I actually attended a Billy Graham revival in the Pontiac Silverdome, around about 1978 or so. I'll have to look it up. I wish I could remember how full were the stadium seats, but I do recall a man declaring from the speaker platform that cars lined up on the freeway and stop and go traffic on the exits. Which is either a good sign of Graham's appeal or bad planning on the revival team's part. I went up to get my soul saved, and they gave me a pamphlet telling me how to connect with local worship groups, a early effort to build a grassroots organization, when one had to mail a message in an envelope to tie into the network. I wasn't going to ask my mother for a stamp and have to explain everything. Mom once had to hide all the bibles under her bed. Dad made it easy to find his magazines in his closet.
Billy Graham pulled 8000 people in that summer of 1950; twenty eight years later my Lutheran church sent a bus all the way from Fowlerville Michigan to Pontiac, and we were one bus of thousands of buses. Ruth and Billy are handsome and young in this picture, and to allude to the novel Zorba the Greek, their teachings saved many souls.
I'be retreated a few times to the Maranatha grounds, always walking respectfully with a look of meditation upon my face. Everyone from the couple walking down to the beach to the woman on the scooter to the man resting of his skateboard said hello today. I went down to the Mona Lake Channel, where two walls or corrugated steel held in place by groins attempt to keep the sand dunes from pinching off the flow. I looked for the dune climb up to a little worship platform, but I couldn't see it through the leaf thick trees. It's that rare time of Autumn when hanging baskets of begonias still prosper and ornamental grasses know nothing of November's crack down to come. Chipmunks are playful and plentiful here. A prayer path must be under construction because it doesn't lead anywhere and needs smoothing and cinders or woodchips.
Two groups are holding conferences, and I think one is The Final Call, a ministry of drivers who will drive you home after the bars close, a taxi cab with no toll and not even much of a sermon, I have heard. The Western Seminary Journey Group has settled her for a few days of retreat and reflection, and I've noticed couples wearing Hope goodies walking, taking the air, vacationing with a purpose. In the lodge, a woman with an accent from India was Skype conferencing with her professor, who claimed to be busy but still had plenty of time to go over program requirements briskly and thoroughly.
I am glad I visited and toured the buildings. One building had conference rooms for two to three hundred people, with more wood accents and beamed ceilings and vaulted picture windows than a ski lodge in Vail. The group wasn't here tonight, but I recall a circle of men and women in the library, singing without piano from hymnals.
I once saw a lithograph of Billy Sunday standing on a table, addressing an audience, the leading citizens flanking him left and right. The print had been collected by the Terra Museum of American Art, then located in Chicago on the Miracle Mile. I wonder if Billy Sunday ever brought his revival to Maranatha? I wonder if anyone calls Maranatha's long curb Muskegon's Miracle Mile.
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