High Spirits: Global Preachers
Aitken, Jonathan
"High Spirits JONATHAN AITKEN Global Preachers HO ARE THE GREAT EVANGELISTS of our day, making a worldwide impact by their preaching of the gospel? In the latter part of the 20th...
...Within the next month or so, Billy Graham took Britain by storm...
...Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator's High Spirits columnist, is author of the new book, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (Doubleday...
...Traveling to over a thousand towns and cities in 129 countries, his air miles were equivalent to more than 31 circuits of the earth...
...Although one is nowfadingfrom the scene and the other has passed from it, they both set such astonishing standards that we may never look upon their like again...
...Orthodox in its biblical faithfulness, yet unorthodox in its interactive dialogue with participants, Alpha has been enthusiastically endorsed across the whole religious spectrum of doctrines and denominations, stretching from evangelical conservatives and liberal Episcopalians, to low Baptists and high Catholics...
...The explanation for such personal commitments must surely lie not in Graham's words but in God's calls...
...The impact of Billy Graham, even on a country as secular as the UK, was enormous in those days...
...But statistics are no guide to his spiritual impact...
...After such domestic triumphs it did not take long for Graham to be-come an international phenomenon...
...NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55...
...Yet the greatest force of Billy Graham's preaching was its effect on individual hearts and minds...
...It is difficult to explain why Billy Graham's evanJ O N A T H A N A I T K E N gelism should have been such an amazing success across the world...
...As a result, over 7 million people have now completed Alpha courses in 152 countries...
...I was eleven years old at the time and, to this day, I can vividly recall the power and the passion of Graham in full flow on John 3:16: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that all who believe in him can have everlasting life...
...BILLY GRAHAM WAS NEVER a narrow fundamentalist...
...That was a good start, but few would have dared to predict that in the next half-century Graham would preach to live audiences of over 210 million people at his crusades in 185 countries...
...He designed the course to complement existing outreach activity by ministries and churches...
...Puff Graham," ordered William Randolph Hearst in a telegram to his editors after hearing the young evangelist at the opening of his legendary mission to New York City in 1957...
...I well remember my schoolboy excitement when huge, black loudspeakers the size of Cadillacs were installed in our village church, connected to relay wires as thick as tree trunks, carrying the good doctor's nightly sermons to the next town or village, and so on throughout the length and breadth of England...
...Graham was both a powerful speaker and a deeply thoughtful one with an intuitive gift for finding the right words at great occasions...
...No one quite understands why Alpha has been so successful in bringing them into the fold...
...His half-century of global missions has continued until June this year, when Graham concluded his life's work with his last crusade at Flushing Meadows Park in New York...
...At the rate it is growing these days, Alpha could just be the answer to the challenge of 21st-century evangelism...
...Who can ever forget his sermon at Washington National Cathedral three days after the 9/11 attacks, or his eloquently perceptive eulogies at the presidential funerals of Nixon and LBJ...
...Come forward and give your life to Christ" was his clarion cry at the end of each and every message at his crusades...
...For Graham had no papal throne, College of Cardinals, or worldwide church to support him...
...HIGH SPIRITS J O N A T H A N A I T K E N Global Preachers HO ARE THE GREAT EVANGELISTS of our day, making a worldwide impact by their preaching of the gospel...
...John Paul II was the most peripatetic pope in history...
...Pope Benedict XVI, notwithstanding the impressive impact of his recent visit to Germany, is more of a theologian than a traveler...
...They are the real owners and promoters of Alpha...
...it came from his sowing of seeds in millions of individual hearts across countries, frontiers, cultures, walls, boundaries, and barriers...
...His earlier books include Nixon: A Life...
...There is no obvious American successor filling the shoes of Billy Graham...
...His preaching has been orthodox and biblically faithful, putting special emphasis on one or two simple direct messages, such as "Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation" and "By knowing Christ you can have a personal relationship with God...
...His field is the world, but much of his mission is targeted on unchurched and uncommitted nonbelievers...
...The greatest force of Billy Graham's preaching was its effect on individual hearts and minds...
...and a media savvy that put him on the cover of Time magazine in 1954...
...It is not an ego trip for Nicky Gumbel...
...He was just an unknown young Southern Baptist pastor from North Carolina blessed with three gifts—an excellent theological education from Wheaton College, Illinois...
...These two giants were kindred spirits, not least in their honoring of certain key biblical texts, such as: "Go, make disciples of all nations...
...John Paul II's power as an evangelist came not from external symbols like popemobiles and papal entourages...
...Nicky Gumbel is Alpha's architect and principal preacher...
...Come forward and give your life to Christ...
...It can be argued that Billy Graham's achievements were, in many ways, even more remarkable than the late Pope's...
...But, whatever the explanation, Alpha is an extraordinary phenomenon of contemporary Christianity, reaching out to mil-lions whom the churches themselves do not seem able to reach...
...I heard Billy Graham on his first major mission outside the United States...
...Indeed, he took considerable flak from some evangelical conservatives for the inclusiveness of his message and his close relationship with the Catholic Church, particularly with the late John Paul II...
...In the latter part of the 20th century, two revered Christian leaders stood out as global preachers of the good news—Billy Graham and John Paul II...
...Alpha is a modern means to this end...
...a remarkable talent for passionate preaching...
...He is Nicky Gumbel, the Anglican Vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton in London—the mother church of the Alpha course...
...After that it was standing room only at the crusade's nightly rallies in Madison Square Garden for the next 16 weeks...
...Who is doing this kind of work on a grand scale today...
...Harringay Arena, despite seating 100,000, proved far too small a nightly venue...
...Yet one of Alpha's strengths is that it works with the churches, not in competition against them...
...It was more than matched by the impact he made back on his home turf...
...Some say that God may be using the course as his leading evangelistic tool in the 21st century, just as he used Billy Graham's crusades for the same purpose in the 20th century...
...It ran for 12 weeks at Lon-don's Harringay Arena in 1954...
...Literally millions responded to this appeal...
...They know that they have to come down from their pulpits and altars in order to answer questions and engage in dialogue with the world's pagans and agnostics...
...So, using the cumbersome sound technology of that era, 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 his crusade was broadcast live by relay to over 20,000 churches and town halls around the country...
...During the past ten years he has criss-crossed the globe in perpetual motion, launching Alpha in venues from Shanghai to Seattle, Valparaiso to Vladivostok...
...So this column daringly offers a British nomination for the role of the 21st century's leading global evangelist...
...Alpha is a 15-session, "Introduction to Christianity" course, subtitled "The Meaning of Life...
...Even so, their spiritual heirs and successors can learn so much from them that their examples are the sign-posts and measurements for contemporary practitioners of international evangelism...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
