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billy graham center archives
2007 annual report
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Rod Coeller, Hans Krabbendam, and Darren Dochuk working in the Manuscript Reading Room on June 1. (see Krabbendam's report below)

Researcher Reports

Here are some reports from 2007 visitors to the Archives on how they used our resources for their projects. In some cases the reports have been edited slightly so that all reports have a common format.

Dr. Alan Bearman, Washburn University

My project focuses upon Billy Graham's 1954 Greater London Crusade and his emergence as a global figure, while also examining the impact of his international success upon his domestic ministry and political relationships. I expect to complete an article on my work by the end of 2007, and a manuscript in early 2008.

I have done significant work on my project in England and at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, but for me the obvious location to go to was the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College because it gave me access to a wide range of materials unavailable elsewhere.

I expected to find reports from London by the Graham staff and the Crusade statistics, along with materials that would help me place the Crusade into its appropriate context. I found everything that I hoped to and more. I am now able to account for each day of activities at the Crusade, tell the story of how the Crusade came about and its general reception in the English press. The Crusade's impact in England is important because it was Graham's ability to take skeptics and make them friends that allowed him, I believe, to emerge as an international presence and an ideal representative of America during the 1950s. The extensive collection of pictures that the Archives holds are of great use to me because they allowed me to further create an image of the events in London during 1954. The Harringay Arena no longer exists, instead retail stores and a McDonald's now stand in its place, so the pictures did much to allow me to understand better the geography of the event. This project is central to my continuing attempts to understand the history of Christianity within the Anglo-American world.


Nina K. Bissett, Doctoral candidate at Regent University

I am collecting data for research on the institutional identity of Wheaton College from the perspective of the college's past student revivals. My objective for coming to the BGC Archives was to transcribe audio tapes from the Wheaton College Revival Collection 514, make digital copies of the paper collection, and to view the 1995 revival videos.

I expected that this data would provide information necessary to answer the research questions proposed in my study and am still in the process of analyzing the data. I found it interesting that in all the interviews and documents in the collection, only one student testimony (with the exception of some emails) produced a fully negative or cynical appraisal of the revivals with the challenge that many other skeptics existed but feared reprisal. This research was conducted to fulfill requirements for a doctorate degree in higher education. The research relates to the trend of secularization or the loss of a Christian identity among colleges.

Mr. John Bray, author and scholar from Tokyo, Japan

After leaving university in 1978, I spent two years teaching in northern India at two schools run by the Moravian church. The second school was in Leh, Ladakh, and while I was there I started reading 19th century mission magazines with articles by the German missionaries who had lived and worked in the region a century earlier. That experience prompted a long-term interest in the activities of 19th and 20th century missionaries in the Himalayas. Over the years I have published a number of research papers on this topic, and my long-term aspiration is to write a comparative study reviewing the history of missions in both the Indo-Tibetan and the Sino-Tibetan border areas.

I first came across a reference to the Billy Graham Center in a bibliographic article written by a fellow researcher in the 1990s. In May 2007, I had to visit New York for a consultancy project, and that gave me an opportunity to drop by in the Chicago area on my way back to Japan. I was able to spend four days in the archives consulting the papers of Victor Plymire, an Assemblies of God missionary, who had been active on the north-eastern Tibetan border areas between 1908 and 1949 - a particularly turbulent period in that region's history. I was also able to look at an unpublished typescript by Robert Ekvall who had served as a Christian & Missionary Alliance missionary in the same area.

It is always exciting to read the original papers and diaries of people like Plymire. In addition, he left a notable collection of photographs, and even some cine-film. The archive reading room was a comfortable and serene place in which to work, and the staff of the Center were enormously helpful. Overall, my visit to Wheaton was both stimulating and pleasurable, and I hope that it will in due course bear fruit in the form of further published research.

Dr. Dale Cressman, Brigham Young University

I came to the BGC Archives to find documents in the Charles W. Colson papers [Collection 275] related to a series of media history projects. I am writing a biography of Elmer W. Lower, the president of ABC News from 1963 through 1974, as well as an article on the relationship between the television networks' news divisions and the Nixon White House. Mr. Colson was in contact with the network presidents over various matters during President Nixon's terms. I did not have a great deal of time, and staff help made it possible to find and copy the documents I needed. I appreciated the ability to copy documents as PDFs directly to my email account -- very handy and economical. I was not terribly surprised by what I found, as I had seen citations in the past referring to some of the material I was looking for.
 

Kevin Flatt, doctoral candidate, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario

My doctoral thesis topic is the survival and decline of evangelicalism within the United Church of Canada (UCC), a large mainline denomination, between 1930 and 1970. I came to the BGC archives hoping to find materials that would help me understand the views UCC leaders and adherents had of evangelical beliefs and practices, as revealed by their attitudes towards the work of Billy Graham and the BGEA in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although I did not find much information about the views of UCC denominational leaders, I was able to find more than I expected about the participation of UCC ministers and people in BGEA crusades. I was interested and somewhat surprised to find that a large proportion of those coming forward at Canadian crusades in the 1960s were UCC people, despite the fact that my other research has shown that the church’s leaders were distancing themselves from Graham-style beliefs and evangelism at the same time. This information will help me and other historians to better understand the religion of ordinary United Church people in this period.

Summer Hartzler, graduate student at Wheaton College

I visited the Archives twice. Once for a small project for research class to get our class familiar with archives and the other was for a gender and leadership class in which we had to research the mission theory and mission practice of a woman, either single or married, involved in cross-cultural missions work. I came to use personal journals of missionaries, diaries, pictures, newsletters, mission statements from the Christian organizations.

I was surprised at the extent of the personal information that was collected and donated. I loved that in my one study there was record of the whole year that Victor Plymire [Collection 341] spent trekking across Tibet. It made his experience come alive and was so good for me as a missions student to be able to read, it helped make the world of missions come alive again.

It's a great resource to the real lives of missionaries overseas, their struggles, their joys, their pains, their triumphs. As a missionary in training often, it is easy to get into the theories and ideas of "how to be a missionary" but when we can read these journals and see into their lives and what missions was like for them, it brings an element of reality and practicality to what can otherwise be only theory.

Dr. Hans Krabbendam, historian at the Roosevelt Study Center, the Netherlands

Building on the leads that I found during a previous visit, I conducted research in the BGCA for three days to complete my survey of American evangelical impact on post-World War II Holland. Even though I was familiar with the holdings, I was able to find a number of additional collections thanks to the expert advise of the able staff. My research focused on the question when and why Dutch groups turned towards which religious traditions in the United States for inspiration, and vice versa, which American religious groups targeted the Netherlands and why. I found detailed descriptions of the American activities in the Navigators Collection (7), the Torrey M. Johnson Collection (285) and the Records of the World Evangelical Fellowship (338) as well as in the Cliff Barrow Collection (622). Among the many surprises, my best find was the close interest of the Christian broadcasting company in the programming of American radio stations and the early experiences with television. In addition, I discovered that also for the 1980s and early 1990s the archives hold relevant documentation, which will encourage me to return. I was especially pleased with the efficient xerox facilities, which enabled me to efficiently collect and reproduce a large number of documents in a short period.
Dr. Melani McAlister, George Washington University

I am writing a book on the global involvements and interests of American evangelicals from the late 1960s to the post-9/11 era, focusing particularly on the Middle East and Africa. On this trip, my third, I examined the archives of several short-term missions collections, including some films, and as well files from the Lausanne convention. I found what I had expected, in that I got a much better sense of the time-lines and the early marketing of STMs, as well more details about Lausanne. I was surprised and delighted, however, to find much more in the way of personal stories from people who went or applied to go on short-term missions, including letters from one middle-aged woman who, in the late 1960s, evangelized everywhere from Hong Kong to Guatemala with her ventriloquism puppet. The archives are indispensable for my research, and my experiences there has been exhilarating, thanks to the remarkable collections.

Dr. Gary L. McIntosh, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

I am working on a biography of Donald A. McGavran. Tentatively titled Yearning for Growth: Donald A. McGavran and the Church Growth Movement, the book is to be competed in late 2009. I came to the Billy Graham Archives due to the fact that about half of Donald A. McGavran's papers are housed at this location. I was surprised to find numerous letters from Donald A. McGavran's mother, Helen. It was delightful to read the words of this pioneer missionary to India, as she wrote in her later years. The missiological theories of Donald A. McGavran and the Church Growth Movement continue to inform and empower church ministry in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, many of our younger church leaders do not even recognize that they are using McGavran's ideas. My hope is that a biography on his life and ministry impact will help today's church leaders better understand their ministry.

Ms. Suzanne Scherr Steger, member of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago

On May 20, 2007, Moody Memorial Church in downtown Chicago celebrated the opening of its new Christian Life Center - a 4-story building for Sunday School classes and fellowship annexed to the main church. As part of the opening celebrations, I was allowed to initiate a drama troupe in the form of a 7-minute skit. Our intention was to show how God had built up the body of Christ in times past in the City of Chicago using a new space for children to enjoy Sunday School. Since I was able to access a lot of the Billy Graham Archive holdings online, I was aware that a great deal was not only available, but easily searchable and able to be found. A single call to the Archives provided several folders of materials an hour later which I used to create our 7-minute skit. Not only were we able to produce a dramatic glimpse into the initial circumstances of our church body (complete with clear evangelical message), we now also have materials to create 5 other historical vignettes (moving forward in time). I envision a potential full hour of dramatic/historical evangelical entertainment based on the history of Moody Church by telling the story of God's sovereignty in this body of believers in Chicago.

Sarah Thelen, doctoral candidate at American University

I came to the Billy Graham Archives to do some exploratory research for a dissertation on Charles Wendell Colson and domestic public opinion during the Vietnam War. Colson donated his personal materials to the BGC Archives and I hoped to find information not available in his White House files. I was only at the archives for a couple hours, but those few hours were enough to let me know that the collection, although primarily White House materials, had a lot of useful material and information not in the official White House files. These materials include personal documents and correspondence as well as selected White House documents which may provide unexpected insights on later visits to the archive.

My visit led me to unexpected sources and materials and my dissertation may well include an examination of evangelical opinions about the Vietnam War in addition to my other case studies. Aided by the materials at the BGC Archives, my dissertation will hopefully help fill the glaring hole in scholarship about domestic politics and public opinion during the Vietnam War.

 
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