Graham fills Yankee Stadium
Billy Graham's New York crusade
Billy Graham is thirty-eight years old when he comes to New York in May 1957 for what becomes a sixteen-week crusade.
The city is not expecting much. Graham has been holding crusades across America and Britain, but New York is different — the media capital, the skeptical capital, the city that has seen everything. Reinhold Niebuhr writes a critical piece about him in Life magazine. The liberal Protestant establishment is cool to hostile.
The crusade opens at Madison Square Garden and does not stop for sixteen weeks — the longest crusade in the history of modern evangelism. Yankee Stadium fills for a Saturday rally in late July. The crowd of one hundred thousand is the largest religious gathering in the stadium's history.
Graham's preaching is not sophisticated by academic standards. He holds his Bible aloft and says repeatedly: The Bible says. He calls for decision — for people to walk to the front, to commit their lives to Christ — in a direct, unembellished way that embarrasses some observers and produces responses they cannot explain.
Two thousand people walk to the front at Yankee Stadium.
What Graham offers is not theology. It is an invitation: something is wrong with you and something is available and you need to decide. The simplicity is the point — the gospel stripped of every cultural accretion, held out in the most direct possible form.
He will do this for sixty years, in one hundred and eighty-five countries, to an estimated two billion people.
“The Bible says.”
— Billy Graham, at virtually every crusade he ever preached
“For as the rain comes down and the snow from the sky, and doesn't return there, but waters the earth, and makes it bring forth and bud, and gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”
The Bible says.
Graham's rhetorical signature is also his theology: the authority he appeals to is not his own intelligence or his own experience or his own spiritual insight. It is the text — the same text Tyndale died for, Carey translated, Wycliffe argued for, Augustine read in the garden.
Two thousand people walked to the front of Yankee Stadium because someone held up a Bible and said: this is what it says, and you need to decide.
The word does not return empty. Graham preached for sixty years and the word went out sixty years' worth.
Somewhere in the world, right now, someone is hearing it for the first time. The word is still going out.
Are you part of its going?