with large-scale Crusades in dozens of cities across the world, from Los Angeles and Seoul to Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong. Much of my time, in fact, was spent overseas, often visiting, in depth, areas that we had only touched earlier. Nevertheless, the rootlessness of the sixties generation burdened me greatly, and I was determined to do whatever I could to point young people to the One who alone gives lasting meaning and purpose to life.
Whether it was at a rock festival in Miami, a spring break on the Ft. Lauderdale beaches, or a university mission, almost everywhere we went we sensed a deep hunger for spiritual reality on the part of many young people. Not all were open to the Gospel, of course, but we still saw God redirect the path of many who found in Christ the answer to their search.
UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES
When I announced plans to spend a part of the winter of 1963–64 holding missions on university campuses, I received one hundred invitations in the next ten days, two hundred more in the next few weeks. Invitations also came from half the theological seminaries in America. I wished I could have been ten men; even then I could never have covered them all. In the end, I accepted only Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, the University of Michigan, and a few smaller colleges near my home that year, with others the next year.
As the sixties wore on and student unrest accelerated on many campuses, I determined once again to spend as much time as possible at universities, in spite of our commitment to a full schedule of Crusades. On some campuses, we joined with Campus Crusade for Christ, which Bill and Vonette Bright founded (partly at my urging) years before.
“Billy,” he told me one night in Hollywood, where he lived, “I don’t know what to do with my life.”
“What’s your interest?” I asked him.
“Well, I’m really interested in students, and Vonette is as well.”
“Well, I’d give my life to the students,” I suggested.
Bill has often said that I wrote him a check for $1,000 to help him and his wife get their program started. I don’t remember ever having $1,000 during those early years, but I will take his word for it.
In 1967 he and I spoke at the University of California at Los Angeles and at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. With InterVarsity and Campus Crusade staff and students saturating the campuses, interest was high. When I spoke at UCLA, 6,000 students came to one meeting, the largest gathering to hear a speaker in the school’s history up to that point. Some 8,000 showed up for one outdoor meeting at the Greek Theater at Berkeley. Although Berkeley was a hotbed of student unrest, there were only a few demonstrators; most students listened with rapt attention.
A year later, in 1968, I found myself speaking to another group of students in a much different setting. The American Ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, asked me if I would come to his official residence in Paris and meet with some of the student leaders from the University of the Sorbonne and elsewhere.
“I think it will be an interesting evening,” he said cautiously.
I flew over and stayed up talking with the students until the early hours of the morning. Some had been leaders in the student riots. Cynical about the answers society had given them, they were searching elsewhere for answers and adopting new and seemingly attractive philosophies like existentialism. Some of them, at least, were beginning to be disillusioned about everything. The ambassador’s wife, Eunice, sat fascinated through the early part of the discussions and went upstairs to bring her young children down to eavesdrop. After Ambassador Shriver and I went outside to say a final good-bye to the students, he turned to me and summed the evening up: “You know, Billy, the basic problem these young people are facing is religious.”
I agreed, adding that the same could be said about students almost anywhere. The basic questions of life are ultimately religious in nature.
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?
Is there any meaning to my life?
Only the God who created us can give us an ultimate answer to those questions.
Since those student missions in the 1960s, I have spoken at dozens and dozens of colleges, seminaries, and universities— everywhere from the military academies at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, to Kim Il Sung University in Communist-dominated North Korea.
Perhaps nowhere has the potential embodied in the youth of our world been demonstrated more forcefully than at some of the special events at which I spoke during the 1970s. I recall, for ex-ample, the following: Explo ’72, with 80,000 students in Dallas’s Cotton Bowl, sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ; Spree ’73 in London and Eurofest ’75 in Brussels, both of which we helped sponsor and which drew tens of thousands of youth from all over Europe for challenge, inspiration, and intensive training in evangelism; and the Brazilian youth congress Generation ’79, with 5,000 gathering in São Paulo.
Of a slightly different nature is the Urbana Missions Confer-ence, held every three years over Christmas break on the campus of the University of Illinois by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Still ongoing, this event now brings as many as 18,000 university students together from across the world—with many more having to be turned away for lack of space—to focus on the challenge of world missions.
One personal incident at an Urbana conference is worth recounting. I was one of several speakers at a plenary session that year. My left leg began to hurt during the session, and I kept lifting it and twisting it in an attempt to relieve the pressure.
Sitting down front was a medical student who sent a note to the platform asking to see me. I turned the note over to David Howard, director of the convention. The pain got worse, and after I finished talking, I left the platform.
“I think you may have something wrong with your leg,” said the young doctor. “Let me examine it.”
He sat me down on a chair and gave my leg a thorough exam.
“Who’s your doctor?” he asked.
“Dr. Rollie Dickson of the Mayo Clinic.”
“Call him right away.”
T.W. was with me and made the call. My doctor talked first with the medical student, asking him to lift my leg in all directions. Then my doctor asked to speak with me. “I don’t want you to leave that chair,” he said. “I want you to be taken back by stretcher to your quarters, and we’ll send a hospital plane for you. We think you have thrombophlebitis.”
My son Ned was with me also, and when the plane from Minnesota arrived, he and T.W. and the medical student, Victor Wahby, boarded with me. As it turned out, I had met his family during our meetings in Egypt, where his father was a leader in the Presbyterian Church. When we arrived in Rochester, it was so cold—twenty degrees below zero—that the pilot took the plane inside the hangar before letting us out.
We were met by Dr. Dickson and cardiologist Dr. Schirger, who rushed me to the hospital and determined that I did indeed have thrombophlebitis, a blood clot in the deepest vein, close to the bone. If it had broken free, it could have gone immediately to the brain.
With his successful diagnosis, the student doctor from Egypt so impressed the staff at the Mayo Clinic that they later accepted his application for advanced study.
AREAS OF CONFLICT
“A great social revolution is going on in the United States today,” I said, introducing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the audience in Madison Square Garden one night during the 1957 New York Crusade.
With the benefit of four decades of hindsight, we know how far-reaching that revolution would prove to be, but at the time we could not see the future and few realized just how radically the civil rights movement would eventually change the face of America. Nor is it easy for later generations to realize what the racial situation was in much of the United States before the precedent-setting 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools.
I cannot point to any single event or intellectual crisis that changed my mind on racial equality. Growing up in the rural South, I had adopted the attitudes of that region without much reflection, though as I have said, aside from my father, I admired no one as much as Reese Brown, the black foreman on our dairy farm. As a boy, I also loved reading the Tarzan adventure books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, although even at the time it bothered me that white people were consistently portrayed in them as superior to blacks. At Wheaton College, I made friends with black students, and I recall vividly one of them coming to my room one day and talking with deep conviction about America’s need for racial justice. Most influential, however, was my study of the Bible, leading me eventually to the conclusion that not only was racial inequality wrong but Chris-tians especially should demonstrate love toward all peoples.
In 1953, during our Crusade in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I went into the building as the people were beginning to gather one night and personally tore down the ropes separating the white from the black sections—ropes that had been mandated according to the custom in those days by the local committee. My action caused the head usher to resign in anger right on the spot (and raised some other hackles), but I did not back down.
Civil rights were very much in the forefront in America during the 1960s and early 1970s. As the issue unfolded, I sometimes found myself under fire from both sides, extreme conservatives castigating me for doing too much and extreme liberals blaming me for not doing enough. In reality, both groups tended to stand aloof from our evangelistic Crusades, but those people who actively supported us understood very well our commitment to doing what we could through our evangelism to end the blight of racism.
Early on, Dr. King and I spoke about his method of using nonviolent demonstrations to bring an end to racial segregation. He urged me to keep on doing what I was doing—preaching the Gospel to integrated audiences and supporting his goals by example—and not to join him in the streets. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy,” he said, “because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets. Besides that, you have a constituency that will listen to you, especially among white people, who may not listen so much to me. But if a leader gets too far out in front of his people, they will lose sight of him and not follow him any longer.” I followed his advice.
Few events galvanized the whole issue of civil rights or caused such strong feelings on both sides as did the 1965 Selma March and the violence that followed in its wake. Shortly afterward, in April, President Johnson suggested that I go to Alabama as a gesture of peace and goodwill, and in April we held several rallies around the state, including one at Tuskegee Institute.
During the long summer of 1965, America seemed on the brink of chaos. Immediately after the riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, I toured the area with Dr. E. V. Hill, a respected black pastor in Watts (who later became a member of the BGEA board) and other community leaders. No doubt extremists on both sides exploited the situation for their own goals, but I was sickened by the violence and the widespread destruction we saw on every hand. There were no easy answers, I knew, but Dr. Hill and I both agreed that any solution that omitted the need for spiritual renewal could bring only temporary relief. Hatred and racism are fundamentally moral and spiritual problems.
Ireland
Much of my time during the 1960s and early 1970s was spent overseas. Two trips in particular brought us to nations torn by chronic strife and division.
The first was our visit to Ireland in 1972. Long a hotbed of religious and political conflict between Protestants and Catholics, Northern Ireland was a virtual war zone as a result of bombings and armed attacks by the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
After careful investigation by Walter Smyth (who had spent some of his boyhood years in Belfast) and others, we responded to an invitation from a broad-based group of Protestant pastors to make a private visit to Northern Ireland. No Crusade meetings would be possible, for security reasons (although I did preach in one church), but we felt that an expression of goodwill toward both sides might do something to defuse the dangerous situation.
We went to Northern Ireland only days after finishing a Cru-sade in Birmingham, Alabama. The progress in racial harmony we saw there between our 1965 rallies and this Crusade seven years later encouraged us to believe that even in difficult places with long histories of conflict, love and goodwill have the power to overcome the barriers of the past.
We arrived in Belfast on a Saturday night, and the next morning I joined our friend, Graham Lacey, a British businessman, and Arthur Blessitt, an American evangelist who was carrying a large cross through the streets of Great Britain and Ireland as a demonstration of Christ’s love and concern. We went for a walk along Falls Road and Shankill Road, often seen as dividing lines between the warring factions. We had no security guards or police with us. The newspapers had displayed my picture prominently, so people knew who I was.
“How will I know if they’re going to accept us?” I asked Arthur.
“Well, if they don’t, you’ll get a bullet in the back!”
His answer was hardly reassuring, but we prayed and committed the time to the Lord. Along the way, we stopped to talk with individuals about Christ and His love, and to pray. In the Catholic Falls Road area, we came upon a public house with an open door. When we looked in, the Sunday morning drinkers recognized me from the newspapers and television and invited us in.
I told them who we were and why we had come into the Catholic district, to tell them how much God loved them. Some of them laughed at me; others whispered noisily to their neighbors at the tables; but still others, who probably should have been in church at that very moment instead of in the pub, seemed to take the words of Jesus Christ to heart. When I finished, they sent us on our way with applause and a good wish for our safety.
Not too much further down the road, we encountered a roadblock manned by the British. We did not see the soldiers, but we saw their steely rifles poking through the sandbags.
Shortly afterward, we heard a mighty explosion. We could not see its flash, but we certainly felt its impact. People poured out into the streets and ran in the direction of the noise. We joined the crowd and soon came upon the dreadful sight: bodies and pieces of bodies blown apart by a bomb. Three of the dead were apparently known terrorists handling the bomb, but certainly others were innocent bystanders.
We tried to bring some measure of comfort to the chaotic scene. Several of the people recognized me. I was not wearing clerical garb, of course, but they insisted on calling me “Father,” begging me to give the last rites to the dead and the dying. It was not a time for theological distinctions: I knelt by each one and prayed for them. One woman said I was the first Protestant clergyman she had met. Many thanked us for coming.
At that moment the soldiers arrived, and one of them advised us to leave the scene as quickly as possible. More trouble was sure to develop. So we turned around and retraced our steps without further incident—without a bullet in the back—but with a profound sense of sadness at what had occurred.
During the next few days, we met with a wide variety of people, including the governor, the Lord Grey of Naunton. In a meeting sponsored by both the Catholic and Protestant chaplains, students at Queen’s University listened attentively as I spoke about the power of Christ to change lives and fill hearts with love. Jim Douglas, our journalist friend from Scotland, said later that from his experience of British student behavior, he fully expected the crowd to break into catcalls and jeers at any moment; but the students could not have been more attentive.
Especially memorable was a private meeting with Cardinal Conway, the Roman Catholic primate, at the Archbishop’s palace in Armagh. Protestant leaders had also been invited, and they confirmed what I had heard from others: that in spite of the division between Protestants and Catholics, the complex troubles in Ireland were not basically religious but rather were historical and political in nature.
Afterward we went by train to Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland. We were overwhelmed by the warmth of our reception: 2,000 invited guests came to an evening meeting at the Royal Dublin Concert Hall, and Chief Justice O’Dalaigh presided at a breakfast for 450 the next morning. At one meeting, the emcee—a Catholic priest—told how he had come to Christ through reading my book Peace with God. Another meeting—this one at Milltown Park, the headquarters of the Jesuit order in Ireland, brought together clergy from all denominations.
Of special interest was a secret meeting I had with the leader of the Official Wing of the IRA. The police advised against it, but I decided to go through with it anyway. Walter Smyth and I were taken out the back door of our hotel and bundled into a car driven by two men with beards. Shortly afterward, we switched cars and were driven to a house in a working-class section of the city. Although not evident from the outside, the building had originally consisted of four or five adjacent row houses in which the interior had been gutted and rebuilt to form a large and comfortable home. The IRA leader we met there talked for almost an hour about the history of the conflict in Ireland. Then we had tea, and I spoke about what Christ had done for me and how I believed He could bring healing to the people of Northern Ireland if they would turn humbly to Him.
South Africa
The next year, 1973, we went to South Africa. I had been invited there several times before—the first time being in my Youth for Christ days—but I had always refused to go; that country’s strict apartheid policy meant that our audiences would have to be segregated.
In the early 1970s, our friend Michael Cassidy, the founder of African Enterprise, detected some slight changes in his nation’s policy and began to pursue the possibility of a congress on evangelism patterned after the 1966 Berlin Congress. He eventually was able to gain permission for a fully integrated conference embracing all races and virtually all Protestant denominations in South Africa, and I was invited by the organizing committee to speak twice at the event.
On March 13, the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism convened in the coastal resort city of Durban for ten days. All 700 of us, regardless of race, stayed in the same hotel; some said it was the largest interracial meeting held to that date in South Africa.
At first I planned to speak only at the congress, but to almost everyone’s surprise, Cassidy was able to secure permission for a fully integrated evangelistic rally. I will never forget Saturday afternoon, March 17, when 45,000 people of all races—half the people nonwhite—jammed King’s Park Rugby Stadium and spilled over most of the playing field. Some of the committee members were almost overcome with joy by the sight of white ushers escorting nonwhites to their seats.
“Christianity is not a white man’s religion,” I stated, “and don’t let anybody ever tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people!” I went on to proclaim Christ as the only answer to the deepest needs of the human heart. At the Invitation, 3,300 people completely filled the only open space in front of the platform; additional hundreds could not be reached by counselors. Local papers said it was the largest multiracial crowd of any type in South Africa’s history. The main Durban newspaper the next day carried the headline “APARTHEID DOOMED,” summarizing my statement at the press conference.
Durban’s record was broken slightly over a week later in Jo-hannesburg, on Sunday, March 25. Some 60,000 filled Wanderers Stadium—the previous stadium record was less than 40,000— and again blanketed much of the playing field. Many came from dozens of the segregated townships around Johannesburg, including Sharpeville and Soweto. The music, including a Zulu quartet, reflected the diversity of the crowd. The entire service was carried live throughout the nation over government radio, in English and Afrikaans. (Television did not exist then in that country.) At the end of the service, more than 4,000 came forward to indicate their commitment to Christ. While we were in Johannesburg, professional golfer Gary Player went out of his way to welcome us to a multiracial reception at his home.
I left South Africa convinced that apartheid was un-Christian and unworkable. At the same time, I knew that South Africa’s problems would not be solved instantly, any more than those in Northern Ireland or the United States. People sometimes assume that an evangelistic Crusade is somehow a failure if the problems in a city or nation are not suddenly solved, but complex and long-standing problems are seldom solved overnight. Nevertheless, a start had been made, and for that we thanked God.
TELEVISION
If the 1960s and early 1970s were years of upheaval in society, they also brought changes and expansion in the outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Chief among these changes was the growth in our use of the media.
Radio, books, and films have all had an important part in extending our ministry, but by far the most significant in the long term has been television. More than one critic has pointed out the limitations and pitfalls of television. No doubt television also has been used to promote lifestyles and points of view that are opposed to what the Bible teaches. At times, in fact, I have wondered if we have not reached the state described by the prophet Jeremiah: “Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush” (Jeremiah 6:15).
All of that, however, does not rule out television as an incredibly powerful vehicle for shaping character and influencing people, for good or for evil. Like most technologies, television in itself is morally neutral; it is what we do with it, or fail to do with it, that makes the difference.
Our first systematic efforts in television were initiated in 1951. Cliff, Bev, and I used the studios of KTTV in Los Angeles to produce a half-hour program in a format called Kinescope, which we then placed on as many stations as we could. Television was still in its infancy, however, and after a few years we discontinued the broadcasts, mainly because of the time involved in making a weekly program—particularly with our London meetings approaching.
Our first telecast to a whole nation took place in 1955 in Great Britain, when the BBC carried our Good Friday message from Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall throughout Britain. As I noted in an earlier chapter, we first telecast live in the United States from New York, during the Madison Square Garden Crusade in 1957.
Following the New York meetings, we continued to obtain television time wherever possible for live broadcasts from Crusades in the United States. Color television was in its infancy, but we were not far behind; we began to cover the televised Crusades in color. Two years later, in 1959, we telecast the Crusade from Melbourne, Australia, back to the United States. Because Australia did not yet have color television, we had to import a huge amount of equipment from a Toronto company in order to handle the color. Our telecasts were the first TV programs ever produced in color in Australia.
Because a Crusade meeting usually runs for two hours and a telecast for one, by 1964 we realized that it was better to tape and edit programs for later release rather than to continue broadcasting live. Cliff became adept at building in musical and other features that would appeal to viewers. Soon we expanded our television outreach to as many stations as possible, not restricting ourselves to one network but purchasing prime time whenever it was available. Our recent pattern has been to go on television four times a year for two or three nights during prime time. We still purchase time in each market on whatever channels are available to us.
In light of television’s high cost, I have been grateful we have not attempted a weekly program. Because we generate programs only intermittently, we do not require our own TV production facilities or staff. Instead, we contract with other people to oversee production and editing, using the finest technology to achieve the highest quality possible. It has been a pleasure to work with some of these people for many years. Among them is Danny Franks—internationally respected for his work with numerous major television productions—who oversees the lighting for our Crusades and television. Since 1985 we have also included closed-captioned capabilities for our hearing-impaired viewers.
FILMS
Almost all of our early films were intended to be shown in churches. But we could not sit back and wait for the unchurched to come to church, so in time we began to do films that could be shown in theaters—full-length features with a spiritual message. These included Two-a-Penny, starring British pop star Cliff Richard; Joni, starring Joni Eareckson Tada as herself; and The Hiding Place, with Julie Harris and Jeannette Clift George. They were dramatic films— stories of youth and sex, pop culture and rebellion, physical handicaps, and wartime civilian heroism and tragedy—dealing with moral and spiritual problems from the Bible’s standpoint.
Most successful was The Hiding Place, the true story of Corrie ten Boom and her family during the Second World War. Committed to hiding Jews who were fleeing from Hitler’s terror in Holland, the ten Boom family underwent terrible suffering. When they were discovered, Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were imprisoned in the Nazi death camp of Ravensbrück; Betsie died there. Corrie is one of the great Christian heroines of the century. We met her in Switzerland, and her story made such an impression on Ruth that she recommended it to writers John and Elizabeth Sherrill. They jumped at it; and the book and film that followed brought home the horror of those days and the triumph of Christ’s love in the midst of virulent hatred.
All that came home to us during the film’s 1975 world premiere at the Beverly Theater, at the corner of Beverly Drive and Wilshire Boulevard. Shortly before the film was to start, someone threw a tear-gas canister into the theater, forcing the crowd to evacuate. The showing had to be postponed. We held an impromptu street meeting out in front while the police and fire departments attempted to find out what had happened. I spoke to the crowd and prayed.
At a reception later that evening, Corrie ten Boom spoke in her distinctive Dutch accent: “People asked me tonight, ‘What did you feel about this [tear-gas] bomb that was falling?’ I was touched. I was sad. Do you know why? Not only because there was in some way disappointment for people who had hoped to see the film but because on that bomb was the Hakenkreuz, the [Nazi] swastika. . . . What we have to do is love these people who hate us—love them, pray for them. These people are wounded people who have hate in their hearts. They need forgiveness. They need the Lord. . . . That is the answer we must give.”
In God’s providence, the furor over the tear-gas canister created enormous interest in the film. It premiered the following night without incident and has become the most widely seen motion picture we’ve ever produced.
Another of our films from this period deserves special mention. As plans began to take shape for the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, we were approached by the fair’s chief planner, Robert Moses, about the possibility of having some type of exhibit. It sounded like an unusual opportunity; at least 50 million people were expected to attend the fair’s two-year run.
We determined to go ahead. As our plans developed, however, I began to have second thoughts. For one thing, the whole fair seemed overwhelming. Someone calculated that if people spent only twelve minutes at every exhibit, it would take them two weeks to see the whole fair. In addition, I doubted if we could raise the funds to build a separate pavilion, staff it for two years, and develop a film that would be adequate for an event this massive. I wrestled with the decision for months. In a moment of discouragement—I was ill at the time—I wrote the BGEA board telling them I thought we should cancel. Dr. Edman, the president of Wheaton College whose wisdom I respected so much, immediately wrote back that he thought I was wrong. He saw this opportunity as “a great challenge put before us by our Lord.” He also told me that Dwight L. Moody’s greatest impact may have been through the extensive campaign he ran in connection with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
So we went ahead, developing a seventy-millimeter wide-screen Todd-AO film entitled Man in the Fifth Dimension. (The name came from the film’s theme: life has a fifth dimension to it, the dimension of the spiritual.) Using spectacular photography to tell the story of God’s creation and His love in Christ, scriptwriter Jim Collier and director Dick Ross put together a presentation of the Gospel that touched thousands of lives.
Our pavilion included an exhibit area, which 5 million people visited in the course of the fair, and a 400-seat auditorium where the film was shown hourly, complete with translations into six major languages. Pavilion director Dan Piatt reported that the film was seen by 1 million people.
World Wide Pictures became the largest producer of religious films in the world, with translations into dozens of languages. Someone once calculated that at any hour of the day or night, a WWP film is being shown somewhere in the world. In the last few years, the head of our international film ministry, Paul Kurtz, has been able to get some of our films on television and in theaters in the former Soviet Union and in countries in eastern Europe. For all of this, we give thanks to God.
At the same time, the film work admittedly has been one of the most difficult parts of my ministry. For one thing, motion pictures by their nature are enormously expensive to make, especially if they are done well. Almost all of our pictures (with the exception of The Hiding Place and perhaps a few others) have had to be heavily subsidized by the BGEA. The task of constantly raising money for these was never easy. And occasionally, we faced organizational snafus and difficulties.
In the early years, Ruth reviewed every script; often we held up production until we were convinced that the Gospel message came through with clarity. In recent years, Cliff Barrows has taken fuller responsibility for World Wide Pictures, working first with Dick Ross’s successor, Bill Brown, and then overseeing WWP’s move from Burbank to Minneapolis.
One film we were involved with—we did not produce it but obtained it after completion—starred Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash . . . and therein lies a tale.
In 1971 June dreamed she saw her husband on a mountain with a Bible in his hand, talking about Jesus. The next year, they made a movie about the life of Jesus called The Gospel Road. Holiday Inns expressed interest in sponsoring it as a TV special, but the corporation wanted artistic as well as financial control. The Cashes said no; they wanted to tell the story their way. That meant they had to finance it themselves.
Johnny got his friends together—Kris Kristofferson and the Statler Brothers, among others—to write songs that would tell the story of Jesus. June played Mary Magdalene; Johnny himself narrated. Robert Elfstrom, who had directed the television special “Johnny Cash: The Man and His Music,” was the cinematographer; he also took the role of Jesus.
A few months and a million dollars later, the Cashes sold the work to Twentieth Century–Fox. I had seen a rough cut of it, and from time to time I asked Johnny how the movie was coming. He finally told me it had been sold.
But the news wasn’t good: the Hollywood studio was having trouble marketing the movie.
“Well, Johnny,” I said to him, “we’ll just buy it from them.”
The studio wanted to get its money back, of course, but eventually they came down on their price. As I recall, they sold it to us for about $250,000. Since then, it has been one of the best evangelistic film tools that the BGEA has had, with hundreds of prints in circulation. Missionaries are using it in video vans in Africa, India, and elsewhere.
WORLD EMERGENCY FUND
One footnote to our work during the 1960s and early 1970s was the formation in 1973 of a special fund within the BGEA to bring humanitarian aid to places facing natural disasters or other emergencies. For many years we made it a practice to give away a large part of our undesignated income for the support of other evangelistic enterprises and organizations in various parts of the world, including those trying to meet emergency needs. In 1973 we named our effort the World Emergency Fund.
Over the years, I became more and more convinced of the importance of demonstrating our love through acts of compassion. I knew Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, of course, and had always believed in our responsibility to do whatever we can as individuals to help those in need.
As I studied and traveled, however, I came to realize that we had a larger responsibility. My travels brought me face to face with the stark reality of human suffering and with the fact that many millions of people live on the knife-edge of starvation or chronic illness or disaster. We also realized that compassionate help often opened the door to opportunities in evangelism, as people saw Christ’s love in action.
I recall, for example, the earthquake in Guatemala in 1976. At the time, Ruth and I were in Mexico, where she was recovering from an illness. As soon as I heard of the disaster, I contacted our board to see what we could do through the World Emergency Fund. Then we arranged to travel to the devastated areas. The president of Guatemala put two helicopters at our disposal. His son traveled with us, along with Cliff and a friend of ours, the Argentine-born evangelist Luis Palau.
When we touched down in San Martín Jilotepeque, we saw at once that virtually every building had been destroyed. Of the town’s 18,000 residents, 3,800 were dead in the ruins. Another 4,000 were badly wounded, but there was almost no medical help. Ruth and I felt utterly helpless as we watched thousands wandering about in a daze looking for food or lost relatives.
Back in Guatemala City, I spoke to 500 Christian leaders and missionaries to assure them of our prayers and support. We were meeting in the partially destroyed Central Presbyterian Church. Even as I was talking, a sharp aftershock hit and pieces of the ceiling began to fall on us. The clergy got up and ran out, thinking it might be another earthquake. Later that day, I was invited to speak on the national television network. The BGEA, through the World Emer-gency Fund, flew in a dozen planeloads of food and medicine to help with the relief effort. As in almost every other emergency situation where we have tried to help, we worked with established organizations and local Christian agencies to ensure that the supplies went where they were most needed.
Just as heartbreaking in its effects, but far more extensive, were the cyclone and tidal wave in India in late 1977. A wall of water eighteen feet high and fifty miles wide had swept inland for upward of thirty miles, completely destroying almost everything in its path. Hundreds of coastal villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh were wiped out, and 100,000 people lost their lives. In one village, only six dogs survived.
In God’s providence, we were in the country for a series of Crusades when news came of the disaster. No outsiders—not even journalists—were being allowed in. President Reddy, whom I had met on another occasion (and who was from Andhra Pradesh himself), graciously granted us permission to see the site and supplied a helicopter to take us there. Most villages in that part of India were surrounded by thick, tall thorn bushes to keep out wild animals. As we looked down, we could see bright bits of color snagged by the thorns surrounding dozens of villages. These were fully clothed bodies—thousands of them—already beginning to decompose in the humid tropical heat. When we landed, a man ran up to me and grabbed me by the legs, shouting and refusing to let go. “Kill us or help us rebuild,” he kept saying.
We took his cry literally. Through the World Emergency Fund, we provided for the rebuilding of one village—285 cement-block homes and a 500-seat church; this became a model for the rebuilding of other villages. The Andhra Pradesh Christian Relief and Rehabilitation Committee oversaw the project. In 1980 Walter Smyth and my son Franklin went to India for the formal dedication of the new town. Against my wishes, the inhabitants insisted on calling it “Billy Graham Nagar [Village].”
The BGEA’s World Emergency Fund continues to minister in places of need: famine-ravaged Ethiopia, war-torn Rwanda, the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, and the areas of South Carolina and Florida decimated by Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Andrew. In such instances, we often give the money through organizations like the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and Samaritan’s Purse. We have visited many of these disaster areas personally to try to bring hope and encouragement in the name of Christ. We know we cannot do everything that needs to be done, but in a world that is never free of turmoil, Christ calls us to do what we can.