In October of last year Cailey and I had the great privilege of visiting the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. Although it is called a “library”, it is what we would usually call a museum – although that is too tame a description for the 14 galleries recording the remarkable ways in which the Lord used William Franklin Graham Jnr (known to the world as Billy Graham) to preach the gospel to more people in more places across the globe than anyone else before or since.
Attached to the Billy Graham Library is a research archive, which houses an enormous collection of papers, recordings, journals, campaign and other materials from Billy Graham’s more than 60 years of public ministry. While visiting the archive we were shown correspondence between John Stott and Billy Graham at the time of Graham’s first mission to Cambridge University in 1955, and then again at the time of a subsequent mission to Oxford and Cambridge in 1979.
Billy Graham records in his autobiography, Just as I Am, his correspondence with “my trusted friend” John Stott in the lead-up to the Cambridge mission: “I do not know that I have ever felt more inadequate and totally unprepared for a mission. As I think over the possibility for messages, I realise how shallow and weak my presentations are… However, it is my prayer that I shall come in the demonstration and power of the Holy Spirit, though I am going to lean heavily on you, Maurice and the others”.
Timothy Dudley-Smith, in volume one of his biography of John Stott, cites unofficial estimates of 500 individuals who sought counselling or made or renewed a commitment to Christ in the course of Billy Graham’s first, eight-day mission in Cambridge. Following the mission, John Stott wrote a letter to Billy Graham that we were able to inspect during our visit. Part of the letter, dated November 16, 1955, reads:
I wanted to thank you very, very much for the privilege of having some share in your mission in Cambridge. How good God was to us! I shall always remember those days. Many things stand in my memory. The stream of determined students gripping your hand and looking you in the eye as they said, ‘I received Christ’… I shall also long remember the emphasis the Lord Jesus gave you to bring us on love, and what a blessing and challenge it has been to me. Thank you very much for all your unsparing service to Cambridge… our gratitude is great and real, Billy – and history will reveal in part, as eternity will reveal in full, what was accomplished by God’s grace in 8 days at Cambridge.
Reading this handwritten note from John Stott to his friend and fellow worker in the gospel was a very moving experience. It opened a window on the friendship and partnership of these two men, who would both come to play such a significant role, under God’s good hand, in the global progress of the gospel in the second half of the 20th century.
In so many ways, theirs was an unlikely friendship: one an evangelical Anglican, the son of a Harley Street physician, a graduate of Rugby School with a double first from Cambridge; the other, a Southern Baptist, the son of a North Carolina dairy farmer, graduate of Wheaton College.
Apparently, Timothy Dudley-Smith did not have access to John Stott’s letter to Billy Graham after the Cambridge mission, though he mentions it. However, he reprints the text of Billy’s reply, written just five days later on November 21:
My dear John… please forgive the delay in answering your wonderful letter. I think I will frame and hang it in my study. It was about the finest letter I have ever received from any of my personal friends. The Cambridge Mission of November 1955 will live in my memory forever as one of the highlights of my ministry! I learned a great deal about how to conduct University Missions… but John I learned more from you than all the rest… We are both young with most of our ministry before us. It is my prayer that our friendship will grow and deepen… and be used of God as was the friendship of Wesley and Whitfield.
The friendship between John Stott and Billy Graham did continue – as much as their hugely demanding ministries allowed. Remarkably, the Billy Graham Archive and Research Center also holds an exchange of letters between the two friends in the months prior to Billy Graham’s 1979 mission to Oxford and Cambridge. In a letter dated August 23, 1979, Graham wrote to Stott that “looming before me constantly is the thought that I must hold those missions in Oxford and Cambridge. Any advice or counsel that you have would be deeply appreciated”.
John Stott replied on September 12:
The advice you need, my beloved brother, is ‘be yourself’, though with all the sensitivity which God has given you to the current situation in those ancient universities. I guess the main difference since 1955 is the ignorance of the average student of the rudiments of the Christian gospel. The more you feel able to teach basic gospel doctrines, before issuing your appeal, the more fruitful I believe your missions will be and the more lasting the results.
Three things strike me about these very personal exchanges between two men whose names are so well known to Sydney Anglicans, and to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude for their ministry in this city.
First, they were transparently servants of God, upon whom they depended in every way for the ministry the Lord entrusted to them of preaching his gospel. They were no less prayerfully dependent in 1979, 25 years after their first mission together, than they were in 1955. Second, they were persuaded that the power for conversion was the gospel itself – simple gospel doctrines – and the work of the Holy Spirit, not anything man-made or contrived. Third, they were mutually strengthened and helped by their fellowship as brothers in Christ, and fellow servants of the Lord and his gospel despite the myriad differences between them of time and space, and their social and cultural backgrounds.
It was a privilege to read these warm personal missives, and it made me thank God again for such servants of the Lord. As the BCP prayer for the church militant says, we “bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear… give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom”.
