Sunday, April 27, 2003

Graham's route to Roanoke Valley mapped by a 4-year pilgrimage

A casual question between friends in late 1998 led to an arduous path of building support for the festival.

By CODY LOWE
THE ROANOKE TIMES

   To find the roots of the Southwest Virginia Festival 2003 with Franklin Graham, you have to dig in Kansas.

    Roanoke native Joyce Williams was in her Wichita kitchen, looking over the lake out back and chatting with her friend Tex Reardon a few days after Christmas 1998.

    Reardon, then a crusade developer for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, was on the board of a ministry run by Williams and her husband, Gene.

    "Just out of the blue, I said, 'Tex, why has there never been a Billy Graham association crusade in Roanoke?'" Williams recalled last week.

    "He said, 'Nobody's ever asked.'"

    "Well, I'm asking," Williams said.

    "Tex authorized me to make phone calls to explore the possibility of interest among pastors," Williams said in an interview last week.

    She and her husband had worked for the Graham association over the years but weren't employees. "I have no authority, no title," she said, refusing to take credit for the upcoming Southwest Virginia Festival 2003 with Franklin Graham at Salem Stadium next weekend.

    Williams grew up poor in Southeast Roanoke and attended First Church of the Nazarene. She said she has lots of friends and family here she is praying for and is sure they would benefit from an evangelistic rally.

    Williams moved from Roanoke at age 46 after her first husband left her in 1990. She took a Roanoke phone book with her.

    In Kansas, she dug up that directory and, less than a week after Reardon gave her the go-ahead, began calling ministers.

    She spent more than 40 hours on the phone, getting support from numerous pastors, including two of the most beloved in the Roanoke Valley.

    The Rev. Charles Fuller, then the pastor of First Baptist Church on Third Street, "was strongly supportive and felt the timing was good," Williams said. He offered to host an exploratory meeting at his church, the region's largest.

    The Rev. Noel Taylor, then pastor of High Street Baptist Church and the city's former mayor, was battling cancer. Williams said she and Taylor "wept on the phone together. ... He said, 'This is an idea whose time has come. The brothers must be involved in this.'" He gave her names of other black pastors.

    Williams also contacted prominent lay leaders. On Feb. 16, 1999, she and Reardon flew to Roanoke for an initial meeting of 29 people.

    Enthusiasm was high, said the Rev. Michael Grooms, pastor of Rainbow Forest Baptist Church in Blue Ridge, who was a leader on the steering committee that came out of that meeting. But that zeal soon took a blow.

    In August 1999, Fuller announced his intention to retire Oct. 3. While he would still be an individual supporter of the Graham initiative, he would not be able to spearhead First Baptist's involvement. Shortly afterward, the church's interim leadership contacted the committee to say "count us out until we get a pastor," Grooms said.

    Throughout the summer, Taylor grew more ill. He died in October.

    Grooms remembers that as a low point. "It was a little discouraging," he said, even though word came that fall that a Kansas donor - a friend of the Williamses - had given $20,000 to the Graham association for seed money for a Roanoke event.

    Grooms credited his secretary, Melissa Wills, with refusing to let things die.

    "She kept the letters going," informing pastors and other supporters of regular prayer meetings, Grooms said. She built a database of pastors and other potential supporters and made sure everyone was contacted. Every six weeks or so, "Melissa just kept setting those dates up."

    "She had the enthusiasm, even when I didn't," Grooms said. "She'd come to me and say, 'Don't you think we ought to set up another meeting?'"

    Williams saw that "letdown" period as a prerequisite to an essential "paradigm shift - from an idea God had instigated in Wichita to one that became the heart of Roanoke, too," she said. "There had to be a coalition, a unity formed."

    Grooms and the other informal co-chairman of the steering committee, First Church of the Nazarene pastor Earl Robertson, also were praying for that. "If this was not a 'God' thing, we did not want to be a part of it," Grooms said.

    Support grew during 2000, with more and more pastors and laypeople joining meetings to pray about and discuss an evangelistic event.

    The Graham organization has other lesser-known evangelists who typically work in smaller cities than would be visited by Franklin or Billy Graham. But the Roanoke committee felt strongly that it could support a Franklin Graham festival and contacted Steve Nelson, the association's "point man" for those events.

    By the fall of 2000, the Rev. Floyd Davis had been hired to succeed Noel Taylor at High Street. He joined the steering committee and hosted a meeting with Nelson.

    Nelson and other Graham staffers began looking at logistics, potential sites, support and explaining how the committee should go about inviting Graham.

    They "made it real clear, if support was not multicolored, multiethnic, multidenominational, we could forget it," Grooms said.

    That fall, steering committee members confirmed rumors that a Franklin Graham visit was possible.

    Wills put together a package of 170 to 200 letters from pastors, laypeople and civic leaders, including Roanoke Mayor Ralph Smith, inviting Graham to the valley. The Graham staffers came back to town and advised the steering committee on the selection of a nominating committee, whose task would be to find local chairmen and chairwomen for the committees needed to plan the event.

    The committee had to incorporate, get tax-exempt status, name the event, find a location and pick a date. That all continued into 2002.

    The formal announcement came last Sept. 5. Since then, Graham professional staff and about a dozen local employees have coordinated preparations.

    There have been training sessions for pastors and laypeople, choir rehearsals and fund-raising efforts.

    More than 7,000 people, representing 500 congregations and 50 denominations, participated in a five-week series of classes to help them become more comfortable about inviting non-Christians to the festival; more than 2,000 have attended rehearsals to sing in a mass choir; more than 600 have signed up to be ushers; another 2,000 have signed up to advise those who respond to Graham's message to accept Christ.

    That participation is the evidence that the festival has already been a success, Grooms said, through newly inspired Christian evangelism and cooperation among many denominations.

    But the organizers' greatest hope is that non-Christians show up to hear the Gospel message. "We want people to find hope, salvation and a transformed life," Grooms said.

Let any elected or appointed official know what you think and how you feel by CLICKING HERE.