"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message / With his own words which have won thousands for Christ

by William T. Ellis

Here is opportunity for the acid test. Billy Sunday has been conducting revival meetings long enough to enable an investigator to go back over his trail and trace his results. After years have passed, are there still evidences of the presence and work of the evangelist? To this only one answer can be made. The most skeptical and antagonistic person cannot fail to find hundreds and thousands of Billy Sunday converts in the churches of the towns where the evangelist has conducted meetings during the past twenty years.

Not all of the converts have held fast; we cannot forget that one of the Twelve was a complete renegade, and that the others were for a time weak in the faith. Alas, this condition is true of Christian converts, however made. The terrible record revealed in each year's church statistics, of members who are missing—entirely lost to the knowledge of the Church—is enough to restrain every pastor from making uncharitable remarks upon the recruits won by an evangelist. The fact to be stressed at this present moment is that Billy Sunday converts are to be found in all departments of church work, in the ministry itself, and on the foreign field.

One reason for the conservation of the results of the Sunday campaigns is that all the powers of the evangelist and his organization are exerted to lead those who have confessed Christ in the tabernacles to become members of the church of their choice, at the earliest possible date. Sunday says candidly that converts cannot expect to grow in grace and usefulness outside the organized Church of Christ. Thus it comes about that before a Sunday campaign closes, and for months afterwards, the church papers report wholesale accessions to the local congregations of all denominations. Three thousand new church members were added in a single Sunday in the city of Scranton.

What these campaigns mean in the way of rehabilitating individual churches is illustrated by what a Scranton pastor said to me toward the close of the Sunday campaign: "You know my church burned down a short time ago. We have been planning to rebuild. Now, however, we shall have to rebuild to twice the size of our old church, and we have enough new members already to make sure that our financial problem will be a simple one." In other words, the coming of the evangelist had turned into a triumph and a new starting point for this congregation what might have otherwise been a time of discouragement and temporary defeat.

For a moment the reader should take the viewpoint of the pastors who have been struggling along faithfully, year after year, at best getting but a few score of new members each year. Then Billy Sunday appears. The entire atmosphere and outlook of the church is transformed within a few days. Optimism reigns. Lax church members become Christian workers, and enthusiasm for the kingdom pervades the entire membership. The churches of the community find themselves bound together in a new solidarity of fellowship and service.

Then, to crown all, into the church membership come literally hundreds of men and women, mostly young, and all burning with the convert's ardent zeal to do service for the Master. Can anybody but a pastor conceive the thrill that must have come to the minister of a Wilkes-Barre church which added one thousand new members to its existing roll, as a result of the Billy Sunday campaign in that city?

Six months after the Sunday meetings in Scranton I visited Carbondale, a small town sixteen miles distant from Scranton, and talked with two of the resident pastors. There are four Protestant churches in Carbondale, which have already received a thousand new members within five months. All these converts are either the direct result of Billy Sunday's preaching, or else the converts of converts. Out of a Protestant population of nine thousand persons, the Carbondale churches have received one-ninth into their membership within six months. These bare figures do not express the greater total of Christian service and enthusiasm which permeates the community as an abiding legacy of the Billy Sunday campaign. These converts consider that they have been saved to serve.

Asked to fix a period after which he would expect a reaction from the Sunday meetings, a critic would probably say about one year. On this point we learn that when the evangelist visited the city of Scranton, which is within an hour's ride of Wilkes-Barre, he found that the influence of the meetings which he had held a year previously in Wilkes-Barre were perhaps the most potent single factor in preparing the people of Scranton for his coming. Night after night Wilkes-Barre sent delegations of scores and hundreds over to the Scranton Tabernacle. Investigators from afar who came to look into the Scranton meetings were advised to go to the neighboring city to ascertain what were the effects of the campaign after a year. The result was always convincing.

When the evangelist was in Pittsburgh, McKeesport, where he had been six years before, sent many delegations to hear him and on one occasion fifteen hundred persons made the journey from McKeesport to Pittsburgh to testify to the lasting benefits which their city had received from the evangelist's visit.

Usually some organization of the "trail-hitters" is effected after the evangelist's departure. These are bands for personal Christian work. The most remarkable of them all is reported from Wichita, Kansas, where the aftermath of the Sunday meetings has become so formidable as to suggest a new and general method of Christian service by laymen.