High Pitch, Low Key

On New Year's Eve television screens, Evangelist Billy Graham, sports-jacketed and gray-templed, delivered a fireside jeremiad. Citing the year's woeful parade of scandals, crises and other miseries, Graham warned that the U.S. would experience even worse difficulties if Americans did not forthwith repent and return to God. "The only answer," he said, "is Jesus."

Throughout the half-hour sermon, Graham never once mentioned the campaign that was supposed to have been the evangelical catchword of the year: Key 73 (TIME, Feb. 19). As labored over for six years by Graham's organization and more than 150 other participating groups, Key 73 was intended to be a broad ecumenical effort to spread the Gospel--CALLING OUR CONTINENT TO CHRIST as the slogan put it. But by year's end most people on the continent had scarcely heard of it.

What happened? For one thing, admits the Rev. T.A. Raedeke, Lutheran executive director of Key 73, "it was a fiasco financially." Organizers had hoped for at least $2,000,000 for the national campaign; less than $600,000 materialized. Most of the money went for a television special and other activities of "Launch Weekend" a year ago. Local and regional groups, though, spent at least $10 million on Key 73.

Controversy also upset the effort. Taking the evangelical rhetoric too literally, Jews were initially incensed by the "Christian America" overtones of the campaign. But Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee, one of the most vehement critics, conceded later that the fracas had actually promoted better Jewish-Christian understanding of evangelism.

Some fundamentalist Christian critics were less easy to appease, especially when 43 Roman Catholic dioceses joined Key 73. The fundamentalists charged that the campaign was sacrificing important doctrinal distinctions for the sake of a watered-down Gospel. Its defenders counter that the basic Christian message is difficult enough to sell without ecclesiastical infighting.

Changing Lives. Key 73's most significant accomplishment, apart from the distribution of 50 million Bibles or scriptural excerpts, was its promotion of new kinds of interdenominational evangelism. There were many cordial meetings among such various participants as Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics and Salvation Army members and among WASPS, blacks and Puerto Ricans. Evangelicals were pleased that some Protestant liberals were again emphasizing "the need for changing individual lives."

The United Methodist Church--one of the mainstream churches that worked most energetically in Key 73--is a case in point. Not only are Methodists once again enthusiastic about evangelism, but they now view it as a joint effort of all Christians, says the Rev. Ira Gallaway, head of evangelism for the denomination. This week, in fact, United Methodists will meet with two conservative Wesleyan denominations and three black Methodist churches in a congress on evangelism in Dallas.

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