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Billy Graham and the Rest of the Los Angeles Story
Famed evangelist had help with the revival that almost wasn't.
Sixty years ago this summer, Billy Graham reached a decision that changed the course of evangelical events. Shaken by his friend Charles Templeton’s growing skepticism of biblical authority, Graham wondered whether he could continue to preach. The doubts grew so strong that he even considered going back to North Carolina to work as a dairy farmer. With evangelistic meetings being planned for Los Angeles that fall, Graham needed a quick resolution one way or another. He conferred with Henrietta Mears, who founded the Forest Home Christian conference center where he was speaking. He confessed his concerns to God and wrestled for an answer. Fortunately for evangelicals, Graham resolved to accept God’s Word by faith. “I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts,” Graham prayed, “and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. During his first sermon under the tent in Los Angeles, Graham thundered, “God Almighty is going to bring judgment upon this city unless people repent and believe—unless God sends an old-fashioned, heaven-sent, Holy Ghost revival.” He punctuated the end of every description of what ailed America with the refrain, “We need revival!” God heard his pleas. Aided by favorable media coverage of Hollywood conversions, Graham’s tent meetings lasted eight weeks, attracting hundreds of thousands. And the lanky Southern farm boy with the fiery delivery became a national celebrity.
This part of the story is familiar to many evangelicals. But they might not be aware of the people and events that preceded this well-known demonstration of the mid-century revival.
“By the eve of the evangelistic campaign in September 1949, there were some eight hundred prayer groups throughout the region,” historian Joel Carpenter writes in his book Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. “The evangelical forces of the city were mobilized as never before.”
The man most responsible for these prayer groups was one-time Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor Armin Gesswein. Beginning in 1941 and 1942, he organized the Ministers’ Prayer Fellowship for Revival in Los Angeles. Gesswein had seen the Norwegian revival in person in 1937 and 1938 and brought this zeal back across the Atlantic. These prayer meetings became a key rallying point for believers who would welcome the later revivals near the end of the decade. Revival historian and advocate J. Edwin Orr likened them to the businessmen’s prayer meetings in 1857-58, especially in how they avoided controversy and united Christians across opposing views on soteriology, polity, and baptism. They somehow also managed to overcome divisions over Pentecostal teaching on the second blessing and whether evangelicals should strictly separate from liberals. As the pastors prayed together, “theory was abandoned for a practical ecumenicity of seeking together for spiritual revival,” Orr wrote.
But if Graham had followed Orr’s advice, the fall campaign might never have built upon these stirrings of the Spirit. That summer, Orr had discouraged Graham from holding the Los Angeles meetings, believing he should wait to allow the Spirit to continue preparing the way. Afterward, Orr was thankful the evangelist continued as planned. Reporting in December for United Evangelical Action, Orr gave thanks for the work of God in Los Angeles. “It is about time some good people made a choice between their sterile, faith-destroying, eschatological pessimism and the optimism which springs from the sure knowledge that God will revive His work in the midst of the years preceding the Coming, despite apostasy and because of it.”
Image: Billy Graham in Duisberg, Germany, 1954. Bundesarchiv of the Federal Republic of Germany via Wikimedia Commons.
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Comments
It would be interesting to know what happened to all those people at the tent meetings years later. Did anything change in the city?
Posted By: Dave Begley | August 12, 2009 5:12 AM
My friend, Hamp Riley, met Jesus at the LA Crusade of 1949. From that time he began to grow in Christ and walk with him as he pursued his engineering career in Southern California. Hamp and his wife,Sue, became prayer warriors and leaders in the First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California. There Hamp was involved in winning other men to Christ and leading the growing congregation that eventually called Chuck Swindoll to be their pastor for 23 years. Hamp continues as a mentor to young leaders at the Fullerton church even though he is well into his 80's!
Hamp Riley was dramatically changed in the LA Crusade and that change has rippled outward over all of Southern California and beyond. His own children and grandchildren have also been very active in missions and evangelism, particularly with Greg Laurie's Harvest Crusades.
Paul Sailhamer
Posted By: paul sailhamer | August 15, 2009 11:41 AM
What happened to Charles Templeton? Did he ever get restored? How did Billy Graham handle his intellectual and doctrinal problems?
Posted By: Roy Marshall | August 15, 2009 4:00 PM
Dave Begley, your question “what happened to all those people at the tent meetings years later,” I can speak for one. I was a 17 year old lad who had just trusted in Christ as my Savior (February 1949) through the ministry of a student from Biola. The student Ed Light and I attended a number of the meetings under the tent. Billy Graham’s clear teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ and his trust in the Word of God was a great encouragement and guide to me in the early weeks and months of my Christian walk. I know the Holy Spirit used the clear teaching of the Bible under the tent in that critical time for me. Don Gregory
Posted By: Don Gregory | August 15, 2009 10:17 PM
Roy Marshall asked: "What happened to Charles Templeton? Did he ever get restored? How did Billy Graham handle his intellectual and doctrinal problems?"
Billy Graham and Chuck were always close, and Billy even visited his old chum when Chuck was too old and ill (from senility) to remember him. Billy Graham's faith over time grew less condemnatory and more inclusive of people whose beliefs did not match Evangelical Protestantism. Billy even admitted that he doesn't know how the world was created (a point he and Chuck used to argue).
Charles Templeton was Billy Graham's best friend, and a fellow evangelist, preaching on alternate nights with Graham in Europe at heavily attended "Youth for Christ" rallies. Together they were known as "The Gold Dust Twins" and the most famous evangelists of their day. The standard procedure for evangelists was to take home all the money collected on the last night of an evangelistic campaign. Templeton instead put himself on a limited salary rather than be seen or photographed carrying a huge bag of money away from an evangelistic campaign. Graham soon followed Templeton's lead in that respect and followed Templeton too in integrating his audience when he preached in the south. Templeton attended Princeton Theological Seminary and invited Graham to come along, but Billy said he couldn't.
Templeton had the largest congregation of any Evangelical church in North America, but it was in Canada. After attending Princeton he was also chosen as the official Evangelist for the U.S. Council of Churches, an honor that no one else has ever had. He also hosted his own Sunday religious TV program, LOOK UP AND LIVE (Merv Griffin was Chuck's bandleader). But in the end he came to have more questions than answers and left the fold in 1957. In 1995, Templeton described his eventual rejection of his faith in his final published work, FAREWELL TO GOD : my reasons for rejecting the Christian faith. He was also interviewed by Lee Strobel in THE CASE FOR FAITH. See also Chuck's story in the collection LEAVING THE FOLD: TESTIMONIES OF FORMER FUNDAMENTALISTS.
Posted By: Edward T. Babinski | August 16, 2009 2:21 AM