Preparing the Way : Enthusiastic Volunteers, Local Church Groups Go All Out for Billy Graham Crusade

The six lights on Greg Strand’s telephone rarely go dark for more than a few seconds, as the hours tick off before the 10-day Billy Graham Crusade begins Wednesday night at Anaheim Stadium.

Strand, a tall, lanky blond in blue jeans and a sport shirt open at the collar, is one of the crusade’s chief advance men. He arrived in the area about a year ago.

“We’re on the final countdown now,” said Strand, 32, as he sandwiched an interview between a meeting with stadium officials and phone calls to volunteer workers.

The Graham organization hopes to draw more than half a million people to its first Southern California crusade in 16 years, an undertaking that combines highly sophisticated techniques--refined over decades--and the efforts of thousands of local volunteers. Strand, who has been with the “team,” as it is called, for five years, began as youth chairman of a crusade in Indianapolis, his home town.

“For me it’s been a real calling,” he said. “I feel that the Lord has directed me in this way.”

Strand, with his wife and two young children, travels around the world preparing for various crusades and working with volunteers. As his children approach school age, he said, he will have to take a hard look at this life style. But he added, “I think I’ll always be involved in Christian activity.”

Knowing Billy Graham, he said, has been a tremendous experience. “I don’t know many men I’ve worked with who are as humble and godly as he is, but at the same time, as down to earth.”

One of the Strands’ visitors last Friday was Bob Wilkinson, a public schoolteacher in Tustin and a former Costa Mesa police officer. He stopped by to pick up materials to make signs that will be hung around the stadium.

“I’m a kind of go-fer,” Wilkinson said later in his Costa Mesa home. “And that’s fine. They need go-fers.”

In addition to tasks such as the sign preparation, each night Wilkinson will man a stadium booth from which 3,000 transistor radios will be sold or rented each night of the crusade. The grounds will be wired for low-wattage AM cable, and simultaneous translations of Graham’s message will be broadcast in 13 languages.

Wilkinson, a powerfully built man with silver hair, admitted he had mixed feelings about evangelists before he volunteered for the Graham effort. He said the main reason he offered his services was to “repay” his church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Newport Beach, and one of its pastors, William Flannagan, who has been especially helpful to people like Wilkinson--people whose marriages have ended in divorce.

“I told Flan if he needed me this summer, they (the crusade) could have me,” he said.

Wilkinson he has since become aware of the extensive follow-up work that a crusade carries on with local churches and that “every cent raised in Orange County stays in Orange County.”

George Orme, a San Fernando Valley resident who says “I love to coordinate things,” put together a committee of lay people in his area to arrange car pools and bus transportation to the crusade. A recent widower and longtime retiree, Orme, 82, has thrown himself into the crusade activities, including a local prayer group and training to be a counselor.

“I don’t have anything else to do,” he said. “I don’t know why I got on fire” about the crusade, “I just did.”

While his wife was alive, Orme said, Graham was “a real inspiration to us.”

Carol Marleau, 40, of Mission Viejo, said she felt a need “to bring an awareness to the community” of the importance of

the Graham crusade. She and some friends decided it would be a good idea for 10 churches in the Saddleback Valley to take a full-page ad in a local newspaper asking people to attend.

“I prayed about it a lot,” she said. “It all came together this week,” with 11 churches contributing sufficient money to buy the ad.

Marleau said that churches in her area were arranging for buses or pooling buses with other churches. Some are organizing their members to serve as some of the 800 ushers that will be needed each night, or to sing in the 10,000-voice choir. Others will be working in the crusade’s “Co-Labor Corps,” to help further “Operation Andrew,” the crusade’s “outreach program.”

Each night of the crusade, the cards filled out by audience members will be processed. Those of people unaffiliated with any church will be sorted by denomination, and their cards will be sent to the churches nearest their homes. Later, they will be contacted directly by the churches.

Local Churches Are Key

While many individuals have volunteered to assist in the crusade, most of the work has been done by local churches. Marleau’s congregation, Presbyterian Church of the Master, inserted the crusade’s fund-raising envelopes into Sunday morning’s church bulletin.

Evangelical Free Church in Laguna Hills is using a special telephone line to invite people who have visited the church to come to the crusade. It will also prepare picnic dinners for those who will ride buses (departing at 6 p.m.) from the church to the stadium. Grace Community Church in El Toro sent out a crusade fund-raising mailer with its newsletter and has scheduled a 45-minute prayer vigil for the crusade Wednesday night at the church.

South Coast Community Church, a non-denominational congregation in Irvine, was one of 41 churches that housed four evening training sessions for the crusade’s Christian Life and Witness Program, which trains people to serve as counselors during and after the crusade.

“Scores of our people are participating in the choir,” said W. Joseph Hemphill, the church’s pastor for communications, who also serves on several crusade committees. “Many of our men are ushers,” he said, and the church will send three buses to the crusade.

At the First Baptist Church of Fountain Valley/Huntington Beach (which plans to send two buses), small groups of people have been meeting in various neighborhoods, according to Associate Pastor Jim Rice, “trying to encourage people to reach out to their neighbors, trying to cross denominational bridges.”

Seven Months of Planning

Gary Love of Santa Ana, a member of First Baptist, has been particularly active in the volunteer effort on behalf of the crusade. He has been working for seven months, planning such things as transportation and ticketing.

“The interesting thing about the crusade so far is that people are under the impression that if Billy Graham comes to town, thousands of people flock to see him. It doesn’t work that way,” Love said.

Love said the months of work by thousands of volunteers is worth the effort.

“That’s the purpose of evangelism,” said Love. “You might say it’s like a united effort on part of all Christian organizations to point people towards what we call a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.”