Living Religion

The chapter explores the everyday contributions of ordinary Christians to the running of Graham’s crusades. In forming prayer groups and organizing bus rides, ordinary Christians blurred the boundaries between private religiosity and public mass evangelism, as well as between the religious and the secular. They filled the organizational structures implemented by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association with life and by doing so turned the crusades into a powerful force of renewal for local churches and everyday religious life in London, Berlin, and New York. Women played a crucial role in this everyday running of the crusade machine. Religious practices such as prayer and pilgrimages traveled with Billy Graham and crossed the national boundaries between the different organizing committees. Organized prayer turned into a dynamic form of transnational communication that tied different crusade audiences together and became the cornerstone of Graham’s international ministry.

Epilogue

This chapter asks whether Billy Graham’s legacy will endure, what Franklin Graham’s effect will be, and what the future holds for mass evangelism. Ken Garfield argues that while time will dim his memory among the public, his place in religious history is secure. But how Franklin Graham, who has an undoubtedly different approach from that of his father, will mark that historical legacy remains in question. Opinions vary greatly as to the costs and benefits of Franklin Graham’s role. Finally, Garfield cites the barrage of distractions that threaten the possibility of another figure like Billy Graham rising to such prominence in mass evangelism. Yet he leaves open that question, recognizing that the possibility exists, but most likely in the form of someone quite different from Billy Graham.

Transnational Construction and Local Imagination of "Crusade Christianity"

This article focuses on a transnational urban crusade by a British representative of Pentecostal-type Christianity in 2006 in Kumasi, Ghana. Such mass-evangelism events have helped shape a new religious topography in most African countries since the mid-1980s. An integral part of the religious landscape, they accompany a "Pentecostalization" of African Christianity. This case study analyzes the interplay between international theological discourses and local appropriations of crusade Christianity. It presents crusades as performances and it researches crusade strategies to establish hegemony in public urban space. The central analysis of the theology of healing most popular in Pentecostal-type Christianity refers to the African religious discourse on well-being and disease causation in general. It concludes that local African discourses, more than crusade heroes, show a capacity to control transnational impact in crusade performances and theology.