For Graham, final altar call nears

NEW YORK -- Tens of thousands of the faithful turned out last night for the first meeting of what could be the Rev. Billy Graham's last crusade, showing that his popularity endures even though the Southern Baptist preacher long known as ''America's minister" has been largely out of the public spotlight in recent years.

An ethnically mixed, capacity crowd estimated by organizers at 70,000, clapped and swayed at the revival meeting in Flushing Meadows Corona Park near Shea Stadium in Queens, where the event had been moved from smaller Madison Square Garden.

''There may never be a moment like this in your whole life. There may never be a moment like this in New York," Graham said after his sermon, as he called people to the altar to symbolize their acceptance of a spiritual rebirth and salvation. ''You come now. Now is the time."

Graham, who is 86 and has Parkinson's disease, moved on the stage with a walker and with the help of his son. His voice was weaker than in past years, but still clear. He stood during most of his 30-minute sermon but sat through the altar call.

Graham plans to preach each day of the New York services. His pulpit was set up with a movable seat so he could sit when he needed to.

He intertwined humor, including references to praying for the Yankees and Mets, with his message of salvation through Jesus.

''We are Christians, maybe. We go to church. We've been baptized. We've been confirmed. But deep inside we need something else, and that something else can be brought about by Jesus," he said.

Casting a wide net to reach as many as possible during the three-day weekend meeting, Graham sent 5,000 counselors and 1,500 ushers from 81 denominations into the audience with 10,000 headsets that translated his sermon into 20 languages.

Most at the service said they came because it was likely to be Graham's last crusade, perhaps the last time they could see him.

''He transformed everything," said Bean Chamber, 49, of Summit, N.J. ''The pope even wants to speak to Billy Graham, but yet but he can speak to anyone. He makes them feel love."

Although he avoided political themes yesterday, is was Graham's broad popularity and his prominence in Washington as a friend to presidents that cleared a path, historians say, for a new breed of evangelical leaders who have come to the fore as political players in the nation's capital.

''He was involved in politics somewhat more than he cares to admit during the 1960s and during Nixon, but after Watergate he was so disappointed in what happened there that he drew out of active involvement in politics," said William Martin, author of ''A Prophet With Honor," a biography of Graham. ''He urged preachers to be wary of being involved in politics because he said it would be easy for them to be manipulated by politicians, who didn't have their interest at heart."

His reasoning seems to have changed over the intervening decades and has become based more on a desire to avoid being divisive. ''If I get up and I talk about some political issue, it divides the audience," Graham said earlier this week during a news conference in Manhattan. ''What I want is a united audience to hear the Gospel."

Evangelical ministers who were as adept as he was on television followed him to national prominence, but had fewer compunctions about parlaying their popularity into political clout. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, for instance, and Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988 and formed the Christian Coalition a year later.

Some leaders of the nation's conservative religious movement who have emerged more recently did not come out of the pulpit. James Dobson is a child psychologist, and Gary Bauer a former federal official.

Yet none of them has eclipsed Graham as a religious leader, even as he has aged and moved out of the limelight, historians say.

''He has become a kind of iconic representation of evangelism in America," said Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University. ''Without a doubt he is the most significant evangelical of the 20th century."

Balmer also drew a stylistic distinction between Graham and many of his successors. ''These other leaders of the religious right are polemicists," he said. ''Graham was never a polemicist."

Graham was a kinder and gentler preacher, Balmer said. ''He thought preaching the Gospel was more effective than browbeating and condemning others."

Once a vibrant man with a bellowing voice, Graham speaks softly now but his message of redemption from sin through Jesus has remained strong. With an everyman charm that reaches back to his roots on a dairy farm in North Carolina, he has used his popular revival meetings to connect with millions of ordinary Americans.

The first of seven ''crusades" in the New York metropolitan area was held in 1957 at Madison Square Garden and helped cement his reputation. It was so popular it had to be extended from six to 16 weeks.

Specialists on religion in the United States say Graham's significance and success stem in part from an early decision to preach an inclusive evangelism. Balmer described him as ''always looking for compromise and to avoid confrontation."

On occasion, Graham's career has been touched with controversy. Oval Office tapes released two years ago captured Graham and Richard Nixon making anti-Semitic remarks, and Graham has often asked for forgiveness.

His son Franklin, whom Graham appointed in 1995 to lead his evangelistic association and whom specialists describe as being far more conservative than his father, has been criticized by Muslims for calling Islam ''a very evil and wicked religion" in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks.

During the first New York crusade, Graham angered segregationists by inviting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to share the stage with him. That crusade also marked his break with fundamentalists, who advocate a strict reading of the Bible and never forgave Graham for cooperating with mainline liberal Protestant ministers, according to Martin, the Graham biographer who is also a sociology professor at Rice University.

Even though Graham now contends that politics has no place in religion, he continues to align himself with President Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, said Harold Bloom, a professor of humanities at Yale University, and he has supported the decisions each made to go to war. But Graham has befriended nearly every president since Dwight Eisenhower, and when he had a political agenda of his own, he opposed communism, supported civil rights, and spoke out against the nuclear arms race.

Bloom said the most serious criticism lodged against Graham is that he has not focused enough on helping the poor.

''He looks the part and plays the part of the leader of American evangelical Protestantism or fundamentalist Protestantism," Bloom said. ''A casting director could not have done a better job bringing forth the right actor. I am not accusing him of insincerity, but pragmatically speaking I don't see anything that Billy Graham has done that made any difference for poor or mistreated people . . . He is not the least bit interested in America's underclass."

Bloom said that as a young man, Graham studied the organizing techniques of other revivalists such as Dwight Lyman Moody, a Northfield, Mass., native regarded as the leading evangelist of the 19th century, and transformed revivalism into a form of popular entertainment. Like Moody, Graham used publicity campaigns and ''prayer specialists" on his staff to pull off the 1957 crusade in New York.

''Under his leadership and wise, creative vision, evangelicalism has grown so large and diverse . . . that no one single person will dominate as he has," Martin said. ''When he came to prominence, evangelicalism was very weak. Now, there is no single person who can say, 'Let's all get together,' and they will come, the way Graham has been able to do it on many occasions."

Six decades in the pulpit

1918 Born in Charlotte, N.C., to dairy farmer parents.

1934 ''Willed to seek Christ" at Charlotte revival featuring evangelist Mordecai Ham.

1940 Graduates from Florida Bible Institute and is ordained in Southern Baptist Convention.

1943 Earns bachelor's degree from Wheaton College in Illinois and is named pastor of a Baptist church in a Chicago suburb.

1944 Leads a Youth for Christ rally at Chicago's Orchestra Hall.

1945 After drawing 70,000 at Chicago's Soldier Field, he begins touring United States as a Youth for Christ representative.

1949 350,000 people attend his eight-week tent revival in Los Angeles.

1950 Establishes Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis and begins broadcasting his ''Hour of Decision" radio program.

1952 Begins writing a syndicated newspaper column.

1954 International rallies in London draw more than 2 million and are extended to 12 weeks.

1956 Founds Christianity Today magazine.

1957 2.3 million attend his 16-week ''crusade" at New York's Madison Square Garden.

1964 Broadcasts conversation with Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston to improve Protestant-Catholic relations.

1966 Tours Vietnam and praises US military policy.

1973 More than 1 million attend a service in South Korea, his largest single audience.

1977 Meetings in Hungary lead to more visits to Soviet bloc countries.

1983 Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom.

1988 Takes 17-day tour of communist China, where his wife, Ruth, was raised.

1992 Discloses he has Parkinson's disease.

1995 Appoints son Franklin to succeed him as head of evangelical organization.

2002 Quickly apologizes after tapes surface of a 1972 Oval Office conversation with President Richard Nixon that contain anti-Semitic remarks by Graham.

Yesterday Revival meeting begins in New York.

SOURCES: Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; Associated Press