When Billy Came to Town
I was 26 when I left my work as a country Parson to take up the prestigious position as Minister of the Cheltenham Church of Christ, Victoria. this church had the reputation for being a large and alive church but that was a mirage. The reality was quite different, as this young country Parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister had some real surprises.
I had been at the Cheltenham Church of Christ for three years and things were really leaping along in great bounds. Still in my twenties and full of enthusiasm, the church was going from strength to strength and services were increasing every week. We had stopped the downward slide in the church, finance was double that level which I found when I arrived. We were now at good strength, poised for a new and larger thrust. That new development and increase was to be aided greatly because Billy came to town.
Billy Graham had been in Melbourne in 1959. I was a Theological student at the time, finishing my studies and at the same time completing a university degree. I attended every Billy Graham Crusade meeting that I could and learned much. Somehow or other, with great audacity, I had written to America and asked if I could be part of the special training program run in conjunction with the Billy Graham Crusade of 1959 for training Australian Evangelists. I pointed out at the time that I was not an Evangelist but rather a student but I intended one day to be an Evangelist and the best time to get training was at that time. To my surprise, I was admitted to the Evangelist Training Program and was by far the youngest present. That enabled me to become known to various people within the Crusade organisation so when they planned a return visit in 1969 I was approached from the earliest stage, to be part of the organising team. Once more, I was the youngest in a big organisation, working as a volunteer, organising the preparation for the Crusade.
The remarkable thing about the Billy Graham Crusade has been that those who attended once always wanted to go again. What I didn’t realise was that something was going to happen in the 1969 Crusade that would have a remarkable conclusion in my life at the end of 1993, 24 years later.
Long before the Crusade was to be held there was a great deal of preparation in the churches, a big Crusade Rally was organised in the Melbourne Regent Theatre and the choir members from two years ago reformed into the nucleus of the new Crusade choir. Dan Piatt came out from America to organise things in Melbourne and Reverend Gordon Powell who had moved from St Stephens in Macquarie Street, to Scotts Church in Melbourne, was guest speaker. There was great interest in the air as churches began to anticipate a new Billy Graham Crusade.
Twelve hundred churches quickly registered to be part of the ten day Crusade being held from March 14 1969.
We were pleased Billy Graham was coming back to Melbourne. It was unusual for a city to get a return Crusade within ten years. It was said that if Billy Graham accepted every invitation he received each year to conduct Crusades, it would take him over two hundred years of preaching to fulfil all the invitations received each year. I was asked to take charge of all the training of counsellors for the Crusade for the southern part of Melbourne.
I leapt into it with great enthusiasm and organised a four week Christian Life and Witness Class. Scores of people from Cheltenham Church of Christ enrolled of course but I threw the net wide and asked others to come to the training class that I would conduct. With a great deal of trepidation, I booked Moorabbin Town Hall and indicated that I would lead the Bible Training Programs in that major centre. It was estimated that they would need five thousand counsellors for the whole of Melbourne and I was determined to organise as many as possible from our locality. I went from church to church encouraging churches to register and to organise people to come to the training sessions that I would conduct.
The training classes were like crusades themselves. I was amazed on the first night to find one thousand one hundred and fifty people crammed into the Moorabbin Town Hall. Night after night more than eleven hundred people completed their counsellor training. The next step along the way was to help one of the laymen in my church to organise the visitation of nearby houses. Once more we had bitten off more than we could chew, or so we thought. We recruited sixty members of the church to door knock every house in the area. Within two weeks, twenty eight thousand people received a personal invitation to attend the Billy Graham Crusade. Throughout Victoria, over fifty thousand church members visited two million residents inviting them to attend the Crusade.
As the day of the Crusade drew nearer, there was a gathering in the Melbourne Town Hall with three thousand people representing the fifteen hundred churches that were now behind the Crusade. Reverend Gordon Powell spoke and public enthusiasm was high.
Around the major shopping centres of the various regions in Melbourne “Youthquakes” were held, although looking back at the programs in my diary now, I am amazed to see how old the speakers and singers were. Gordon Boyd, popular singer from “Show Case” on television was the featured soloist and John Robinson was the Preacher. It would be most unlikely that men of that age would have been the featured presenters at any youth program today. Throughout our area, people responded to the call to open their houses to conduct mid-week prayer meetings. More than two thousand five hundred homes invited neighbours and friends to pray for the Graham Crusade. By the time I had finished teaching my Bible Class, one thousand one hundred and fifty people graduated and the Crusade was right upon us.
Billy arrived in town. Tall, handsome, with wavy hair and wide smile, he charmed the press. He was fifty years old and at the height of his preaching capacity. Already Billy Graham had spoken to more people than any other single person in the history of the world. At his last Crusade in Melbourne, the final meeting surpassed that of Sydney with a hundred and twenty thousand in the Melbourne cricket ground, filling every seat in the former Olympic Stadium and covering the turf with thousands more.
Members of the Billy Graham team had been impressed that my Christian Life and Witness Class of one thousand one hundred and fifty people was in fact one of the largest that they had ever known in the history of the Graham Crusades. Consequently, members of the organising committee went out of their way both to encourage me and to encourage the church that was supporting me.
The chief organiser of the Billy Graham Crusade, Henry Holly who had just come from organising the brilliant Tokyo Crusade, came and preached for me at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. Chris Barrows, arrived to lead the choir and he wrote a special greeting to all of our members. I was invited this time not to be a student but to take part in the School of Evangelism speaking of my own experience. It was heady stuff for a Preacher still in his late twenties to be lecturing the outstanding Evangelists in Australia.
We organised buses to take people from the church every night to the Crusade. There was a free seat for you in the bus and reserved seats at the Myer Music Bowl or the Melbourne cricket ground if you brought a non-Christian friend with you. Tens of thousands of people attended the Crusade meetings every night. Our buses were always filled. At the Crusade Meetings I was entitled Advisor’s Supervisor which meant I had the responsibility of overseeing the placement of five hundred Advisors who were there to support the five thousand counsellors who each night guided those who made commitments to Christ through a Bible Study so that they understood what it meant to become a Christian and follow the way of Christ. The supervisors had special responsibility to make sure that each counsellor’s tasks were completed well and at the end of each counselling session, the counsellor took each enquirer to an Advisor who asked the very simple question “Why did you come forward tonight?” It was then left entirely to enquirers to respond in their own way as to what was happening in their lives, spiritually, at that moment. If a counsellor had done the job well and the enquirer understood then they spoke about the change that Christ would make in their lives. If the enquirer did not understand or was merely moved by the emotion of the moment then it was the supervisor’s job to go back over the basic principles of the counselling until the person understood.
My responsibility was to be on the platform and to watch as people came forward. Night after night thousands streamed forward. When I saw special needs, such as people in wheelchairs or elderly people on walking frames or young people who came from a motorbike squad or a group of people who moved forward from the deaf section or people who were obviously non-English speaking, I would give one of a series of pre-arranged signals to people who worked with me and they would bring specialised counsellors who were multi-lingual or were able to communicate well with ‘bikies’ or were disabled themselves so that every person who came forward had an appropriate counsellor and advisor. I was often moved to tears as I saw people come forward with obvious meaningful commitment in their lives.
One night after the end of a very busy evening overseeing the supervision of the counsellors and supervisors, I went back stage at the Melbourne cricket ground, where, in a secret place underneath the stage, I used to leave my bag and personal belongings. I opened up the back of the curtain behind the tubular pipe that held the pipes erect and discovered that the bag was gone. In it was a small amount of money, pens, notes, materials that could be used to help counsel people and several other valuables which I now forget. My name had been stamped in gold upon the case. I looked everywhere. It was missing. Who would have thought that some thief in the crowd would have moved behind the stage and in spite of the security men, had stolen my bag.
I wrote it off to experience. It was just one of those things. The Crusade ended with a massive gathering in the Melbourne cricket ground filling every seat and spilling out over the turf once more. Gordon Powell led the opening prayers and Billy Graham preached brilliantly. There had been a whole series of other conferences running in conjunction with the Billy Graham Crusade. There was a training program for more than a thousand people who wanted to commit their lives into full-time missionary service.
There were thousands of women who gathered for special women’s rallies at St Kilda Town Hall. A thousand men gathered in Coles Cafeteria to hear Grady Wilson. Daily lunchtime services in St Paul’s Cathedral were packed. The Crusade had a profound effect upon the lives of people in Melbourne as a part of a growing and involved church. I found that my own people were greatly built up and blessed in their faith, and numbers of people coming for membership and baptism meant that for months afterwards, every week, we were receiving people into membership. The only thing that marred the whole Crusade was the fact that I had lost my bag and had my possessions stolen.
Twenty three years passed since that event and in September 1993 at the close of an evening service in Wesley Theatre a man in his thirties asked to speak to me privately. “My name is Doug Taffie”, he said “I have just been released from prison and I’ve wanted to come to speak to you. I owe you an apology. You see, I stole your bag while you were attending the Billy Graham Crusade in Melbourne.”
I looked at him. My eyes must have been wide and I was speechless. Doug continued “I remembered your name well from the bag I stole. I took the money and dumped most of the other things. But I always remembered the name. I had been in trouble with the police for years and I was one of the scaffolding workmen who erected the stage. That is why I was allowed to pass through the back of the stage and underneath. The security people saw my scaffolding rigger pass, and thought I was there to check the scaffolding. But really I was checking out to see if anyone had left any valuables behind. That’s when I saw your bag and took it. But I never forgot your name.”
I asked Doug what had happened in his life since: “Most of the time since I’ve spent time either getting into trouble or spending it in gaol because I had been in trouble. But a few years ago when I was in gaol in Hobart, I was watching TV one morning when I saw your TV program “Turn ‘Round Australia”. When I saw your name I suddenly remembered that you were the man whose bag I had stolen. From then on I started to watch your program regularly. I sewed a cover for the window of my cell with a towel and listened with the earplug because I didn’t want any other prisoners to know I was watching a religious program.
I wrote to you and you put me in contact with a couple of other prisoners who had become Christians. Then Tom Varney whom you had met in Ararat back in 1965 started to write to me and has been a tremendous blessing in my life ever since. One day you had on your TV program another prisoner who was in a Melbourne gaol for armed robbery. Your TV program “Turn ‘Round Australia” had played a part in the conversion of his life. He started to write to me and between him and Tom Varney I began to receive the guidance I needed to become a Christian. Every week I watched your TV program and thought “I have stolen his bag. One day I will tell him”.
I became a Christian in gaol, and upon my release went back to Adelaide where I was helped by the Offenders Recovery Program. I was now a strongly committed Christian and I shifted here to Sydney. Incidentally, my girlfriend works for Wesley Mission in one of your Aged Care Lodges and so I wanted to come to your service and tell you I was the man who stole your bag at the Billy Graham Crusade”.
Doug Taffie was no longer an offender, no longer a former prisoner. He was no longer the man who stole my bag. Doug Taffie was my Brother in Christ, fellow Christian, a fellow sinner who had been saved by grace. Years ago I had stepped forward during the hymn “Just as I am without one plea but that my blood was shed for me, and that thou didst come bid me come to thee, oh Lamb of God I come”.
That was the walk that started my Christian life.
Years later while that hymn was being sung I supervised thousands of others who came forward to commit their lives. The Grace of God was working in many hearts and even then it was working in the heart of a man who came to rob and steal. His conversion did not come until years later and by television and through the man whose bag he had stolen.
Today Doug Taffie is my Christian brother. I never realised that the Billy Graham Crusade in Melbourne 1969 would end in Sydney in 1993.
That night I spent some time in my study writing up my journal and looking out the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road intersection that was dominated by the lovely church with the high white tower, noting down the events of another day as suburban Minister.
GORDON MOYES