In 1963 when Billy was holding meetings in Los Angeles, he
invited Helmut Thielicke to sit with him on the platform.
Thielicke, a prominent pastor in Berlin after World War II, had
earned enormous influence through his preaching, lectures, and
books. He shared the common European suspicions of the Amer-
ican “show-business” approach to faith.
Despite his reservations about identifying with Billy, he
accepted the invitation to sit on the platform, but Thielicke wrote
later, “I kept my eyes wide open critically.”
The atmosphere at the meetings, however, and his corre-
spondence afterward with Billy, built a bridge the skeptical Ger-
man hadn’t anticipated. Prepared to dislike what he feared might
be an overly flamboyant faith, Thielicke said, “As the people came
forward in their thousands to confess their faith, however, I was
aware only of calm meditation on the part of his crew and
detected no expression of triumph. His message was solid stuff.”
After the event, Thielicke wrote Billy a letter in which he
admitted his own change of heart. “I confessed that whenever I
had previously been asked for my opinion of him, I had said that
I felt that many essential elements were lacking in his proclama-
tion of the gospel,” and that he felt Billy offered an “individualis-
tic doctrine of salvation.”
Billy’s response to this letter built yet another span onto the
bridge.
“I found the answer he gave me extremely significant,” said
Thielicke. “I was, he said, completely right in my criticism. What
he was doing was certainly the most dubious form of evange-
lization. But what other alternative did he have if the flocks that
had no shepherds would not otherwise be served? This answer
gave him credibility in my eyes and convinced me of his spiritual
substance.”
At times, however, Billy’s efforts at bridge building were
rebuffed. In the 1950s one of the sharpest critics of his ministry
was the theological titan and leading spokesperson for mainline
Protestant Christianity, Reinhold Niebuhr. The esteemed vice
president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary deemed
Building Bridges