Billy!

A lot of people think Billy Graham’s methods are out of date. That’s because people are different, and they aren’t Graham’s audience.

Billy Graham had his “last American crusade” in New York. CNN made a huge thing about it; for a while Headline News was giving glowing retrospectives of Graham’s life every hour. (So glowing, in fact, that someone walked into the lounge in mid-retrospective and said, “Why’re they showing this? Is he dead?”)

Graham’s one of those guys you just gotta admire. Even though he’s accused all the time of oversimplifying the gospel (and though it’s complicated, when you boil it down it is all about God loving us and Jesus saving us), the man’s stuck to this message with such tenacity that he had to leave behind Fundamentalism, liberalism, sectarianism, and every other -ism that the church has warped itself with. That, to me, is a sign that the man’s been on the right track.

I bring him up because lately many postmoderns have gotten onto the idea that Graham’s mass-conversion method doesn’t fit into their ideology. I was talking with Mom about this last night; she was at some meeting where it was pointed out that the future of evangelism is in one-on-one encounters, not crusades.

Postmoderns sometimes get so hung up on the fact that everyone’s different, they sometimes forget that everyone’s different. One-on-one relational evangelism works with a lot of people, but mass conversions work with a lot of people too, for different reasons. If this weren’t true, people wouldn’t come to Jesus at Graham’s crusades. The gospel doesn’t change, but the delivery system needs to be adapted for the individual—and it seems for a lot of people, the best adaptation is still an old guy in a pulpit giving a simple sermon. It doesn’t make any sense to toss a method that works simply because another one fits our ideology better.

Now, I know some people argue that Graham’s method doesn’t work because about 90 percent of the people who come to Jesus at mass conversions don’t stick with Christianity. Thus mass conversions’ effectiveness is a huge illusion.

I don’t think this has anything to do with mass conversions’ effectiveness. This has to do with follow-up. Supposedly, all these people who come to Jesus at the conference had “counselors” from local churches who were supposed to (a) pray with them, (b) contact them later and see how they’re doing, and (c) invite them to church. Most of these counselors drop the ball. I know; I’ve been one.

Churches need to take a tip from the 12-step groups. When someone becomes a new Christian, they need to be assigned a sponsor—someone who’s been a Christian for a while, who isn’t a hypocrite, who knows how to be forgiving and gracious and correcting in a non-judgmental way (or who’s been properly trained to be that way).

New Christians need help! They’re never warned that the first weeks of their Christian life are going to suck. Some of that comes from old temptations that they know they have to give up, new temptations that they now know they can’t start, and of course this all-too-common false statement: “Just come to Jesus and your life will be better.” Jesus said the opposite.

They need discipling. Most churches don’t do that, or they make it voluntary, or they only disciple children—fr’instance many churches have catechism, but most of the time it’s only presented as dogmas to memorize, in vocabulary that not even the adults understand, and little more.

We concentrate too much on getting them into the church. We ignore them once they’re in. It’s like they’re unborn children.