I was 21 years old the last time, and the first time, that I heard Billy Graham preach the Gospel in person.
The year was 1995 and I was finishing up my undergraduate degree at York University while serving as the Youth Intern at Calvary Baptist Church in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.
I’m not sure what I expected that night as we gathered 20 plus students into a school bus and made our way into the city. I had heard Billy Graham before on the radio and seen snips and bits of his sermons on television but I did not think that he would connect with High School students and I never expected him to make much of an impression on me.
Billy Graham was my grandmother’s preacher.
Billy Graham was friends with the Queen.
Billy Graham was the version of Christianity rejected by my High School teachers and basketball coaches and highly educated friends and neighbours.
Billy Graham was the ghost of Christianity past.
All of those thoughts were rattling through my mind as we made our way into our row of seats in the 300 section at SkyDome.
It was long enough ago now that I cannot quite recall the exact order or sequence of the preliminaries. I recall that there was some singing and a testimony and an announcement or two but all of that has faded greatly in my mind. What I do remember is that when Billy Graham began preaching a holy hush descended upon the congregation. I also remember that he was wearing a three-piece suit and that he spoke very softly and without a great deal of the charismatic energy for which he had once been famous. I am reminded now that he had suffered a health crisis earlier in the week and had missed the first few days of the crusade while recovering in hospital.
He preached a very straightforward sermon.
I can’t remember the details but the substance of it seemed very close to every other sermon I had heard in my little independent evangelical church as a child. There was talk of God’s holiness, man’s sinfulness and our desperate need for the grace and forgiveness that comes through the life and death of Jesus Christ.
And then there was a very simple and straightforward invitation.
I remember thinking that such an appeal would likely have precious little effect on the sort of worldly-wise and culturally savvy teenagers that I had brought to the event.
And yet.
As the invitation went out, hundreds and hundreds of teenagers rose out of their seats and began walking down the aisles and stairways to stand in the mosh pit and to speak with a counselor and to pray to receive Christ as their Savior.
At first I recall being rather skeptical.
Surely this was mostly just adolescent emotionalism.
Possibly this was even to some degree a form of group hypnosis.
And yet.
I felt a strange stirring in my own soul.
I was a believer already by that time, but I was freshly reminded of God’s holiness, largely as I saw it reflected in this strange, saintly older man. I was convicted of my sin, partly as I reflected upon the gap between my own spiritual reality and the self-evident piety of Billy Graham. And I was reminded again of the free grace of God in Jesus Christ that was as effective for fake and fallen youth interns as it was for freshly convicted 16 year old teenage boys and girls.
Thanks be to God!
As I look back upon that night in the spring of 1995 3 lessons stand out for me as a pastor and a preacher of the Gospel:
1. Ethos matters
In John Broadus’ landmark work “On The Preparation And Delivery Of Sermons” he identifies 3 critical aspects of the preaching task: logos, pathos and ethos. Logos refers to the actual content of the message; pathos refers to the appeal to the heart and emotion and ethos refers to the character and presentation of the preacher.
I’ve always been a bit of a logos man.
I have always worked hard to study and understand my Bible. I’ve translated my way through huge swaths of the Bible. I’ve read more commentaries than I can remember. I’ve supplemented that with reading in the area of history, biography and systematic theology.
I’ve worked hard to deliver accurate and faithful logos to my people.
And I’ve always had a natural bent towards pathos. I’m a passionate guy. I wave my hands around when I get excited. I shout when I feel like something is important. And I cry whenever the text touches on the issue of children or the vulnerable or, as I get older, just about anything and sometimes nothing in particular.
Whether I like it or not, I tend to be a bit of pathos man as a preacher.
But ethos has always been a bit more of a struggle.
What does that mean exactly?
How do you communicate ethos?
How do you emanate character without sounding like a blow-hard or self-promoter?
I think that spring night back in 1995 may hold the beginnings of an answer.
I don’t recall Billy Graham saying a single word about himself as a preacher. He didn’t communicate ethos intentionally. He didn’t use himself as an example or hold himself up as a model to be followed.
He just looked like the sort of man I should aspire to be.
He looked like a man who didn’t care what people thought about him.
He looked like a man who wasn’t aware that his clothes were 2 decades out of date.
He looked like a man who wasn’t in it for the money or the fame or the personal recognition.
He looked like a man who wanted to spend his last days on earth pleading with men, women, boys and girls to be reconciled to God through the grace and power of the cross.
He looked like Jesus.
Or what I imagine Jesus would have looked like had he lived to be 80 and had he come to Toronto by way of some small town in North Carolina.
It occurs to me now as I look back upon that day that I didn’t really learn that lesson very well and neither did most of my ministerial colleagues. We spent an awful lot of time in the 90’s trying to look exactly like the culture. Do you like flannel shirts? Well then we do too. Do you like strange haircuts? Then we do too. What kind of music do you like? We like that too – or at least, now we do.
We became so like the culture in our appearance that we more or less surrendered the testimony and power of a transformed ethos. We didn’t look like we came from another world; we didn’t look like we had had a transforming experience with Jesus Christ – we looked like everybody else and I think it cost us.
Preachers should look like they come from someplace else and someplace better.
Preachers should look like they have already died to this dying world.
Preachers should look like Jesus.
2. Style is overrated
One of the other things I remember about that night back in 1995 was the very tacky choir out in centre field. I remember being a little embarrassed by that. My mom was in that choir as were several other ladies from my church. I think they were wearing peach coloured robes, although I won’t swear to that.
The music was also very 1980’s.
Even in the 90’s you didn’t want your music to sound like it was from the 80’s.
And the format seemed very 1960’s; which of course it was. Billy Graham had been doing crusades since the late 1950’s; he perfected the format in the 60’s and hadn’t seen fit to change things a great deal since that time.
Stylistically, that crusade was a disaster.
And yet, as previously narrated, it didn’t seem to matter.
I wish I had learned that lesson better.
I spent a great deal of time in the late 90’s trying to perfect my style as a minister. From 1994-1999 I pastored in Seeker Sensitive churches until finally I gave up and found the most unstylish, unhip, unseeker friendly church on the planet. The whole movement exhausted me. I’ve written about that before and it embarrasses me now to realize how I could have been spared that experience simply by paying more attention to what I observed that night in the example of Billy Graham.
Billy Graham was not stylish.
Billy Graham was not up to date or with it.
Billy Graham looked like he might have been friends with my grandmother.
And yet.
None of that seemed to matter – not even to my rich, stylish, “with it” students from Oakville, Ontario, Canada.
The whole “style” thing is a giant distraction.
Of course there is no such thing as “style neutral”. Every church has a style. Every pastor has a style. But what I should have learned that night is that style doesn’t matter; or at least it doesn’t matter very much. Billy Graham presented as you would expect him to. He looked like an 80 year old Evangelical preacher from North Carolina. He spoke like that. He sang like that. He preached like that.
He was authentic.
And he made an effort to be inclusive.
He knew he was in Canada and he knew he was worshipping with and speaking to a wide variety of people. He was sensitive without being insincere.
Bingo.
That is the approach I wish I had adopted 24 years ago and that is the approach that I would now recommend to every person generally and every pastor in particular.
3. Unction is an actual thing
This was the lesson I learned best on that spring night back in 1995. I learned that night that unction is an actual thing. I learned that night that Billy Graham had something that I did not.
There was nothing terribly deep, nothing terribly funny, nothing particularly relevant about Billy Graham’s sermon that night – and yet – you could feel the power of God seemingly coming out from Billy and affecting the hearts of hundreds and even thousands of people in the stadium.
Unction is the only explanation for what happened there that night.
That lesson stayed with me and very quickly began to erode my confidence in just about everything that I had been taught about the art of preaching. It took a while, but over the next 5 years my trust in humour and cultural relevance and general sagacity began to wane and my desire for anointing and spiritual overlay began to slowly but surely increase.
Billy Graham preached like a man who actually knew the Lord.
Billy Graham sounded like a man who spent time with Jesus.
I wanted to sound like that too – more than that, I wanted to actually BE like that. I wanted to have DEPTHS and REALITY upon which to draw in the pulpit. I wanted to KNOW the Lord and to have the overlay of his Spirit whenever I stood in the pulpit.
Slowly but surely, that began to affect my entire approach to pastoral ministry.
I know that not everything Billy Graham did should serve as an on-going pattern for how to do evangelism. Many wise and mature people have expressed concern over the crusade model. Several astute critiques have been offered as to the effectiveness of the follow up mechanisms that were put in place around those week long preaching programs. Many studies have shown that a high percentage of those who walked the aisles at places like the SkyDome never actually made their way into a Bible believing local church.
Yes, yes, yes. A thousand times yes!
And yet.
Who can deny that people were authentically and legitimately saved through those crusades? I’ve never yet served in a church that did not have a handful of people who were really and gloriously saved through the ministry of Billy Graham.
All our heroes have feet of clay. They are all men and women of their time. They all have blind spots.
And yet.
There was an awful lot for me to learn on that June night in 1995. There were many lessons, many rebukes and many secret encouragements. That old man in his three-piece suit was a gift from the Lord and a much needed intervention – thanks be to God!
SDG,
Pastor Paul Carter
To listen to Paul’s Into The Word devotional podcast visit the TGC Canada website; you can also find it on iTunes.