Let us not be satisfied with the religious mediocrity of our age. The New Testament church, the zeal of the New Testament Christians is our example. Join us in expecting God to perform a miracle in our hearts as we make ourselves available to Him and all that He has to teach us during this coming week.
Bill Bright, regarding Explo ’72
In the fall of 1971, Billy Graham released a book, one of the thirty-three he wrote over the course of his long life. Graham had become America’s best-known religious leader, a role he had held, and would hold, for decades. Greg had not met him yet—that would come later—but they were both focused on the same thing: the Jesus Revolution. With its pop-art-style cover and One Way salute, Graham’s book about The Jesus Generation struck a chord, selling two hundred thousand copies within the first two weeks of its release.
Graham wrote about the hippie culture’s rejection of conventional cultural values. Some had chosen political protest; others had simply dropped out and dropped acid. Others had attempted to create countercultural communes and “get back to the garden.” Others had adopted a new set of life principles—based in a vague existential relativism—that were as far from their parents’ absolutes of right and wrong as they could flee.
And many others, said Billy Graham, had found the one revolution that was different: it was not about a new set of life principles, but a Person. “Tens of thousands of American youth are caught up in it. They are being ‘turned on’ to Jesus,” Graham wrote.1 He said that he’d been bombarded with questions about this new spiritual phenomenon in the mail, at press conferences, on Capitol Hill, at the White House, and in the editorial boardrooms of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other news outlets of the day.
Graham hoped that readers who hadn’t yet joined the revolution—those who were experiencing, in his words, “bad vibrations”—would come to faith in Christ and join in as well.
Of course it had not been a perfect revolution. “There are pitfalls,” Graham wrote. “There are fears. There are critics. Some say it is too superficial—and in some cases it is. Some say it is too emotional—and in some cases it is. Some say it is outside the established church—and in some cases it is.”
But, said Dr. Graham, the early church in the book of Acts had such weaknesses as well. In his analysis, the new Jesus Movement also had some intriguing strengths.
Because of Graham’s huge influence on conservative Christians, his focus on the Jesus Movement served as an important wake-up call for older believers who might have otherwise ignored what was going on in youth culture. It was also a signal that what had started primarily as a hippie phenomenon was becoming more mainstream. It was giving fresh energy to the work of parachurch ministries that had been working among young people for years, like Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru), InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IV), Young Life, Youth for Christ (YFC), and the Navigators, among others. Most of these were born in the burgeoning evangelical movement of the 1930s and ’40s, adapted during the tumult and new expressions of the ’60s and ’70s, and continue to do great outreach and discipleship today.
If the Jesus Movement started as a spontaneous movement among hippies, Billy Graham helped to shape its second wave as traditionally conservative Christians got on board. The clearest manifestation of that was Explo ’72, a gathering of about eighty thousand young people in Dallas in August of that year.
A “religious Woodstock,” it was organized by Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ and was at the time the largest religious camp meeting ever to take place in the United States. University students, high school kids, and young people from across the country arrived in buses, broken-down cars, and flower-power vans to spend five days in evangelism, discipleship training, worship, and outreach to the city of Dallas. They were mostly white, clean-cut, and middle class. They yelled Jesus cheers, raised their pointed index fingers in the era’s famous One Way sign, and enjoyed bands from Johnny Cash to Love Song to Larry Norman to praise and worship music.
President Richard Nixon had indicated that he’d love an invitation to join the kids, perhaps as a photo opportunity to appear in solidarity with at least one aspect of youth culture. Concerned that his presence would politicize the event, the event planners wisely declined to accommodate the president’s wishes. Though no one knew it at the time, the Watergate break-in had already occurred, the cover-up was well underway, and Nixon’s presidency would soon topple altogether.
The New York Times called Explo ’72 “the largest and most conspicuous public outpouring thus far of the Jesus Movement, which has revived interest in fundamentalist Christianity among young people across the country.”2
The festival also represented a widespread shift in conservative churches across the country. Many pastors had decried rock music, long hair, and casual dress . . . anything that seemed like the threatening, chaotic culture beyond the sedate confines of their churches. Chuck Smith and other pastors who had welcomed hippies and opened their churches to fresh ways to praise God had been, perhaps, in the minority. Some conservative pastors without enough to do picketed Explo, pointing out long hair and questionable dress among the attendees, even as the kids inside the stadium earnestly studied their Bibles and attended workshops like “How to Live with Your Parents.”
But Explo ’72 was a turning point. Billy Graham’s presence reassured most of the old guard, and those who attended still get tears in their eyes when they talk about their experience there. Its climax was an unforgettable scene in the Cotton Bowl, the entire stadium swathed in darkness. On stage, Billy Graham and Bill Bright lit candles and then passed the light on to others’ candles, which in turn lit others, and others, all through the stadium, until there were nearly one hundred thousand points of light in the darkness, shining individually yet as one. The entire stadium was illuminated with an orange glow. Local residents were calling the Dallas fire department to report that the Cotton Bowl was on fire. They were right: those who attended never forgot the fire of the Holy Spirit and the sense of what Jesus was doing in their world of 1972. Many went on to full-time Christian service.
“When you find out you’re not alone, it gives you that much more confidence,” a Cru staff person named Bob said later. “You pray different, you act different, you lead different. It was intended to have momentum, and it did.”3