“A Personal and Private Search for God”

It will come as no surprise to the ancient men of my generation that I was once in love with Hayley Mills.  That inconsequential factoid hardly sets me apart or reveals me as a hopeless romantic— all the men of my generation were once in love with Hayley Mills.  That is, all the men who were born in the mid-1950s saw the Walt Disney film The Parent Trap in 1961 and emerged from the cinema with a tremendous childhood crush on its young fifteen year old star who played the identical twins Susan and Sharon (inset above) in the film (featuring one of the first uses of the “split screen” technique). Such childhood crushes of course don’t last. A few years later Hayley had faded from our hearts and we were in love with someone else. For me in 1963 it was my grade 3 teacher, Miss Rich.

       I mention Ms. Mills because I have just read her brilliant, candid, and well-written autobiography Forever Young and was surprised to learn that she once attended a Billy Graham rally.  One doesn’t think of stars immersed in Hollywood or British theatre and who attend All The Best Parties sitting in an arena and listening to an address by Billy Graham, but so it was.  The bit is worth quoting in Mills’ own words.

       “Dr. Billy Graham had been in London for a month and his ‘Crusade’ was drawing enormous crowds… I was fascinated by his story and I wanted to go and hear him speak.  It was a very relaxed affair. His words were simple, he talked about real things, real issues in people’s lives… He had a powerful voice and a tremendously strong presence and he was totally sincere… The most important thing he spoke about was our relationship with God. And when he talked about tolerance and love, his words challenged every individual sitting in that arena.

       Listening to him preach, surrounded by all those thousands of people in that vast hall, I found myself going back to that tiny little chapel at Elmhurst, to Father’s John’s stirring sermons.  As children we had always said our prayers at night, kneeling by the side of the bed. Later, as I grew up, I prayed less and less; other things filled my life and I felt I had outgrown it. But after that evening listening to Billy Graham, I made a personal reconnection and I started to pray again. Prayer has helped to carry me over some of the most challenging and stormy times of my life and that evening was the beginning of my spiritual search. [After the invitation to come forward] I found myself walking with them. I wanted to be swept up, to be part of this energy.” 

       I was quite surprised to read this and thought that perhaps Mills was a Christian, perhaps in the Evangelical wing of the Church of England.  Was John Stott’s All Souls, Langham Place church up and running then?  Then I continued to read:

“A few days late someone from the Crusade called me up and invited me to go to church with them, but I shied away from it. I didn’t want to join a church or feel under any obligation to a group. It had been an inspiring experience and I recognized the need to search for God in my own life— but for now, it was personal and private.”

Alas, it appeared that Mills was not a church-going Christian after all.  Her stated reason was significant: she did not want to “feel under any obligation to a group”, any sense of accountability where someone or something, priest or Scripture, might tell her she could not do whatever she wanted to do. 

In fact, later in life she came into contact with Beatle George Harrison and his attraction to Hinduism.  She said that “the first time a Krishna devotee carefully explained about karma, it was like a light going on”.  Thereafter she always carried “a small framed picture of ‘Sri Govinda’—Lord Krishna as the divine cowherd”.  Billy Graham’s reaction could be imagined.

The reason for sharing all this has less to do with the specifics of an individual than the message and methodology of Dr. Billy Graham and Evangelicals like him.  In this case in particular, their separation of a call to commitment to Christ from their call to join a church proved unfortunate and fatal.  Dr. Graham called upon Hayley and those listening with her to commit themselves to Christ but apparently this was something quite separate and separable from the question of her joining a church. 

It was this separation of commitment to Christ from commitment to His Church that proved to be the problem.  Hayley believed that she could say ‘yes’ to Christ and still say ‘no’ to the Church.  In fact, Christ and His Church are as inseparable as the head is meant to be inseparable to the body. To say ‘yes’ to Christ necessarily involves also saying ‘yes’ to joining His Church.  Church attendance is not an add-on or something that another person could suggest days later.  Joining the Church and becoming a part of Christ’s saving Body was what it meant to commit oneself to Christ.

       That is a very different message from that offered by evangelists such as the late Dr. Graham or from the message contained in such “tracts” as “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?”  This latter Evangelical message concentrates exclusively upon saying a prayer inviting Christ to come into your heart.  Church attendance, if mentioned at all, is considered as something entirely different from becoming “saved”; it is regarded as something beneficial and perhaps required by the Bible, but not as a part of first receiving forgiveness from Christ.

       It was otherwise in the New Testament.  When St. Peter preached a sermon on the Day of Pentecost inviting his fellow Jews to become disciples of Christ, he did not invite them to say a prayer, but to repent and be baptized into the Church (see Acts 2:38).  Coming to Christ was synonymous with joining the Church and thereby becoming a part of His Body. They were not forgiven by saying a prayer or “accepting the finished work of Christ” (i.e. believing a theological truth) but by receiving a sacrament.  St. Peter did not say, “let each one of you ask Jesus into your heart for the forgiveness of your sins” but rather “let each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins”.  This baptism, administered by church leaders and in the church assembly, constituted joining the Church.

       It is this ecclesial element of salvation that needs to be an integral part of the call to commitment to Christ.  Unless there was a baptismal font filled and ready, Christian forgiveness of sins could not be received by Dr. Graham’s listeners at his Crusade.  The invitation should have been for his listeners to go to church that Sunday, talk to the pastor, and arrange for baptism and sacramental church membership, not to say a prayer with the assurance that forgiveness would follow as a result of it. It was omitting this ecclesial component that made the whole exercise ultimately unfruitful in the case of Hayley Mills— and, if Dr. Graham’s own “follow up” statistics are to be trusted— in the case of many others also. 

       The Evangelical methodology and theology embraced by such evangelists as Dr. Graham are rooted in a post-Enlightenment individualism— an individualism ascendant in our culture today. In this mindset, salvation is something one does as an individual, in comparative isolation, an affair between “Jesus and me”.  A growing relationship with others in the church community and one’s integration into that sacramental community, though it may come as a result of salvation, is not an integral part of it.  

That is why some Evangelicals dismissively reject what they call “Church-ianity” (as opposed to “Christianity”) and why they insist that one is not saved by church-going but by Christ.  They have a point, in that it is possible for someone to attend church and not know Christ.  But their radical separation of Christ from His Body the Church is profoundly unbiblical.  Salvation is something worked out throughout one’s life in humility (“in fear and trembling”; Philippians 2:12) as a part of the sacramental life of the Church.  It begins with a personal commitment of oneself to Christ in baptism, but it does not end there.  It is a process, a journey because life is a process and a journey.  And that journey consists of living as a part of the worshipping Christian community.

In short, one can have a personal and private search for God.  But after you have found God (or better, after He has found you) the journey, though personal, is no longer private.  The saved soul is isolated no more, but takes its place as a member of a family, as a limb in a body, as a sheep in a sheepfold.  The only truly and completely private place in the cosmos is Hell.  The saved find themselves as citizens of the teeming, noisy, shiny, and glorious City of God.  And just how teeming and noisy?  In the brief peek at it supplied by the Book of Revelation, we are told that the voice of song and joy and praise was like the sound of many waters and mighty peals of thunder (Revelation 19:6).  That is a lot of song, a lot of joy.  That is where our personal journey is meant to end.  We are to come finally home, brought by angels through the wide and open gates, and find the face of Christ, the triumphant goal of all good journeys.