“Practicing Global Evangelicalism”: Prayer in the Early Making of Billy Graham’s Global Evangelical Community

The study of U.S. evangelicalism has undergone a significant transnational turn in the last decade. Research on evangelical international humanitarianism, international conferences and revival meetings, and networks such as World Vision has opened a new field beyond traditional missionary studies. The proposed paper aims to broaden the analytical focus further beyond networks and organizations to discuss the contributions of ordinary Christians to the shaping of global evangelicalism using the Billy Graham Crusades of the 1950s as an example.

The paper shows that those who participated in Graham’s revival meetings around the world, did so not just as passive recipients. With their own practices and experiences, they contributed significantly to the creation of an international evangelical community from below. In particular organized prayer for revival campaigns in different parts of the world allowed national evangelical communities to develop a sense of international belonging and global consciousness. By organizing prayer groups for Billy Graham Crusades, contributing to and reading prayer newsletters published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, by sending faxes and letters to Crusade organizers to pledge prayer support ordinary Christians around the world connected with revival meetings in other cities. Prayer groups in former campaign cities prayed for future crusade cities sometimes years after having experienced their own Billy Graham Crusade. The Billy Graham organization aimed to provide the institutional framework for those prayer initiatives, but it was only the experiences and everyday practices of ordinary Christians that turned prayer into a significant form of transnational communication and means of affect.