Billy Graham wraps up historic crusade

More than 80,000 people gathered in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stadium to hear the Reverend Billy Graham preach on the last day of what was probably one of the veteran evangelist’s final crusades.

More than 312,000 of the faithful, the curious and the nostalgic attended over the course of the four-day crusade, which marks the 55th anniversary of the Los Angeles revival that propelled Graham to fame in 1949.

Nearly 13,400 people made a religious commitment to Jesus Christ, including 3,400 yesterday, according to crusade officials. Yesterday’s crowd nearly filled the 92,000-seat stadium, the largest US venue booked for a Graham crusade.

Graham, 86, spoke for about 45 minutes, pausing only to sit down about halfway through his sermon.

“Now I can preach another hour,” he joked.

“Many of you have a Christian heritage, grew up in a Christian home, but you have this other pull of the sins of the world. Are you really happy?” Graham asked, as people in the crowd cheered and waved their hands.

“God is offering to you and to me a pardon for our sins. God says: ‘I love you. I’ll forgive you and I’ll have mercy on you.’”

This mission will be the preacher’s last in California – and probably his second-last ever, his advisers say. Graham is expected to appear at a revival in New York’s Madison Square Garden in June.

Organisers had worried that Los Angeles’ size and linguistic diversity would make it difficult to mobilise worshippers, but said they were pleased with the turnout.

“What makes a crusade happen is when people in the local churches bring friends and family, and obviously that happened in a big way here in Los Angeles,” crusade spokesman Larry Ross said.

Michael Reagan, eldest son of the late US president Ronald Reagan, introduced Graham with his own testimony about becoming a born-again Christian in 1985.

More than 20,000 volunteers and pastors from about 1,200 local churches worked for months to plan the crusade, which was delayed for several months when Graham broke his pelvis.

Graham’s first Los Angeles revival addressed a much different city. The five-county area covered by the crusade had a population of just under five million in 1949. Now, 16 million live in the concrete grid of freeways.

Graham planned to speak for three weeks in 1949 under a tent pitched in downtown Los Angeles.

But when famous personalities such as 1936 Olympian and war hero Louis Zamperini and mobster Mickey Cohen showed up, the event caught the nation’s eye and Graham kept going for eight weeks. Up to 6,000 people showed up each evening - and an estimated 350,000 overall.