Ship of Fools: 16th June 1966

Thread: 16th June 1966 - I was there Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Phil the Bear (# 10464) on :

I had a tweet which stated that Cliff Richard 'came out' at the Billy Graham Crusade on 16th June 1966. By coincidence I was there.

Anyone else want to own up to that?

Posted by Percy B (# 17238) on :

I wasn't there.

But is that tweet correct?

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

'Came out' as what precisely? Generally followed by 'of the closet'.

Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :

came out ... on stage. Improved the show no end ... though he hadn't come up with "Devil Woman" at that stage

Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :

Am I correct in understanding that that particular Billy Graham crusade was later viewed as some sort of landmark event in the history of modern British Christianity?

I had a book a few years back which contained a chapter that seemed to be arguing that, but I lost my copy before getting to said chapter.

Posted by PD (# 12436) on :

It certainly put a bomb under the Evangelical Movement in the Church of England. The 1967 Keele Conference is regarded as something of a turning point in the modern history of Anglican Evangelicalism.

PD

Posted by ArachnidinElmet (# 17346) on :

I have a friend who traces her adult Christian faith (brought up CoE, drifted in teenage years) to that event. She was, and is, a big Cliff fan. It was a massive deal to her to hear him state on stage what and why he believed.

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
'Came out' as what precisely? Generally followed by 'of the closet'.

As publically Christian. It's a hazardous and inappropriate phrase to choose these days as it's usually used in a different context. One suspects that the tweeter referred to in the OP has misunderstood how language was used in 1966 and what anyone then was likely to say.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

Rumour has it that our church was the first one that Billy Graham ever preached in in England.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

And a brief Google hitns that might might be true. Apparentl;y Billy Graham's first preaching tour of Britain and Ireland was in the winter of 1946/47, speaking for Youth for Christ at various meetings mostly in hired halls. And our then vicar, who was called Tom Livermore, was involved with YFC and invited Graham to preach at an evening service. So we might well have been the first church he preached at in England, and were almost certainly the first Anglican one. Livermore and others then went on to organise the Harringey evaqngelisit campaign, which was the really big one.

Not that I'd remember, as all this happened ten years before I was born and forty years before I moved to the area.

Posted by Phil the Bear (# 10464) on :

It was, in fact, Cliff 'coming out' as Christian, having suppressed the fact, presumably, because of possible damage to his image as a pop singer.

It was front page news on many a paper the following day. I can honestly say that the actual 'service' was monumentally boring (my main memory being of an aged American gentlemen who rendered "How Great Thou Art" at interminable length) interrupted less by Cliff's 'revelation' and more by the buckets that were passed round for the collection - which seemed to be going for at least half the time.

I went to 3 of the services (if that's what they were). Cliff's was the first. I went with a girlfriend to a second and at the third took part in an anti-Vietnam war demo (Graham was reputed to be financed by the American arms industry). The third was the most painful, largely because of the rough-housing of the evangelical stewards!

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