34,586 Decisions

"The Spirit of God is moving across Great Britain," said Billy Graham last week. On a raw afternoon of wind and rain (the kind of weather. Billy told the crowds, that would have emptied a U.S. stadium), he wound up his three-month campaign with two open-air meetings. At London's White City Stadium 67,000 came to hear him, and at Wembley, a few hours later, about 120,000 turned out -- more than had come there to the 1948 Olympic games. When Evangelist Graham called on them to step forward and "receive Christ as your Lord and Master and Saviour," 2,038 surged out of their seats at White City and 2,022 at Wembley, making the day's total of 4,060 "decisions."

The Cutting Edge. During his British campaign, 1,761,000* had come to hear him (many of them repeaters) and 34,586 had been stirred to come forward and give their names for later follow-up sessions with their own ministers. What the long-term effect will be on England's, anemic spiritual life will take time to appraise, but ministers who get about the country already report a heavy increase in church attendance and collections. And the clergy of England, at first skeptical about Evangelist Graham, are now warmly grateful: last week 2,300 of them gathered at Westminster for a farewell lunch to Graham. After the Wembley meeting, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself pronounced the benediction.

The biggest change in attitude occurred among the press. Graham's first press conference in Britain was lively with verbal harpoons and loaded questions (TIME, March 8), but last week's conference ended with a benediction and bowed heads.

"We Live & Learn." The newspapers that had scoffed at the "hot gospeller" from the U.S. now wrote editorials of warm praise. Even the Daily Mirror's sharp-tongued columnist, "Cassandra" (William Connor), devoted more than a page to his second thoughts on the man he had called a "Hollywood version of John the Baptist."

"I think," he wrote, "that he is a good man. I think that he is also a simple man. And goodness and simplicity are a couple of tough customers ... In this country, battered and squeezed as no victorious nation has ever been before and disillusioned almost beyond endurance, he has been welcomed with an exuberance that almost makes us blush behind our precious Anglo-Saxon reserve. I never thought that friendliness had such a sharp cutting edge. I never thought that simplicity could cudgel us so damned hard. We live and learn."

Twelve pounds lighter than he was last March, Evangelist Graham is off next month on a fortnight's tour of other European countries, with meetings (through interpreters) scheduled in Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Diissel-dorf, Berlin and Paris. Churches in Glasgow, Birmingham and London have invited him to come back to Britain next year for another campaign, and he probably will.

"Meanwhile," says Billy Graham, "God is expecting great things from Britain."

*Not counting some 112,000 who have heard Graham speak at special meetings, or an estimated 500,000 throughout Britain who have listened to him over leased telephone lines in their own churches and town halls.

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