Billy Graham and the Anglican Church

[0:00] Alexandra asked me what I would like to do a learners exchange on, and I couldn't really think of anything. And then Billy Graham died, and I thought, you know what, I'm going to talk about Billy Graham a little bit.

[0:14] And I'm going, Billy Graham, there's a lot to talk about, of course. But I narrowed it down to talking, I want to talk about Billy Graham and the Anglican Church. And I've had several people, when they saw that title, say, a bit shocked and say, what do they have to do with each other?

[0:31] So I'll put out a thesis out there, and you can tear it to shreds if you want to. But there was an important relationship between the two. You know that Billy Graham, I don't know, how many people have heard Billy Graham speak in person, first of all?

[0:49] Wow. See, that says something right there. So I don't need to tell you that much about how he spoke. You know, the way that his, the way of his speaking was very direct.

[1:05] You know, short sentences, very sincere. He was very energetic as well. One person said it was a direct message of sin and salvation that he delivered energetically and without condescension.

[1:21] Without condescension. And I like the way that that's put. There's a sincerity in his heart. There's a humility, but there's great power in his preaching. And one person said, and in fact, he himself said that sincerity is the biggest art of selling anything, including the Christian plan of salvation.

[1:40] Which is a, which is probably a good way of putting it. But that, that really comes through. And people think about Billy Graham, they think of sincerity. They think of it being Christ centered as well.

[1:51] And he spoke about these big issues. You know, he spoke about life and death and heaven and hell. He talked about repentance. He talked about society and how it's in decay.

[2:02] And he spoke a lot about souls that are in misery, our need for hope. Hope is such a strong theme in Billy Graham's preaching.

[2:16] He is definitely the preacher of hope. And he relied on the scripture alone for authority. He was very unapologetic about saying the Bible says, the Bible says.

[2:29] If you remember his preaching. And, and as one writer said, he says he pursued the listener's heart and will from beginning to end.

[2:39] He pursued the listener's heart. And that's very, very true. His heart and will from beginning to end. Now, here's something that I like.

[2:52] Because this is, this is a quote from a great theologian that you may, that you may not know. Oops. This is not, there we go.

[3:04] That, Bob Dylan. So Bob Dylan said about Billy Graham. This guy was like a rock and roll personified. Volatile and explosive.

[3:15] He had the hair, the tone, the elocution. When he spoke, he brought the storm down. Clouds parted. Souls got saved. There's never been a preacher like him. That puts it pretty well, doesn't he?

[3:28] Bob Dylan, the poet. And, you know, I think he's probably true. Now, I want to say there, there's the preacher.

[3:39] And you know that he spoke, he did 417 crusades. We don't use the word crusade anymore. It's not politically correct. So there are missions, right?

[3:51] 417 missions. And, you know, the numbers kind of vary. But conservatively, he reached 84 million people face to face.

[4:02] Can you imagine that? 84 million people face to face. And it looked to me like about 90% of you heard him face to face, actually. Did anybody go to the 1984 crusade here in Vancouver?

[4:16] Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. You know, he said that this was one of the most difficult cities to have a crusade in, spiritually. I don't know if you know that. But there's several quotes on him saying that.

[4:30] But Billy Graham, he spoke in 185 countries as well. And then he started doing satellite feeds. And there was probably hundreds of millions of people that he reached through that towards the end of his ministry, too.

[4:46] So it's a massive number. It's mind-boggling. But here's something interesting that he said. If I were starting all over again.

[4:59] Now, here's the quote. So there's a book that was written by, it's a biography written in 2014 by Grant Wacker. He wrote a biography of Billy Graham called America's Pastor.

[5:13] And Bruce, do you know Grant? Yeah, I was just with him last week. Okay. Well, then you can just verify what he's saying here. But he claims that he was speaking to a reporter.

[5:25] And Billy Graham said that if he were starting all over again, he would be an evangelical Anglican. Have you heard it? Anybody heard that before? Yeah.

[5:36] There you go. Those are his own words. And he told journalist Ken Woodward that he saw spiritual beauty in Anglican order. Do you think those things are true, Bruce?

[5:49] Grant said it. I believe it. I believe it. So it's true. It's true. And there he is. He's age 35 when he first went to London.

[6:02] And that's a very traditional-looking Anglican vicar he's with there. And I want to say two things. I think that obviously the Anglican Church, if these things are true, had an impact on Billy Graham.

[6:19] And the opposite is true, too. Billy Graham had a profound effect on the Anglican Church worldwide. And the reason for that, I think, one of the big reasons for that is because his first foray into the international mission was in England.

[6:40] So he had become known in the United States of America and had a number of successful missions. The best-known one was in L.A., how that was just a massive success. And his first time traveling overseas to do a mission was in England.

[6:56] And the other thing that happened in that year, just before he went to England in 1954, is that Queen Elizabeth became the queen of England, Canada, I should say UK, New Zealand, Austria.

[7:15] All of these commonwealths were connected to the queen. And I'm going to talk a little bit about his relationship with the queen. I don't think it's an accident that she had her coronation the year before he came.

[7:28] Anyway, we'll talk about that in a minute. So in 1954, Billy Graham came to do a crusade in London. And this was an extraordinary thing that happened because for three months, Billy Graham had meetings every night in that 11,000-seat arena and would pack it out most nights, if not all of them.

[7:58] Lynette, do you know anything about this? I was there. You were there. Can you tell us anything about it for you? No, it was very easy. I remember singing on the tube prins on the buses.

[8:11] Well, I read about this too. So you would come back on the tube and you'd hear singing of the hymns that were sung here. That doesn't happen anymore in London, does it? Were you a Christian at that time?

[8:26] Yeah. Wow. Well, you can talk more about this with a first-hand account. This is amazing, talking to a group that has all these connections. Well, conservatively, during those three months, one and a half million people from London and surrounding areas, I'm sure probably all over England they came.

[8:47] Over a million and a half people attended those crusades. And between 30,000 and 40,000 people made commitments. Two-thirds of them were under the age of 18, which is amazing to me too.

[9:05] And Billy Graham, he would come back over the next 35 years for seven crusades. And in all, there was about nine million people in England who came to these crusades.

[9:18] And 320,000 responded to Christ over those years. And the Bishop of Chester, who was a theology student in 54, said exactly what Lynette said.

[9:31] He said, he remembers underground trains crowded with hymns singing passengers. He says it was like divine adrenaline for a jaded church.

[9:43] I like that quote. And that's what was going on here. Divine adrenaline for a jaded church. Richard Buse, who was rector of All Souls Langham Place, he was the rector after John Stott was.

[9:59] He was a good friend of Billy Graham, too. In fact, he was asked by Billy long before Billy died to officiate at his funeral. But he said he was a teenager at the time.

[10:12] And he said that Billy Graham disdained high flowering oratory, complicated metaphors or many jokes. He spoke with gravity and seriousness about our need and God's solution.

[10:25] And he went on to say, and then another guy went on to say who was listening to this, he said he's not a preacher, but he's a caller. He has the gift of bringing people to the point of decision.

[10:35] And that's what was going on at those crusades. The thing that happened, as you probably know, in crusades is that people prayed.

[10:47] They prayed for the year before. Now, I don't know if your church prayed before that. Were they called on to pray for this crusade? Yes. We were preparing ourselves with navigators to lead people to their living places.

[11:02] Okay. And the thing that was amazing was that Anglicans and different denominations all gathered together to do this. They called him to come to London. And they committed themselves to praying for that time.

[11:15] And that, obviously, you know of all the crusades, that is the key to all of his crusades, is the prayers of God's people for those gatherings, for God's gospel to go forth in great power.

[11:28] And I just want to jump ahead before I talk about the next thing, which is in the 50s, too. But I'm going to jump ahead to 1984.

[11:39] In 1984, there was something called Mission England. And Billy Graham came to England and spoke at six or seven different cities. And it really had an impact on the church, too.

[11:52] I went to, there was one place that we, when we were talking about my background, you forgot. And that is that I also went to England.

[12:04] I studied in England for a year. And in England, I was at St. John's Nottingham. And there were a number of, at the time, it was the largest seminary for Church of England priests.

[12:16] And a lot of those people had been affected by Billy Graham and by the mission that had taken place in 1984. So this was a year later. And so I saw firsthand that there was an effect.

[12:28] The evangelical wing of the Church of England was quite strong. And there was a number of young people in their 20s, who I was in my 20s as well, who were encouraged to go into full-time ministry because of that mission.

[12:47] And the missions before had an effect as well. But I saw a year later how that affected the whole country and certainly the Church of England, the Anglican Church there. So that was London.

[13:03] Now, the last, did you go to Wembley Stadium at the very end? At the very end, I don't know, there was 120,000 people or something. It was quite an ending to this all.

[13:14] And I guess you saw lots of people come forward to receive Christ at that time. Now, here's, this is, by the way, that's a mistake.

[13:25] I should say 1954. I have two mistakes here. This one's 54, it's actually 54. And then this one, I want to talk about for a little while, this next slide, because this, I think, was a critical time.

[13:43] Does anybody know who this is here? It's John Stott. That's right. And this is actually 1955. So, but I want to tell you about this mission.

[13:57] There was a mission in Cambridge, and it was the CICCU, which is the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union, was the forerunner of InterVarsity.

[14:11] So InterVarsity is what that was connected to. And they wanted to invite Billy Graham to do a mission at Cambridge University in 1955. Now, three years earlier, John Stott had done a mission there, and it really was successful.

[14:26] It had quite an effect on the university. And so John Stott encouraged the Christian Union to invite Billy Graham to come.

[14:37] Now, there was a, this was not an easy thing to have happen. When the powers that be got wind of this, there was great anxiety.

[14:51] Because the, sort of the establishment was worried about fundamentalism. So they didn't want, I'll actually read something here.

[15:02] The guy named Cannon Luce of Durham, he wrote a letter to the Times deploring the invitation of Billy Graham. And he said, Billy Graham's approach, he argued, would be unthinkable before a university audience.

[15:17] It would be laughed out of court. But then he went on to say, he says, he said, there's a recent increase in fundamentalism among university students.

[15:27] And that should cause concern to those who work in religious education. No branch of education, he argued, can make terms with an outlook which ignores the conclusion of modern scholarship in that particular department of knowledge.

[15:40] Is it not time that our religious leader made it plain that while they respect or even admire Dr. Graham's sincerity and personal power, they can't regard fundamentalism as likely to issue in anything but disillusionment and disaster for educated men and women in this 20th century world.

[15:58] And so what followed was a whole series of letters to the Times. And John Stott waited for 10 days and then he wrote this letter.

[16:08] And I'm going to read the whole thing. And it's kind of, you can hear John Stott in this. It's very, it's very learned. He does not sound like a fundamentalist. And here's what he said.

[16:19] He said, sir, it is surprising that your correspondents on this subject have not paused to define the term fundamentalism. They have assumed that your readers understood the term, that they actually, that they understood it in the same sense and that it accurately describes Dr. Graham.

[16:35] Actually, the term clearly has different meanings. And Dr. Graham has publicly denied on more than one occasion that he is a fundamentalist. The word has noble origins, but more recently has become associated with certain extremes and extravagances.

[16:50] So that now, fundamentalism is almost a synonym for obscurantism. You know what that word means? It's deliberately preventing the facts from getting out. And it's generally used as a term of, I'm going to say this again, opprobrium.

[17:08] Can you say opprobrium? Use it in a sentence. It means harsh criticism, right? Opprobrium. So, it appears to describe the bigoted rejection of all biblical criticism, a mechanical view of inspiration, and an excessively literalist interpretation of scripture.

[17:26] It is doubtless in this sense that your correspondents have employed the term. And in this sense, the Dr. Billy Graham and others associated with him have repudiated it. Okay?

[17:37] So clearly, a distinction must be drawn between fundamentalism and the traditional conservative view of scripture. It is neither true nor fair to dub every conservative evangelical a fundamentalist.

[17:49] The conservative evangelical desires to lay a truly biblical emphasis on the necessity of divine revelation, to ascribe to the scriptures no meaner an authority than did our Lord and his disciples, and to accept the biblical doctrines of scripture as they accept the biblical doctrine of God and Christ and the church.

[18:09] The real point at issue in this controversy, revealed by an episcopal disagreement in your columns, seems to be the place of the mind and the perception of divine truth.

[18:20] And he closes by saying, all thoughtful Christians would agree with the Bishop of Durham, whose letter you published on August 20th, that God's revelation is essentially reasonable, but would have to add that it is often in conflict with the unenlightened reason of sinful men.

[18:35] Isn't that great? The Bible is itself aware of this conflict. There is then, in conversion, not what Bishop of Durham calls the stifling of the mind, but the humble and intelligent submission of the mind to a divine revelation.

[18:57] The proud human intellect still needs to be abased. In England, as in Corinth. And the only way to enter the kingdom of God is still to become like a little child. Yours faithfully, John Stott.

[19:10] They printed that whole thing? What's that? The paper printed that whole thing. The paper printed the whole thing. Well, there was a whole flurry of, and a lot of them were bishops and so forth who were writing. And, including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[19:23] So, and our own Jim Packer wrote a great book called Fundamentalism in the Word of God, which really unpacks that, and really that letter, if you want to understand that biblically, theologically, look at Jim Packer's book, Fundamentalism in the Word of God, which was written about three years later.

[19:43] So, were you writing partly in response to that controversy? Partly, yes. Though not primarily. Primarily, I was writing up a talk that I'd given to the Graduates Fellowship in London, responding to all this criticism of Fundamentalism in the Times, the same material, same stuff that John Stott was responding to.

[20:20] And it just happened that we, as a publisher, wanted simply a write-up of what I'd said within an hour's talk at this gathering.

[20:35] I don't know whether it's proper to say, the project got out of hand. Instead of the 6,000 words that he hoped for, he got 60,000.

[20:51] It was a full-size book. Well, I don't think I dare say more, so I won't. That's a great book.

[21:02] So if you get a chance to look at that, that would be well worth reading. But I think that there's something going on here for Billy Graham, because he obviously was very aware of this controversy and aware of the answer, which is very erudite and very solid theologically and intellectually.

[21:27] And I want to say a little word about Billy Graham in the midst of this. So he comes in this kind of hornet's nest to Cambridge University.

[21:39] And he came, he was very nervous. He was insecure about his own lack of advanced theological education. And he's coming to this world center of great higher learning.

[21:55] And so he really dreaded the meetings that were coming up. In fact, he wanted to cancel this mission. He said that if he had been able to do so without a complete loss of faith, he would have canceled the meetings or persuaded somebody better qualified to come.

[22:14] So that's how he came. He came in great weakness. He said to John Stott, he said, you know, I'm deeply concerned and in much thought about our Cambridge mission this autumn. I do not know if I've ever felt more inadequate and totally unprepared for a mission.

[22:30] So that's how he came. He said on his arrival to Cambridge the first day of the mission, it was the day after Guy Fawkes Day.

[22:41] And so it's, you know, a day after fireworks and bonfires and partying. And as he was speaking to the team, somebody threw firecrackers into the room from the outside.

[22:55] And there was a strong police presence around the building and so forth. Billy Graham met with C.S. Lewis, by the way. That was the only time when he was there. He met with him for an hour.

[23:05] And the conversation went very well. But Lewis's parting remark was a bit unsettling. He said, you know, you have many critics. He said this to Billy Graham.

[23:17] He said, you know, you have many critics. But I have never met one of your critics who knows you personally. The question was, had Lewis met anyone who knew Billy personally?

[23:30] Probably not. So he met, so he meets with these guys. A terrible start to this mission. And then the meetings were held in Great St. Mary's.

[23:40] Anybody been there? It's a university church in Cambridge? Great St. Mary's? Yeah? You went to Cambridge, didn't you? Olaf, yeah. So Graham preached for three nights.

[23:53] You weren't there, were you? No, but I helped to fall out from this in the mission that John Stott led in 1958. Oh, really? Because that was my first year as an undergraduate.

[24:04] Ah, okay. And there's a lot of apocryphal stories about the 1955 mission. That was exciting. Well, so here's what happened.

[24:14] This is, a number of things I read about said this. Graham preached for three nights, the first three nights. And he really tried to preach to the university mind.

[24:26] That's what he was after. But he knew he wasn't getting through to students' hearts. That was a very modest sort of response. And he felt like he was preaching to please the audience rather than to please Jesus Christ, is the way that he put it, and the Holy Spirit.

[24:44] So he prayed. Billy Graham prayed after the third night and spent time thinking about this. And the next sermon, following the third sermon, he put aside all of the university-focused sermons, and he said, I'm going to just preach to ordinary human souls, is the way that he put it.

[25:04] And there was a breakthrough. And things changed in the subsequent preachings.

[25:14] There was a huge response to what he was saying. And there was a mighty ministry that happened for the rest of that mission. And John Stott wrote to his congregation, which was praying, all souls lying in place, he said this, he said, history will show, but only eternity will finally reveal how much was accomplished during that week.

[25:38] And one of the things that I'll just say as far as the effect on Anglicanism is one of the people converted there was a guy named David Watson. And David Watson became one of the great evangelists in the 60s, 70s, and 80s in England and really had an effect on the Anglican Church.

[25:57] And again, when I was in England, I saw that effect quite in an extraordinary way that it had on the church. But it wasn't just him. There were many leaders that came into ministry because of that mission.

[26:12] And these were the leaders of the country that were there responding to the gospel. And I want to say that...

[26:26] I'll just conclude that section of the mission by saying that I think that what he saw there and I think what he experienced there was a deep, I think, strengthening and growth in his confidence in the gospel.

[26:47] Because, you know, if the gospel affects the greatest minds in the world, then the gospel is greater than anything. And that the power of that gospel to penetrate into people's hearts is immense.

[27:00] But he also heard, I think, a very reasoned and academic defense of the gospel as well and of looking at God's word as being the revealed word of God, God's power for salvation.

[27:16] In fact, this is one of the things, and I'll just jump to this, is that Romans 1.16 says that, you know, Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel because it is God's power for salvation.

[27:32] And that's a real theme in Billy Graham's ministry. And I think that was strengthened in that mission. But for the Anglican church, there was a deep effect too. The Church of England had an evangelical wing to it.

[27:49] And at that time, there's a guy named Max Warren, Canon Max Warren, and he writes about evangelicals in the Church of England in 1944. He said that we are laboring under a sense of frustration and discouragement.

[28:04] And it engendered an inferiority complex. But this, there was a transformation that happened through this and other things that happened with Billy Graham.

[28:15] There was a resurgence of evangelical scholarship, an explosion of evangelical candidates for ministry. There was greater evangelical involvement in the structures of the Church. And the outstanding contribution to the evangelical cause was made by John Stott.

[28:31] Now, John Stott and Billy Graham entered into a partnership through this. And what happened was there was a combination of John Stott and Dr. Graham who worked very closely together.

[28:45] And they provided, as Baptist historian, Ian Randall put it, the scholar and the salesman. that, you know, this great communicator and caller of decision and a great scholar working together really had a profound effect on evangelicalism and certainly on the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church.

[29:11] So, how long do I have? 30 minutes? 25 minutes? 25 more minutes? Excellent. Okay. So, and John Stott and Billy Graham, there they are together when they're young.

[29:29] They had a very, very close friendship over the years. You know, when Billy Graham died, when John Stott died, Billy Graham was speechless and he wept.

[29:43] And he said, one of my closest friends and colleagues has died. They had a, they had a very important relationship.

[29:53] They were, they're towering figures in evangelicalism in the world. And of course, John Stott was, was one of the great leaders of, of the Anglican Church during his lifetime too.

[30:05] So, this close connection, there undoubtedly was an effect that Billy Graham had on the Anglican Church and John Stott on Billy Graham. Now, there's one more thing that I want to bring up about England and that is, anybody been watching this?

[30:25] Yeah. Okay, so, how many people have watched The Crown before? Any, any, so in season two, there is a, an episode that has Billy Graham in it.

[30:40] Anyone seen that? Yeah. Yeah. I was surprised. And a lot of people are surprised by that, that there was, that, but it's true. In fact, that's actually downplayed in The Crown from what the relationship really was.

[30:55] From, 1954, and so that's just a year after her coronation, she met Billy Graham and they became friends right away. And, so when he was in England, he would, he would, he would visit her.

[31:12] He said, almost every occasion that he has gone to England, I have been with her and I've been in a warm, informal setting, such as a lunch or dinner, either alone or with a few family members or close friends.

[31:25] And, so there was a, there was a close, warm, personal friendship. When she was in the United States, she would often visit Billy Graham and his family as well. So that's what that relationship was like.

[31:39] And he would often preach at Windsor Chapel, as we saw in The Crown. And, he said, he said, I always found Queen Elizabeth very interested in the Bible and its message.

[31:52] He said, after preaching at Windsor one Sunday, I was sitting next to the Queen at lunch and I told her I'd been undecided until the last minute about my choice of a sermon and had almost preached on the healing of the crippled man in John 5.

[32:04] her eyes sparkled and she bubbled over with enthusiasm as she could do on occasion. I wish you had, she said. That's my favorite story. So, they would often have conversations like that that were of spiritual nature.

[32:19] And, I believe that he was probably a great strength and influence on her own spiritual life. You see that in her addresses each year.

[32:31] You can see her faith coming through. And, I can't help but think also that the Queen had an effect on Billy Graham as well. That maybe that's one of the reasons that he was drawn to Anglicanism, Evangelical Anglicanism and said if he started over he would do that.

[32:49] The Queen is the head of the Church of England. And so, so that personal relationship certainly had an effect on him.

[33:02] Now, I want to, I just want to go, I'm going to look at two other areas of the, of the world. And by the way, here's a picture of them together. That's a, it's a good picture of them.

[33:16] And, I just wanted to show you too, this is the 1984 Mission England that they had. So it was in Bristol, Sunderland, Norwich, Ipswich, Liverpool, and Birmingham where that was. So that's, his, his, his involvement with England was profound.

[33:33] And I think the Anglican Church, the Church of England, I think he had a warm spot in his heart for it. And saw much of God's work there. Now, another monumental thing that happened was in Australia.

[33:48] So Australia, there was a crusade, and there was one in Melbourne and then there was one in Sydney showground as well.

[34:00] So this was about a month later. So each of them were a month long. But there was an amazing thing that happened at both of those. A huge percentage of those two cities came to those crusades.

[34:11] So, in, in, in Melbourne there was 720,000 people who attended and in Sydney there was about a million. Now, those weren't that big of cities.

[34:24] You know, the cities were about a million at that time. And the decisions, there was, there was 28,000, something like that in Melbourne and 38,000 in Sydney.

[34:34] Now, the people in Melbourne said this because there's more sinners in Sydney. But, that is like 2% of the population.

[34:45] And, there, there have been some documentation on the effect on society that the number of unwed births, divorces, alcoholism, crime, all plummeted in the years following.

[34:59] So, especially 59. Now, he came back a couple more times as well. It wasn't as profound in effect, but it was huge in 1959. Now, one of the things that happened in 1959, which I just want to focus on, is that a number of Christian leaders came out of those crusades.

[35:17] because Billy Graham would say, you guys need to go and follow Jesus and give your life to him in ministry. So, for instance, in Sydney, two teenagers, one was 15 and one was 13, came forward.

[35:32] And, their names were Peter Jensen and Philip Jensen. Peter Jensen ended up being the Archbishop of Sydney and Philip Jensen, dean of the cathedral there, but also started this ministry training scheme, which is similar to Artidzo.

[35:48] That's where Artidzo came in. But it was huge and still is. Those two people had a profound effect on the diocese of Sydney and Anglicanism in Australia, too. But that's just an example because a number of people came into Anglican ministry because of those crusades.

[36:08] By the way, this is just a little bit of an aside, but in Canada, we were affected in this diocese by the crusades in a very roundabout way.

[36:20] I came to this diocese under, through Bishop Douglas Hambidge. So, Douglas Hambidge called me to come to this diocese.

[36:31] I knew his son who was going to seminary in England. We were there at the same time. Hambidge was converted at the Billy Graham Crusades in London. Wow.

[36:41] And that's why he went into ministry himself. And even though he was a real mix, he was supportive of evangelicals in this diocese. But I think, you know, there's an effect on me personally coming here, but also an effect on the diocese from Billy Graham.

[36:58] But that's what would happen in these crusades is that Anglican ministers came who believed the gospel into the church. And Sydney Diocese is one of the largest dioceses in the world and very influential, of course, as you know.

[37:15] And there's a lot of that influence goes directly to Billy Graham. And I just put this up here. This is a book called The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism.

[37:29] And it's an interesting read because it talks about this whole age that we're in as the age of Billy Graham and John Stott for evangelicalism. And it shows how you've got an Anglican and a Baptist background really being two pillars of that evangelical movement in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and into the 90s.

[37:54] Okay. You've got a Baptist background, that's Anglican. Brian Stanley or John Stott? I'm talking about Billy Graham being Baptist, John Stott being Anglican.

[38:05] Oh, I see, I see. Yeah. Do you have any questions before I move on? Yeah, just with the influences on the Anglican Church, Anglican Church of Canada.

[38:19] Yeah. Did Graham have any influences in the United Church of Canada here by any chance? I don't know. I was just looking at the Anglican Church. Right. That's all I had time for. But I'm sure they did. Yeah.

[38:29] I'm sure he did. Yeah. Okay. Now I want to jump over to the Lausanne 1974.

[38:44] John Stott and Billy Graham were very, very involved with this Lausanne conference. Billy Graham brought all these evangelicals together and their dream was to work together in mission in the world and to really cooperate in bringing the gospel to as many countries as possible.

[39:03] So it really was an international gathering. And the architect of the Lausanne document was really John Stott.

[39:16] So he did a lot of the writings for it. Something happened at this conference that there was a real debate about. And that is what the role of the social justice work in that are really mercy ministries and the preaching the gospel.

[39:37] How do they work together? You know, is the mercy ministries quite secondary and the preaching the gospel primary? How does that work? John Stott really wanted to see those two brought together and not to make kind of an artificial sort of separation of them.

[39:52] And he worked very hard on that. And that is reflected in this document. That the key players in this Lausanne movement are, a lot of them were Anglican.

[40:08] So John Stott, Bishop Jack Dane, who was from Sydney, and then Leighton Ford was also the other guy who was big. Has anyone heard Leighton Ford speak, too?

[40:20] And he would, whenever he was in Vancouver, he'd come to St. John's, when we were at St. John's Shaughnessy, he would come to church here. And he loved the Anglican church, too, by the way.

[40:33] But what they all did was that they thought it was important for the movement to help evangelicals recover a social conscience and to give voice to a generation of evangelicals from the global south.

[40:47] And there was really a movement, thanks to John Stott and Jack Dane, to really see that the core of evangelicalism and mission would go into the developing world, the two-thirds world at that time.

[41:04] And again, the Anglican church through John Stott had a huge impact on Billy Graham in this way. Because when he began his ministry, he was very much just focused on I've got to just preach the gospel.

[41:16] and really ignoring the missions of mercy. You've seen how that's changed with Samaritan's Purse and all this kind of thing over the years.

[41:28] And that's thanks to a couple of Anglicans there. And then just briefly as we continue on, one of the examples of the crusades that happened after, that was the Singapore crusade.

[41:45] Now the Anglican church is very strong in Singapore. And here it is, this little nation, and there's the national stadium back then with 75,000 people. And I did some reading about the Anglican church in Singapore after that crusade.

[42:03] And the Anglican church doubled in size within 10 years of that. It has plateaued since then, but it was a real shot in the arm for the Anglican church.

[42:14] church. And people who led that crusade, one was Moses Tate, who was actually influential for us here in New Westminster.

[42:25] He was a real encouragement to us as we went through our crisis at the beginning of it. And he really pushed mission and evangelism in Singapore, especially after that crusade.

[42:36] And then John Chu was one of the organizers, and he was the recent archbishop of Southeast Asia. But the Anglican church really flourished and began to really grow again through this crusade in Singapore.

[42:53] And that's been played out in a number of different places throughout the world with the Anglican church. And I'm just giving that one as an example. Now I want to just close by saying a couple of words about Billy Graham here.

[43:18] He, remember I said at the beginning that his message was a message of hope. And he is saying the greatest need in our world today is a need for hope.

[43:28] We thrive on hope, we rejoice in hope, we witness in hope, knowing that experience works hope. Happy is he whose hope is in the Lord, his God.

[43:39] Psalm 146, there is hope for the future, it is centered in the person of Jesus Christ who died for our sins and rose from the grave and is alive now. I have staked all that I am or ever hoped to be on him.

[43:53] Now I think that captures what the content and center of his preaching was. It's a real focus on the center of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that it's centered on that.

[44:07] And this has been the strength of Billy Graham for all these years. And I think the confidence in that gospel to transform lives is the effect that Billy Graham has had on the Anglican church.

[44:23] It's like bringing the Anglicans back into the center of why they exist. We can be focused on externals and things that have to do with our structure, things with living church up, but this is the center of what we are all about.

[44:43] And it's like Billy Graham helped to center us as Anglicans, especially evangelical Anglicans. And I believe the Anglican church had a great effect on Billy Graham to strengthen his confidence in that gospel too.

[44:56] That it is a gospel for all people, whether very intellectual or developing world, not just for that American culture that Billy Graham was from. I think the Anglican church helped to open his heart and his mind to the whole of the world, evangelizing it.

[45:14] And I do think John Stock was key in that as well. And I want to close with this quote from Billy Graham that you probably have heard.

[45:25] He said this years ago. He said, someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don't you believe a word of it? I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address.

[45:37] I will have gone into the presence of God. And certainly his ministry was shaped by this understanding of heaven, by this hope of Jesus coming again, but also this hope that that gospel actually changes hearts and minds profoundly now in this world with an eternal result.

[46:05] So that's the sincerity of Billy Graham. Okay, so I think I'll end there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[46:15] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.