I accepted Christ as my savior in a Vacation Bible School in Evansville, Indiana, in 1954 when I was eleven. My parents found a small Baptist church that some of their friends attended and my mother and I were baptized on the same day. She died of Leukemia two years later, the first real test of my Christian faith.
As a freshman in high school, I joined the Youth for Christ club that met weekly after school in the teacher/sponsor’s class room. Each meeting began and ended with a prayer usually led by the teacher, Mrs. Saltzman. We would discuss temptations and problems we were going through as teenage Christians and would plan outings together. As Youth for Christ members we were notified of every Billy Graham crusade. We watched them on TV then discussed them at our next meeting. In that time of racial hatred and tension I was struck by the scenes of African-American and white men and women peacefully worshiping together and I instinctively knew that is how it should be. I saw Billy Graham and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stand side by side on the platform at Madison Square Garden and proclaim that there is only one race – the human race and everyone in that race needs Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior. I witnessed the love and respect Billy Graham and his team had for Ethel Waters, the very warm reception she always received from worshipers of all races, and the love she showed to “My boy, Billy” and his team.
I had been spared from the racial hatred that existed in some homes in those days. I never heard my parents say anything negative about African-Americans and as president of his local auto workers’ union my father welcomed African-American workers into the union in the face of very strong opposition.
More than 50 years later, when I visited Christian Life Center for the first time it felt like I was coming home to the Spirit filled services of the Billy Graham crusades where all of God’s people worshiped Christ together listening to a message not based on church doctrine or tradition, but on the inspired word of God.