The Crusade for Britain

Extra police would be needed, the stationmaster at Waterloo Station was warned: Billy Graham was coming to London. The stationmaster smiled a British stationmaster's smile. "Never mind," he said, "we've always been able to handle the crowds when Mr. Churchill arrives." Next day a harried police sergeant pulled bobbies off traffic details outside the station. Inside, full-throated singing echoed under Waterloo's dingy skylight, and a surging mass of 2,000 Londoners hoisted children to shoulders, waved Bibles, and clambered up on anything handy for a look at a tall, grinning American with wavy blond hair. "My!" exclaimed one dazed young girl. "You'd think it was the Queen!"

North Carolina-born Baptist Billy Graham had arrived in Britain for a three-month, six-night-a-week "crusade" that could conceivably be the flattest flop or the thumpingest success of his 35 years.

"Apologize, Billy!" While Evangelist Graham was still on the high seas, the British press warmed up the oven to give him a good roasting. The whole crusade seemed to editors to be U.S. anti-Socialist propaganda or a moneymaking racket, or both. Sneered the Daily Mirror: "America occasionally tells her friends what to do. Tomorrow an American arrives in Britain to tell us what to think and what to believe. God's Own Country has always run a brisk export line in evangelists. They come in all shapes and sizes . . . We've had kids like seven-year-old Renee Martz, who tooted a trumpet and sang in Chinese. We've had 'Little David,' the teen-age 'miracle healer.' Now we're getting Mr. Billy Graham." The pinko, nationalist New Statesman and Nation ran verses by Sagittarius. Sample stanza:

The mission to save Britain from the brink Reveals that Saints need not from Mammon shrink - The world's Industrial Croesus In partnership with Jesus Brings Christ to Britain labeled "Jesus Inc."

Most provocative was the discovery by a Daily Herald columnist of a 1954 calendar issued by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ascribing Britain's troubles to socialism in the following, flat terms: "And, when the war ended, a sense of frustration and disillusionment gripped England, and what Hitler's bombs could not do, socialism with its accompanying evils shortly accomplished." The Laborite Herald ran the story under the headline, APOLOGIZE, BILLY -OR STAY AWAY! Laborite M.P. Geoffrey de Freitas announced that he would ask a question in the House about why Graham was allowed to come to Britain.

Billy Graham did apologize. The offending copy, a pressagent explained, was meant to read "secularism" for "socialism" ; the wrong version had been used. Billy went down to the House of Commons and apologized personally to Laborite De Freitas, who ended by calling him "a sincere Christian." But his most dramatic job of fence-mending was a press conference he held the day after he arrived.

"The Sort of Simple Charm." The 100-odd newsmen who assembled to meet him in a gloomy Methodist meeting hall in Westminster came ready to perform on him an expert British drawing-and-quartering. But Billy got in the first few thousand words. "I am here," he explained, "because I was invited to come. I am not here for your money . . . I'm not going to preach antiCommunism, anti-socialism or anti-liberalism ... I have come to preach Christ."

Then in his Southern accent he launched into a rapid-fire sermon. In the last five years, he said, "we have seen the greatest religious wave in our history sweep the U.S. Arthur Godfrey now talks about religion on television." By the time he wound up, with George Beverly Shea, a member of the Graham team, singing his own composition, I'd Rather Have Jesus Than Anything Else, most of the knife-thoughts had been washed out of the newsmen. A woman reporter found him completely disarming. "He seems to have the sincerity, ingenuousness, the sort of simple charm that is the greatest fun about Americans and the quality that makes us love Danny Kaye so."

"Retreat from Christianity." However the Graham crusade turns out, everyone seems to agree that Britain is standing in the need of prayer. Church membership is between 5 and 15% of the population, as opposed to 59% in the U.S. Easter Sunday attendance in Anglican Churches fell from 2,261,857 in 1930 to 1,859,008 in 1950. Clergymen are as hard to recruit as churchgoers; though the Church of England needs at least 600 new deacons each year, only 380 are expected in 1954. A recent survey by the magazine Picture Post found only ten in one group of 40 R.A.F. cadets who had any idea how Christmas got its name, and one old lady who huffed, "They'll be dragging religion into Christmas next!"

In the face of what the Archbishop of York calls "this general retreat from Christianity," Tory M.P. John Henderson and the Rev. Colin Kerr, prebendary of St. Paul's, helped arrange a meeting in 1952 at which Graham discussed evangelism with 800 British religious leaders. The result was an invitation from Britain's century-old Evangelical Alliance to launch a full-dress campaign.

Six weeks ago Billy Graham's team of advance men went to work on London with the same methods that they used in Los Angeles, Boston and Albuquerque They plastered the sides of 600 buse with posters and rented 150 billboards 3,000 units of smaller outdoor advertising and 1,500 tube-station posters. They passed out 20,000 car stickers, organized 1,000 volunteer ushers to work on 200 man shifts in huge (11,000 seats) Harringay Arena. About 5,000 home prayer meetings a week were held to pray for the success of the crusade, and 2,700 "counselors" were trained to follow through with the men and women who step forward at Billy Graham's call to "make a decision for Christ."

The British crusade will cost some $300,000, not counting Billy Graham's transportation and living expenses, which are paid for by his U.S. supporters. Half of this budget will be raised in Britain half in the U.S.

"A Plane in a Fog." This week 11,000 men and women jammed Harringay Arena for the first of Billy Graham's sessions. Some 3,000 more had to be turned away. Speaking from a sky-blue pulpit under a mammoth cube that hung from the middle of the roof with the same text on each of its four sides ("Jesus said: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life"), Evangelist Graham slowed down his usual machine-gun delivery for the benefit of British ears and moderated his usual platform prowl in deference to British dignity. But the message was the one he delivered in the U.S.:

"Many of you here tonight are like a plane in a fog which has lost contact with the airport. You are circling round and round in the monotony, confusion and drudgery of life. You can make contact with God tonight through Jesus Christ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.