Ruth, a Portrait by Patricia Cornwell

Author:Patricia Cornwell [Cornwell, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76514-7
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-04T23:00:00+00:00

1. “The Greatest Meet: Graham, Ali Discuss Problems,” Asheville Citizen Times, September 17,1979.

12

CHAPTER

Her Jungle

THE NEW YORK CRUSADE, 1957

Having always longed to do pioneer missionary work, I must keep reminding myself as I look out over the New York skyline this is our jungle.

—Ruth Bell Graham, 1957

On Saturday, May 11, 1957, Ruth leaned against pillows in her Pullman car as soft lamplight shone on the blanket tousled over her legs and her open, battered King James Bible. Two and a half hours had passed in hypnotic beats since she had awakened at 2:00 A.M.

The train lurched to a halt in Washington, where the day before Billy had met with President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. Billy boarded the train and greeted Ruth with a hug in their two-bunk stateroom. As the train lumbered to New York, they talked and then slept until the porter brought them coffee and toast at 9:00 A.M.

Two years earlier, John Sutherland Bonnell, pastor of New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, had approached Billy with an interesting question.

“Billy,” Bonnell asked, “when will you begin a crusade in New York?”

“I am not ready for that,” Billy replied. “I want more time for study and prayer before tackling that project.”1

That same year, the Protestant Council of the City of New York, representing seventeen hundred churches and thirty-one denominations, invited him to hold a crusade in Madison Square Garden. He accepted and his organization began setting it up. As the train sped that way, the city was plastered with six hundred fifty billboards, forty thousand telephone dials reading “Pray for Billy Graham,” thirty-five thousand window posters, and forty thousand bumper stickers. The BGEA’s marketing arsenal included one million letterheads, two and a half million envelope stuffers, two hundred fifty thousand crusade song-books, and one hundred thousand Gospels of John.2

Vice President Nixon would attend the crusade on behalf of the president and speak to one hundred thousand people in Yankee Stadium for ten minutes on July 21. Many of the country’s top entertainers and jet setters would come. It would be the longest, most expensive, and exhausting crusade Billy had yet held, as the scheduled six weeks of services stretched into sixteen. By the time it was over, more than two and a quarter million people would have attended, with one hundred sixty thousand jamming Times Square for the first meeting September 1. But the phenomenon that would change the course of history for Billy, and for the Graham family, was that on June 1 Billy’s ministry would be televised, launching him as one of the nation’s pioneer “televangelists.”

As the Grahams sat in their Pullman car, journalists from virtually every major magazine and newspaper in the United States and Europe were trickling into Manhattan. Billy was restless, unnerved by the task ahead. To him, his mission was not necessarily one of choice, but of obedience. He knew it was God propelling him along a ribbon of steel to the central nervous system of the nation, the hub of sophistication, art, and fashion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.