The Billy Graham Story by Revd Dr John Charles Pollock

Author:Revd Dr John Charles Pollock [Pollock, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2018-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

20

GREAT STEPS FORWARD

ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1980, MANY EVANGELICAL LEADERS AND other guests, including George Bush, soon to be elected vice president of the United States, came together for the dedication of a fine new Colonial-style building on the campus of Wheaton College: the Billy Graham Center.

For nearly thirty years Billy had considered founding an educational institution. At one time he had thoroughly investigated the possibility of creating a new university, but every project was laid aside because it might deflect him from his primary task of evangelism. At length, in the later 1970s, he found his answer. In September 1977, he turned the first sod on a site donated by Wheaton, his alma mater. The building rose fast. Billy appointed a team member to raise funds and gave the center the royalties of his book Angels, which became a runaway best-seller and topped the American nonfiction list for weeks. The center’s finances had a good start.

The Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College soon established itself as an aid to Christian enterprise and thought, to the understanding of the past, and to planning for the future. Associated with the Wheaton Graduate School, it helps prepare future leaders from all over the world, intellectually and spiritually. It organizes courses and conferences to think through the problems and possibilities confronting the church. The library provides an impetus to the study of evangelism and missions through the ages and in the contemporary world. The archives not only bring together in expert hands the vast and growing mass of papers relating to the Billy Graham crusades, and Billy’s life and ministry, but they are also a repository for the manuscripts of American evangelists and thus an important center of research.

And there is the museum. During the building of the center, Billy became concerned that the museum might be a glorification of himself. He wanted to scrap it. He was dissuaded, and the finished product delighted him. Designed by a sensitive expert, it provides the visitor with “a walk through the Gospel,” setting American revivals and the Billy Graham crusades into the context of church history from earliest times and featuring the varied ways in which the Christian message reaches the contemporary world.

“The museum deeply moved me and filled me with silence, wonder, and tears,” wrote one of the distinguished guests at the dedication. “I wanted at the end to be alone with Jesus for as long a time as he would please to grant me.”

Immediately after the dedication, Billy left for Japan. A crusade in Tokyo and three other cities, with Leighton Ford preaching at two more, had been prepared in much prayer, with outstanding thoroughness.

Billy had briefed himself fully about this highly populated industrial nation with a strongly traditional culture. The stranglehold of tradition and of the ancient religions was loosening; the young were open to other influences, though not to Marxism, which had little appeal to Japanese. Christianity had been preached freely for more than a hundred years, yet only 1 percent of the people were Christians.

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