Royal Faith

by Steve | Mar 12, 2018 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March-April 2018

Royal Faith

By Steve Beard-

There is an intriguing scene in Season 2 of the wildly successful historical drama, The Crown, on Netflix. For the uninitiated, the award-winning series revolves around the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the now 91-year-old sovereign of the United Kingdom.

At the beginning of episode six, Elizabeth (played by Clare Foy) is studiously watching Billy Graham preach on television in 1955 while sitting with her mother in Buckingham Palace. The Queen Mother (played by Victoria Hamilton) finds Graham to be more than an acquired taste for the upper class British religious sensibilities. She appears perturbed that the public is captivated by a man who learned his trade “selling brushes door-to-door in North Carolina” and that British subjects turned “out in droves for an American zealot.”

“He is not a zealot,” Elizabeth responds.

Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II and Matt Smith as Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown a Netflix Original. Photo source: Robert Viglasky | Netflix

“He’s shouting, darling,” her mother replies. “Only zealots shout.”

Much to the chagrin of the palace staff, Elizabeth asks that an invitation be extended to Billy Graham for a visit. In The Crown, Graham (played by Paul Sparks) fittingly preaches in Windsor Chapel on what it means to be a Christian: “As I was thinking about what to preach about today, I considered various topics which speak to me personally, but I thought that I would start with a simple question. What is a Christian? The Bible tells us; Colossians 1:27 says that a Christian is a person in whom Christ dwells. It’s Christ in you, the hope of glory. It means that you have a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. That encounter has taken place. You have received Christ as savior. And that is what a Christian is.”

“I enjoyed that very much,” Elizabeth tells Graham after the service. “You do speak with such wonderful clarity and certainty.” She admits her “great joy” at being “a simple congregant, being taught, being led … to be able to just disappear and be…”

“A simple Christian,” Graham says to assist in finishing her thought. “Yes,” Elizabeth replies, “Above all things, I do think of myself as just a simple Christian.”

Script. Off script. Of course, that dialogue was all from the creative mind of The Crown creator David Morgan. We actually don’t know much about their encounter except from what we learn from Graham. “When we filed into the Royal Chapel, I looked around to see the location of the pulpit. I was stunned to realize that the chapel had no pulpit, just a place to stand. I carried a thick sheaf of handwritten notes on extra paper and was forced to leave them behind when I got up to speak,” the evangelist recalled in the pages of Billy Graham: God’s Ambassador, a memoir of Graham’s photographer Russ Busby. “I had prayed so much about this moment that I knew however simple and full of mistakes my sermon would be, God would overrule and use it – but I’ll tell you, I could really feel my heart beating.”

Paul Sparks portrays Billy Graham in The Crown. Courtesy of Netflix.

The earlier mentioned tense exchange between mother and daughter in The Crown may have utilized a tad too much artistic license in the screenwriting technique of having the Queen Mother give voice to the many naysayers within British society who were overtly skeptical of Graham’s message and style. His visit was an overwhelming cultural moment and a headline-grabbing experience. Great tension and passion surrounded his rallies. There were more than 30,000 posters with the face of the evangelist and the simple message: Hear Billy Graham!

“No one in Britain has been more cordial toward us than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” Graham wrote in his autobiography, Just As I Am. He is now 99 years old and living in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I believe one reason for the Queen’s spiritual interest was the warm faith of her mother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother,” he wrote. (The Queen Mother died in 2002 at 102 years of age.)

The unscripted reality is that there was an undeniable special connection between Graham and Queen Elizabeth. “I always found her very interested in the Bible and its message,” he wrote. “After preaching at Windsor one Sunday, I was sitting next to the Queen at lunch. I told her I had been undecided until the last minute about my choice of sermon and had almost preached on the healing of the crippled man in John 5. Her eyes sparkled and she bubbled over with enthusiasm, as she could do on occasion. ‘I wish you had!’ she exclaimed. ‘That is my favorite story.’”

While the relationship was warm between certain members of the royal family and Graham, the young fiery evangelist was still acquainting himself with becoming the preeminent international Christian evangelist.

In Prophet Without Honor, Graham biographer William Martin gives a taste of the reception the evangelist received from the British press. The London Evening News, for example, called Graham an “American hot gospel specialist” who took “his listeners strolling down Pavements of Gold, introduces them to the rippling-muscled Christ, who resembles Charles Atlas with a halo, then drops them abruptly into the Lake of Fire for a sample scalding.” Other media outlets dismissed him as “Silly Billy” and peppered him with questions such as, “Who invited you over here, anyway?” “Do you think you can save England?” and “Don’t you think you’re needed more in your country?”

During his first visit to England, Graham learned that his bright ties and socks proved to be a distraction to the understated British society. On his second go-round, he was very concerned about making the right impression by arriving with a new fedora and a conservative dark coat. He also asked his wife, Ruth, to not wear lipstick since some of the church leaders viewed it as worldly.

“Bill stooped from being a man of God to become a meddlesome husband and ordered my lipstick off,” Ruth wrote in her diary. “There was a lively argument – then I wiped it off. He got so busy getting the bags together I managed to put more on without notice.” She later commented, “It doesn’t seem to me to be a credit to Christ to be drab.”

When the Grahams arrived in Waterloo train station, they were met by a “perfect mob,” recalled Ruth. William Martin quotes an eyewitness who stated that “women screamed and fainted, babies and children were passed over the heads of the crowd, newspaper stands were overturned, and burly railway policemen were swept aside….” Ruth remembers, “The press of the crowd was so terrific that Bill and I were instantly separated. Cheers went up, and the air was filled with ‘God bless you’ and ‘Welcome to England.’”

A Royal Faith

Long before Billy Graham appears in The Crown, the creators had already given slight indications of Queen Elizabeth’s sincere Christian faith. She is shown kneeling next to her bed in prayer and inquiring of her elderly grandmother, Queen Mary, about the divine “calling” of royalty. “Monarchy is God’s sacred mission to grace and dignify the earth,” Elizabeth’s grandmother tells her before her consecration. “To give ordinary people an ideal to strive towards, an example of nobility and duty to raise them in their wretched lives. Monarchy is a calling from God. That is why you are crowned in an abbey, not a government building. Why you are anointed, not appointed. It’s an archbishop that puts the crown on your head, not a minister or public servant. Which means that you are answerable to God in your duty, not the public.”

Once again, these are the scripted words of The Crown’s creators. Nevertheless, Queen Elizabeth has used her Christmas address each year to publicly profess her faith with her own conviction. “Christ not only revealed to us the truth in his teachings,” Elizabeth proclaimed in 1981. “He lived by what he believed and gave us the strength to try to do the same – and, finally, on the cross, he showed the supreme example of physical and moral courage.”

As the Queen of the United Kingdom and the head of the Church of England, Elizabeth has never been timid about admitting her allegiance to Jesus Christ. “To many of us our beliefs are of fundamental importance,” she said in 2000. “For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.”

Although she oversees a nation that is better known for empty cathedrals than religious revival, the Queen remains a beloved world leader who speaks eloquently, humbly, and respectfully from a heart of faith.

“For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace,” she said on Christmas in 2014, “is an inspiration and an anchor in my life. A role-model of reconciliation and forgiveness, he stretched out his hands in love, acceptance and healing. Christ’s example has taught me to seek to respect and value all people of whatever faith or none.”

Steve Beard is the editor of Good News. This article was originally published in the March/April 2018 issue of Good News. 

Restoring Our Vision

by Steve | Mar 12, 2018 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March-April 2018

By Duane Brown-

One of life’s great blessing is to have clear vision, and few things are more frightening than the prospect of losing one’s sight. During the summer of 2013, I began losing my vision. For nearly six months I stubbornly ignored the problems. After multiple exams and prescription changes, the doctor said cataracts were growing in my left eye. I had surgery to remove the cataracts and replace my existing lens with an implant. What a transformation! My vision was restored almost instantly and now it’s the best it has ever been.

At times, I have lost my missional vision as God’s redemptive change agent for a lost world. There is a great spiritual harvest awaiting God’s Church. Jesus said, “I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for the harvest” (John 4:35). It’s easier, however, to fashion for myself a world that fits my personal likes and tastes. Like blinders on a horse, I focus on the things in my world that are important to me. As the famous comedian Flip Wilson often said, “What you see is what you get!”

Too many North American churches settle for mission only in their local community and are not guided by a strategic Acts 1:8 model (“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth”) that involves local and international outreach. Churches may also function in ways that focus mostly on serving the physical needs of others with scant attention to proclaiming Christ and making disciples. That’s why TMS Global, the agency for which I serve, seeks to mobilize believers and churches to make disciples, especially among the least reached peoples. Through our training and coaching called “Activate,” churches often receive a restored vision of their world.

Our training utilizes raw data to demonstrate the reality of the world’s spiritual needs. For instance, while many know that some 7.3 billion persons inhabit the earth, they are unaware that a staggering 2.2 billion persons have never heard the name of Jesus to them. While speaking to a pastor about this astronomical number of unreached, he disagreed, saying it is too high an amount. I responded, in effect, by asking if one billion persons is convincing enough to him that there really is an overwhelming need.

The Activate training also examines how God sees the world. We see the world as one comprised of countries with political and geographical borders. God, however, sees the world as more than 16,000 distinct people groups, with their own distinct history, language, beliefs, and identity. Of that 16,000, more than 3,000 are considered unengaged and unreached, with no Bible in their language, no church in their community, and no critical mass of serious Christ followers.

An examination of exactly where churches are sending cross-cultural witnesses can be revealing. Most church mission committees believe they are doing their part by supporting a cross-cultural witness, regardless of location. As one pastor said to me, “We send checks to support church planters in another country.” That is important. Yet, what most don’t know is that nearly 97 percent of the cross-cultural witnesses supported and sent around the world serve in “traditional” mission fields, locations in which Jesus is already known. Most cross-cultural witnesses do not serve among the 2.2 billion unengaged and unreached peoples who have never heard of Jesus. (I am thrilled that TMS Global sends approximately 30 percent of our cross-cultural witnesses to the unengaged and unreached.)

When all the data is combined – populations, people groups, and where cross-cultural witnesses are sent – a church’s vision for outreach can change drastically. Churches begin to realize the most strategic work for them is to be intentional about mission outreach among the unengaged and unreached. As we have often discovered, when a church adjusts its missional energy to meet a world that has yet to see Jesus, the church’s vision of its role in global outreach becomes much clearer.

Duane Brown is the senior director of church ministry at TMS Global (tms-global.org).

In the Beginning

by Steve | Mar 12, 2018 | Magazine, Magazine Articles, March-April 2018

By B.J. Funk-

God and his creation were on good terms. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis we can almost hear nature clapping loud approval after each “God saw that it was good” statement. The Creator masterfully painted the flowers with deep red, gold, and violet stripes of perfumed paint, leaving heavenly scents as he moved from one area of the garden to the next.  Then, he put together a plan and presented it to the two other parts of the God-head.

To them he said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” Then, to his creation he said, “Get ready. We’re going to do a new thing, and we want all of you to watch.” Colorful birds chirped their approval, while dogs barked with excitement and baby monkeys ran up and over tree branches, swinging from limbs and then cuddling up to their mothers.  God reached down and gathered a handful of dust, and from this unlikely source, the God-head created man.

God looked at this man and said, “My, my, isn’t he perfect!” He could not stop staring. As he gathered this son in his arms and looked at his face, he saw in this child a reflection of his glory, one that would possess the same attributes He had: patience, love, forgiveness, kindness, and faithfulness. God danced around the Garden, gently caressing this beautiful wonder, while singing love songs to his boy. But, God wasn’t finished. The son was lifeless. He rested in his father’s secure embrace, but he was lifeless. God wanted a relationship with this new creation, and for that to happen, something extraordinary had to occur.

So, God placed his breath close to the son’s nostrils, breathed on him the breath of life and whispered, “LIVE!”  Not until then, but only because of then, man became a living being.

That first man, Adam, stretched and yawned as though waking from a deep sleep. God carefully placed him down on the thick grass carpet and watched with delight as Adam tried to stand up and walk. Each time he fell, his Creator laughed and helped Adam to his feet, until Adam was able to walk in the garden alone. With the same care and diligence, he then created Eve.

It was the beginning.

Almost as quickly as they were created, however, the two even more quickly disobeyed God and brought death to the beautiful garden. They would be responsible for the fall that came to the garden and subsequently to all humanity born after them.  Listening to the serpent’s lies would have long-lasting effects.

By chapter three of Genesis, God revealed his master plan to bring these two – and all of humankind – back to God. Centuries later, he would send another Son, a second Adam to restore and redeem what Satan had stolen.

Move down the centuries to a tomb, cold and dark and not at all ready for death. It is the morning of the third day. Jesus, stretched out on the slab, was bloody with visible wounds. The result of the painful hammering of the nails, the depth of the gashes from the whips and the cuts all over his head from the crown of thorns had left his body only slightly resembling the man he was. But, God looked at him and thought, “My, my, isn’t he perfect!” God still saw in this beloved Son a reflection of His glory.

But, God wasn’t finished. The Father picked up His Son, cradling him in his arms and placed his breath close to the Son’s nostrils. Then, God breathed on him the breath of life and whispered, “LIVE!”  Not until then, but only because of then, the Son opened his eyes and looked around.

It was finished. The reason Jesus came to earth had been accomplished. He stood up in the tomb, his legs getting used to his beautiful new body. At first, when he tried to walk in the close quarters of the tomb, his Father walked with him. Perhaps he even danced with him as the realization of their togetherness sealed God’s promise. God whispered to his beloved Son. “It’s over. Well done.” And, with those words, the Beloved walked through the open tomb and into the garden. It was the new beginning. And God saw that it was good.