speaking to high school groups, college rallies, gatherings of Chris-
tian businessmen, and civic clubs. During 1945 alone, he visited
forty-seven states, logged 135,000 miles flying, and received
United Airlines’ designation as its top civilian passenger.
All that travel put him in contact with many who succumbed
to all sorts of temptations. “More than once he had to disassoci-
ate YFC from freelance evangelists who had built up extravagant
expectations, then absconded in the wake of financial or moral
misadventures,” wrote historian George Marsden. “Seeing the ter-
rible disillusionment trusting church folks had suffered stirred
deep revulsion within him and added an increasingly dogged
determination to adhere to high standards of morality and ethics.”
Just a few years later, in 1948, this determination led to a fate-
ful afternoon discussion with his newly formed evangelistic team.
It would chart the course his ministry would take for the next half
century. At this time—shortly before the meetings in Los Ange-
les that propelled him into national prominence—he and his team
were holding smaller evangelistic meetings in Modesto, California.
As Billy describes it: “From time to time Cliff, Bev, Grady, and
I talked among ourselves about the recurring problems many
evangelists seemed to have, and about the poor image so-called
mass evangelism had in the eyes of many people. Sinclair Lewis’s
fictional character Elmer Gantry unquestionably had given travel-
ing evangelists a bad name. To our sorrow, we knew that some
evangelists were not much better than Lewis’s scornful caricature.”
So one afternoon during the Modesto meetings, Billy called
the team together to discuss the problem.
“God has brought us to this point,” he said. “Maybe he is
preparing us for something that we don’t know. Let’s try to recall
all the things that have been a stumbling block and a hindrance
to evangelists in years past, and let’s come back together in an
hour and talk about it and pray about it and ask God to guard us
from them.”
The team members went back to their rooms and listed all the
problems they could think of that evangelists and evangelism
encountered.
The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham