Billy Graham - A Personal Reminiscence

I was one of those who went forward at a Billy Graham Crusade. It was the early summer of 1966, at the Earl's Court Arena. He preached there for a month. Close on a million people must have heard him. I was one of about forty thousand who responded to the "altar call" (though I don't think that phrase was being used any more in the 1960s).

There. I've come out and admitted it. I won't say it changed my life. I'd consciously become a Christian earlier that year, thanks to friends in the school's Christian Union. Before that I'd been a chorister. I hadn't been brought up in a church going family. My parents told me on my first day as a chorister not to bring any of "that religion" back home with me. It was for the music that they were encouraging me, that alone. So they were not best pleased when I announced my conversion, though they did come to my baptism and confirmation a few months later.

So yes, 1966 was an annus mirabilis, a year of joyful wonder, no doubt about that. And Billy Graham was part of it. I went with friends to hear him several times. I didn't care for the musical style of Cliff Barrows and George Beverley Shea - I'd have preferred O worship the King and There's a wideness in God's mercy to Blessed assurance and To God be the glory (still do). But I remember admiring the sheer professionalism with which these vast events were managed. I also recall being impressed by the diversity of people sitting on the platform - Anglican bishops, civic leaders, some black faces I didn't recognise. All in all, it was great theatre. You couldn't but be impressed.

He was a master of rhetorical technique. Where had he learned it, I wonder - from the study of classical Greek and Roman rhetors, or from American politicians or the great preachers of previous ages? Maybe he was one of those natively gifted people who come to realise they have power to sway human minds and hearts. He knew how to work a crowd. And he knew exactly how to speak in such a way that you would think it was directly and personally meant for you. To achieve that calls for charism of a high order.

But most of all, I was drawn to the man. It wasn't so much the content of his addresses (none of which I can now remember), but the way he gave them, the kind of human he came across as being. (I wonder if this is true of all of us preachers most of the time?) What struck me more than anything was the sense he conveyed of a profound personal integrity. He seemed to have no "side". It was hard to suspect hidden agendas or imagine ulterior motives, though the cynics tried hard enough. He believed every word of his own message, and as far as we the audience could tell, lived by it. All the obituaries I have read confirm the impression that he was a genuinely humble man who "loved his Lord", as Donald Coggan would have said, who never regretted giving his life to the gospel.

I think, looking back, that it was his essential goodness that impelled me to go forward that evening. I craved innocent, unselfconscious goodness (and still do), that singleness of mind and purpose that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount calls "purity of heart". I was already aware as a teenager that I fell well short of it myself. I wanted, so to speak, to nail my colours to that mast. It was an aspiration. Perhaps I knew in some obscure way that this would be a life task, that conversio is never a once-for-all decision, but a lifelong turning away from what is destructive or corrupting or evil towards all that is good and true and beautiful. "Think on these things" says St Paul. I believe Billy Graham was one of those rare people for whom this was a daily habit.

I met him once, briefly. This was in May or June 1984 when he came to the original Sunderland FC ground at Roker Park to preach to the North East. Nearly twenty years older than when I'd last seen him, he had not lost his good looks. I'd been sent to report the event for a newspaper. By then I'd moved away from conservative evangelicalism into a more catholic and sacramental spirituality. So I perhaps went to Sunderland prepared to be critical. The stadium was only half full: maybe it was the keen wind blowing off the North Sea that night, or maybe the people of County Durham and Northumberland were just worn down by the miners' strike that had begun a few months earlier.

I went to the press conference. You could tell that Billy Graham understood how to engage with, if not a hostile, then a suspicious media. (The press mostly don't care much for religion until a significant exemplar of it dies - today's obituaries strike a very different, and far more positive, tone from the press commentary of thirty years ago.) He was courteous, direct and shrewd in his answers. He wouldn't get drawn into debates about American politics, what he thought about Viet Nam, Watergate and so on. I asked him a question, possibly about race relations in US; or was it about Nicaragua? I don't think it was the miners, though that would have been interesting. I was probably trying to be clever. But he played a straight bat, and you couldn't quarrel with that. He looked me directly in the eye as he spoke. His gaze was piercing, questioning, placing me under scrutiny. I thought: here is a man who deserves to be taken seriously.

So why didn't the Billy Graham brand of evangelicalism "stick"? I was asked a similar question by George Carey once, when he was Archbishop and came to preach at Sheffield Cathedral. "You were on course to be an evangelical leader, Michael. What went wrong?" I said I didn't accept the premise that anything went wrong. But it would take a long series of blogs to explain. Maybe I don't entirely understand it myself, though as I get older and look back on my life, things gradually fall into place, even if gathering the fragments is always a work in progress.

I suppose that as the prophets said to Elisha, "the place where we live is too small for us". I don't mean this unkindly. We all move home many times in our lives, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. I have good evangelical friends whom I honour for their faithfulness to Christ and their loyal witness to the gospel. But I found the evangelicalism of those days too talkative, too busy, too extraverted. There was not enough silence in it, not enough space to contemplate, not enough imagination or playfulness, not enough awareness of the place of beauty in religion. And it didn't seem to reach into the complexities of the human heart (well, mine, anyway). No doubt a lot of it comes down to temperament. But I have to say that I became increasingly at odds intellectually with the way conservative evangelicalism did theology.

But I want to think (and pray) that I haven't lost what has been most precious in my evangelical formation: a love of the scriptures and a belief that they must be central to Christian life and thought; a conviction that personal relationship with God is the essence of all religion if it is to mean anything; and not least, a spirituality that is ardently focused on Jesus' cross and passion. As a student (at Trinity College Bristol!) my tutors told me to read the radical New Testament critics and John Henry Newman's Apologia. Oh, and to try to grasp the principles of liturgical prayer. I realised how much bigger the Christian world was than I'd imagined. That's it, really. The rest is history.

There are many mansions in our Father's house. God not only moves in mysterious ways himself, but moves us in ways that are just as mysterious when we try to make sense of them. I know that on many matters, Billy Graham and I would not have agreed since those heady days of the 1960s. He probably wouldn't have been comfortable in my liberal catholic, inclusive-church world, nor I in his. Except for this. I have no doubt whatsoever that he would have honoured my stumbling attempts to walk my Christian faith journey with integrity, just as I want to honour his. For what matters most is the same, to "turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ" as the Ash Wednesday words put it. Discipleship is as simple as that, purity of heart. Billy Graham helped me to start out on that path. For that, I'm grateful and glad.

Farewell to a great Christian man. RIP.

Balliol, the Freshers' Fair and the Christian Union

At Balliol College Oxford, the ban on Christian Union students taking part in the Freshers' Fair has been lifted. No doubt there's a lot more to this story than has been reported in the media. But on the surface the original decision emanating from within the structures of the JCR not only looked foolish and naive, but it was guaranteed to provoke an outcry not only from evangelical Christians but from all fair-minded people, including the students in their own College who quickly condemned it.

I'll come clean. Balliol College Oxford is my alma mater. I went up in 1968 to read maths and philosophy, and stayed on to do a second degree in theology. I went back as a postgraduate in 1974 and was ordained priest in the College Chapel in the summer of 1976. So you'll see that I have a lot invested in the place. You won't be surprised if I say I loved it and still do. My years there were deeply rewarding. I suppose I began to grow up at Balliol. I'm more grateful than I can say to have been a member of such a progressive, open-minded and enlightened institution.

In particular, I owe a great deal to the College Chapel and the Christian Union. I doubt I would have become a priest at all had it not been for Balliol. The Christian Union, part of the University-wide Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union or OICCU, laid down important foundations on which to shape my life as a Christian. And although that thought-world belonged unreservedly to the conservative evangelical tradition, I did not experience it as narrow or exclusive. We were ordinary members of the College alongside students of many different faiths and of none. Most Christian Union members attended College Chapel regularly, some every day. Its traditional Anglicanism helped set our fervent evangelicalism in a broader, more liberal, context. We were certainly low, hearty and happy in our churchmanship. But we were part of mainstream religion.

It's true that I now blush to think of some of the convictions I held in those far-off days. I could have defended such doctrines as the inerrancy of scripture, a literal Second Coming and the predestination to their fate of the elect and the reprobate. Everything turned on the hardest version of belief in substitutionary atonement as the only way to understand the Cross. But Balliol was a tolerant place where you could try anything intellectually, test ideas and belief by the cut and thrust of robust debate. If you believed something wildly ridiculous, your friends would smile gently and without ridicule, ask you with what logic or on what evidence you drew that conclusion.

I owe a lot to that tolerant, liberal attitude. It's what made Balliol an intellectual force to be reckoned with in modern times. This it owes largely to the vision of its legendary Master, Benjamin Jowett, one of the most eminent of Victorians. A priest of the Church of England, he got into tremendous trouble for contributing to a notorious but highly influential book called Essays and Reviews. In it, he argued as a classical scholar that the Bible should be interpreted like any other text from the past, using the same rigorous tools of textual and higher criticism and of literary interpretation as he would apply to his beloved Plato. It was, he claimed, through such ordinary processes of study that the word of God would be discerned among the words. This radical approach was not well received at the time (and the book's other contributors were not spared the opprobrium either). But today, almost all biblical scholars apart from the most conservative would endorse his approach.

Jowett's legacy at Balliol was of a College in which dons and students alike were generous and  tolerant, modern people of their own century, open to new ways of thinking, unafraid of debate. Looking back fifty years, having been at a school founded on similar lines, perhaps I unconsciously chose an Oxford college that would continue to foster these liberal ideals and teach me to practise my faith in a setting that modelled the real world where beliefs are not privileged or protected. This kind of learning is an inestimably important preparation for adult life in a contested secular age. We may not know it at the time but later we realise how its values have shaped us in hugely important ways. My faith is very different now from what it was then. I suppose I echo whoever it was (David Jenkins?) who said that as he grew older, he believed more and more in less and less. "Be tentative in theology but be sure in religion", that is, don't invest more in the speculative particularities of doctrine than you do in knowing and loving and serving God which is the heart of all good religion. That is what I shall always regard as the core of what I learned about Christianity at Oxford.

Back to the headlines where Balliol has unwittingly (and unwillingly) found itself today. I spoke earlier about its character as a "progressive, open-minded and enlightened institution". I don't know the Christian Union today so I can't speak for them. But somewhere in the JCR decision-making structure, there seems to be a mighty fear of them if these heavy-handed tactics of airbrushing them out of the Freshers' Fair are any indication. What we are told in the media reports is that out of respect for the vulnerabilities of its new students, there was a need to create a secular space that is "safe". Religion, it is argued, does not belong in such a space, least of all when it comes freighted with homophobia (an allegation that is merely stated without any evidence or justification).

Yes, no doubt religion can be oppressive, and is in many places. Homophobic too. But it won't do wildly to accuse Balliol's Christian Union of it. (And by the way, were Jewish and Islamic groups also refused permission to have a Freshers' stall and be present at it? I genuinely have no idea - please tell us. It's important that we understand the background here. There's a lot we don't know.)

This unhappy episode is all part of the debate about the limits of free speech in higher education. There are no easy answers to the question of who should and shouldn't be given a public platform to promote their beliefs in a university or anywhere else. But in a fair-minded society there should be a presumption of trust that those who publicly share their vision and ideas will do so responsibly. No-one has quoted any evidence that the Christian Union intended to do anything other than the likes of the Balliol Music Society or Rowing Club: share what they had to offer and invite anyone interested to find out more.

One final thought. If I were a fresher at Balliol (happy days!), I'd be pretty annoyed if I thought that anyone was trying to "protect" me from notions that might challenge or disturb or (God forbid)  corrupt me. I'd have said: "I'm a legal grown-up now. I have the right and the duty to make my own choices. I have come to Balliol of all colleges because I want to be in an environment of bracing exploration and debate that will form me intellectually, ethically and as a person of faith. This is the very thing you are denying me. Please stop infantilising me in this way."

Well, common sense has prevailed, thankfully. I gather that the JCR as a student body has been as outraged by what has happened as anyone. Maybe we should put it all down to the naivety of youth. Making a mistake and learning from it is no bad experience. I hope this episode helps all students to think about and absorb their College's values and treat their fellow students with respect. What's happened will have cost Balliol in terms of its reputation for diversity and inclusion. That grieves me. But what matters now is that trust is quickly restored and Balliol continues to be recognised as one of Oxford's brightest, most generous and most humane institutions.

Oh and by the way, I'm looking forward to being back at Balliol next month to preach in the College Chapel.

**I have made some minor amendments to this blog in the light of conversations today with Oxford people who are close to the events behind the media reports.