The final crusade:
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association planned Billy’s final crusade for June 24-26, 2005. It was held at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York. By this time, they had organizing mass revivals down to a science, but it was no less difficult. The first step was to find a list of the churches within fifty-mile radius of New York City, but no such list existed. Never ones to be frustrated, they created a list that included some twelve thousand churches, Everyone of these churches was contacted and its members were invited to attend. Of these churches, 1,424 agreed to participate, representing eighty different denominations-from Adventist churches to the Vineyard churches, and even one calling itself Hebrew Pentecostal. It was the greatest number of participating churches in the history of the Billy Graham crusades. Leaders and congregation members from these churches were then invited to attend forty-three different seminars on every aspect of the crusade, from soliciting donations to reaching the neighbourhoods of their city with invitations. Applications were reviewed as the crusade planners selected six thousand volunteer counsellors to meet with those people who would come forward during the crusade. The volunteers didn’t even include the ushering staff, which alone had five tiers to its organization chart.
As with every one of Billy’s crusades, prayer was the foundation of the event. More than 35,000 people were on a monthly mailing list so that they could be notified about individual requests, as well as be encouraged to pray for the event overall.
More than seventy thousand chairs were set up, and facilities were erected to translate the message into thirteen different languages – including Tamil, Hungarian, and Arabic – simultaneously. The cost of the revival was estimated at $6.8 million, even with all the volunteer work.
When Billy was asked some years earlier about being the last of the big-time evangelists, he could only comment, “After D.L. Moody was finished, they said that same thing…and after Billy they said the same thing, and after I am finished they’ll say the same thing. But God will raise up different ones who will do it far better than me.” Oh, that some of us could be those ones!
Culled from “God’s Generals: The Revivalists” by Robert Liardon