The Baseball Evangelist
Hello everyone. Today I want to tell you an interesting story from American church history. I want to tell you about a very unusual man.
His name is Billy, and he was a world-famous evangelist. But not Billy Graham. Before Billy Graham, there was Billy Sunday.
This man was born in 1862 outside Ames, Iowa, in a little log cabin with rough boards for a floor. This is during the Civil War, and Billy never saw nor knew his father. The elder Sunday, William, was a contractor and brick mason. He enlisted in the Union Army. While fording a river, he became wet to the skin, contracted a severe cold, and died from pneumonia during the war. He was buried at Camp Patterson in Missouri.
The young widow, Mary, tried to raise her new baby and his older brother, Ed, but it was a hard prairie life. Billy grew up milking cows, cutting wood, building fences, and riding horses. Despite her best efforts, Mrs. Sunday couldn’t provide for her boys, and at length she sent them to the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home at Glenwood, Iowa. Billy later recalled how she took them to the train station, her eyes red with tears, and put them on the train without being able to give them enough money for the ticket. A kind railroad man, touched by their story, let them ride for free.
Thankfully, the two brothers did very well in the Home. When it was discontinued, they were transferred to an orphans’ home in Davenport, Iowa, where they studied under good Bible teachers. Billy wasn’t a Christian at the time, but he learned a lot about the Bible.
When Billy was fourteen, he went with his brother Ed to live with their grandfather back near Ames. But Billy didn’t like farm life, and, despite his older brother’s tears, he left the farm and traveled to a nearby town where he got a job at a hotel. By and by, he learned that a prominent local politician and Civil War veteran, Col. John Scott, wanted to hire a boy to work for him. When Billy applied for the job, Mrs. Scott didn’t like his looks, but she told him he could go and scrub the cellar stairs.
Billy cleaned the stairs so well that he was hired on the spot. Shortly after, Billy was able to enroll in high school. He proved to be sensational at sports. His speed as a runner was incredible, and he became known as one of the few people in the country who could run a hundred yards in ten seconds. After graduating from high school, Billy moved to another town and joined the local baseball team.
He excelled as a player and caught the attention of Cap Anson, also from Iowa, who had been a famous baseball player with the Chicago White Stockings (today known as the Chicago Cubs).
Anson persuaded Billy to move to Chicago and join the team. And just like that, Billy Sunday became a professional baseball player. His speed in running around the bases was sensational, and he became a very popular figure. His speed and athleticism, along with his outgoing and friendly personality, made him a celebrity wherever he went. He specialized in stealing bases, with ninety-four steals in one season.
One day he was strolling around the Chicago streets with some of his baseball friends. He saw a small crowd gathered in an empty lot at the corner of State and Van Buren streets. It was an outdoor evangelistic rally conducted by workers of the Pacific Garden Mission. Billy and his friends stopped to listen, and soon sat down on the curb and heard every word of the sermon. The group sang some Gospel songs, and Billy remembered his mother singing the same songs. He went on down the street and visited the Pacific Garden Mission. He even sat through a worship service there. He did the same for several nights in a row.
The Pacific Garden Mission had been started by Colonel George Clarke and his wife Sarah. It was Sarah that sat down with him, talked with him like a mother, and led him to confess Jesus Christ as his Savior.
Incidentally, when I was in college in the 1970s, I visited the Pacific Garden Mission, which is famous around the world. Billy Sunday’s pulpit was still in use in the chapel, and I stood behind it. Attached to the pulpit in a place only the preacher can see is a quote from the Gospel of John: “Sir, We Would See Jesus.” Sunday wanted to focus on showing people Jesus. I assume the pulpit is still there at the Old Lighthouse, as the Pacific Garden Mission is often called.
Well, let’s get back to Billy Sunday, the baseball player.
Not long after his conversion Billy suffered an injury while sliding into base. He always slid headfirst, but this time something went wrong and he hurt his knee. When the Chicago White Stockings took a promotional trip around the world, Billy stayed home at the insistence of his doctor. Soon he was working actively in a nearby Presbyterian church. He also joined the YMCA, which, at that time, was focused on training young men in the Bible. Billy learned everything he could.
One Sunday he was asked to teach a class of young men. The guys in the class wanted to talk with him about his baseball career. Finally he promised to meet with them the next day to talk about baseball if he could teach them the Bible during the class period.
For several years, Billy played professional baseball in Chicago and then in Pittsburg and finally for the Philadelphia Phillies, all the while teaching the Bible and giving religious talks at YMCAs in every city where the team traveled. Before long pastors began asking him to speak from their pulpits at Sunday services.
One newspaper said, “It is something of a novelty to see a professional ball player get up in the pulpit, and, forgetting base hits, home runs, brilliant catches and the [roar of the crowd] for a while, expound on the great doctrines of Christ in such a forcible manner as to almost bring tears to the eyes of over fifteen hundred people.”
Along the way, Billy met a young woman named Helen Thompson. She was a Sunday School teacher. Her father, too, had been a Union Soldier in the Civil War and had been wounded at Shiloh. Billy was 24 years old when they met. They were married in 1888.
Billy retired from baseball in 1891 to engage in Christian work, and he became an assistant to one of the best-known evangelists of the day, Dr. J. Wilber Chapman. Here I’m going to insert another personal remark. A few years ago I had a visit from Dr. Chapman’s granddaughter, who was researching a biography of him. In addition to his preaching and writing, he is the author of two of my favorite hymns. The first one says, “Jesus, what a friend of sinners, Jesus lover of my soul. Friends may fail me; foes assail me. He, my Savior, makes me whole.” And he also wrote the hymn, “Glorious Day,” which says, “Living, He loved me; Dying, He saved me. Buried, He carried my sins far away; Rising, he justified freely forever. One day He’s coming, O glorious day!”
Billy served as the advance man for the J. Wilber Chapman crusades. He would go into a city and make all the arrangements with the pastors and churches and for the tent and the choir. Then he would begin the meetings and preach for several nights until Dr. Chapman arrived. This went on for three years, until Dr. Chapman accepted the invitation of a church to become its pastor and left the rigors of a traveling evangelist.
That freed up Billy to begin conducting his own campaigns and crusades, mostly in Iowa at first. Each service began with Gospel songs led by a song leader and with a mass choir made up of people from all the church choirs in town. Then Billy would preach. At the end of his sermon, he would ask those who were interested in receiving Christ as Savior to raise their hands. Personal workers would go through the audience and invite those who raised their hands to come forward for prayer and counseling.
At first these meetings were held in large churches or auditoriums, but these proved too small for the numbers of people who came. So Billy began using large tents. But even the largest tents proved too small, so the advance teams began building special tabernacles that could hold the crowds.
One reporter said: “You are in the largest room you ever saw, and the whole scene is glorious with electric light and bunting. Look where you will, the brightness dazzles you…. Billy requires the tabernacle to be one of the most brilliantly lighted places in the city. The building you have entered will seat about ten thousand, and there is standing room for two or three thousand more….”
Billy Sunday was perhaps the most athletic preacher who ever lived. He ran back and forth across the platform, jumped on the chairs, pounded the pulpit, kicked the pulpit, shook his fist, leaped into the air, and traveled at least a mile per message around the stage. Sometimes he smashed chairs across the pulpit. And then suddenly he would lean over the desk, look exhausted, his suit wet with perspiration, and say, “You know that God has spoken to you. You know that without Christ you are lost, and that with Him you are saved. You know your duty and your privilege; and now without another word from me, and before anyone can have a chance to say anything to you, how many of you will settle the great question without the delay of another minute by coming forward to take me by the hand, and by so doing confess and accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior? Who will come?”
From all over the tabernacle people would come forward in large numbers to give their lives for Christ.
I’m also happy to tell you that Billy Sunday’s mother, who so tearfully put her sons on the train for the orphanage years before, lived long enough to see her son preaching to the great crowds. She had a special seat on the platform in many of his great meetings.
The floors of the tabernacle were sawdust, and the aisles were sawdust. That gave rise to a famous phrase that developed from the Sunday crusades—hitting the sawdust trail. It meant going forward to be saved. When a Billy Sunday campaign came to town, it was a sensational event.
One newspaper said about a Billy Sunday meeting in his town: “Every walk of life was influenced. It could not be resisted. It went into every office, every shop, every home, every street. It claimed converts in every profession. The police of the city were captured. Every policeman placed on duty at the tabernacle hit the sawdust trail. The chief himself, seated on the platform, made a hearty and open confession of Christ. Lawyers, physicians, merchants, artisans of every description, all added their quota to the harvest of the evangelist. One pastor wrote, ‘The work cannot be conservatively and sanely described. It would be like trying to describe a cyclone when you are in the midst of its fury.’”
The article went on to say, “Men and women were carried off their feet. Men who had never listened to a religious appeal, surrendered to the call of Christ. Many who had hated evangelism and feared the Gospel were caught in the throes of decision. The total number of converts during the campaign was 18,149. There were 95 tabernacle meetings held, and the aggregate attendance was nearly a million people.”
Everywhere Billy Sunday went resulted in the town or city being changed. The Ohio State Journal said about the story and statistics in one Ohio city:
“In the opinion of men who have studied the campaigns of great revivalists, this record surpasses all figures thus far compiled in the United States and abroad, and may be taken as the greatest evangelistic demonstration of modern times. For more than seven weeks, hundreds of businessmen neglected their private affairs. For an equal period, social engagements were disregarded or sidetracked. For that length of time sixty churches had closed their doors (so people could attend the meetings and) the pastors devoted most of their time to advancing the work of the campaign. And during all those days the Rev. Billy Sunday, the baseball evangelist, talked and prayed, sweated and pranced about the platform, besought and entreated with sinners, flayed with scalding inventive every sort of wickedness, and endeared himself personally to the multitudes who either had been openly or covertly antagonistic. Under the spell of his oratory and the persuasive influence of his coworkers, all manner of men were made to take a new view of life. City and county officials, saloon keepers and professors, society women and shop girls, schoolchildren and avowed agnostics stood up and said “I publicly accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”
When Sunday held a campaign in Los Angeles, he met Charlie Chaplain. The actor later said: “I was swept off my feet. I had known I was to meet him and had tried to think of some nice things to say. But I just could not talk. I had a bad attack of stage fright. He put his arm around my shoulder and then I felt sure he was going to ask me about my soul. But he did not. He asked me to join the family in his dressing room. I followed him in, still dazed. There was nothing artificial about the man or his family…. I did not think of him then as Reverend Mr. Sunday, but just plain Billy.”
The famous actress Mary Pickford was similarly impressed, saying, “When Mr. Sunday, hot and tired from his long talk, came up and I was introduced, I did not know whether or not he had ever heard of me, but he took my hand, shook it heartily, and said: ‘You’ve done lots of good in this world too.’ Wasn’t it nice of him to say that. Here is one man who is against everything sinful, evil, or malicious, telling us that at least some of us are appreciated for the good we are trying to do in our small way. It is the nicest compliment I have ever been paid.”
In all, Billy preached for about forty years and held more than 300 campaigns or crusades. He was seen and heard by one hundred million people—more than another other person in history to that point. It’s estimated he led over a million people to place their faith in Christ.
In spite of that, people look back and criticize Billy Sunday for his theatrics, for the large love offerings he received at the end of each meeting, and for his alleged neglect of his children.
Billy and Helen had three sons and a daughter, each of whom suffered tragedy. Helen Sunday died of pneumonia in 1932. George was arrested for drunkenness and auto theft before he committed suicide in 1933. After Billy Sunday’s death in 1935, Billy Jr. died in an automobile in 1938. And Paul, who became a test pilot, died in an airplane crash in 1944.
Billy’s primary associate and music director was Homer Rodeheaver, who served as master of ceremonies for the meetings and led the music and the choir. He led the music with a trombone in his hand. In those days without amplification, Rodeheaver knew his trombone could be heard when his voice could not. Perhaps the song that he made the most famous was “The Old Rugged Cross,” which had been written by George Bennard in 1912.
Even Rodeheaver became concerned that later in his ministry Sunday was gradually declining in his ability to do his work. Rodeheaver felt Sunday was preaching too long and too fast for the audience to understand, and that he had lost the clarity of his invitation. Billy also had started pacing across the platform while the choir sang, which frustrated Rodeheaver.
He wrote a letter outlining his concerns, but Mrs. Sunday intercepted it before Billy saw it. Rodeheaver quietly left the organization, but within a few years the parties were reconciled and at peace and Rodeheaver spoke at Billy’s funeral.
After World War I, Billy’s popularity waned and his health declined. In 1935, he suffered a mild heart attack, and the doctors advised him to stay out of the pulpit. That he could not do. He died a week after preaching his last sermon on the subject, “What must I do to be saved.”
Several years ago I visited the modest Billy Sunday home in Winona Lake, Indiana. It’s still there as a museum to Billy and Ma Sunday if you want to visit it. It’s well worth a visit. While I was there, I purchased a little booklet called Ma Sunday Still Speaks, which was a transcription of a tape recording Helen Sunday made before her death. She was a big part of the secret for Billy’s success.
In her recording, Nellie or Helen or Ma Sunday—she was known by all those names—told about Billy’s final days. Their daughter’s death devastated him, and not long afterward as he was preaching, Helen saw that something was wrong with him. She slipped to the church office and told one of his associates to go onto the platform and help him. The man said, “What will I do?” Ma Sunday said, “I don’t know, but something is wrong. You’ll just have to figure it out yourself. You’ll just have to let the Lord lead you in what to do!” The man went onto the platform and put his hand on Billy’s shoulder and said, “Boss, you’re not feeling very well just now—let me finish the sermon for you.” He led Billy to a side door and a doctor was waiting. Billy had suffered a heart attack.
After a long recovery, and with invitations coming from all over the country, Billy tried to preach again. But he had another heart attack in Chattanooga. After another recovery, he accepted an invitation to preach and his last sermon was from the text, “What must I do to be saved?” When Billy gave the invitation, 49 people came forward to be saved.
A few days later, Billy was so weak he was sitting in a chair with a blanket around his knees. He felt like eating some rice crispies with crackers and cold milk. In a few minutes he called out, “Nell! Come quick. I’ve got an awful pain.” He said it was running across his chest. They put an ice bag on his chest and a hot water bottle on his feet. He relaxed, and Nell went over to the desk to write some letters. He said, “I’m getting dizzy, ma!” And he was gone. It was November 6,1935. He was 72 years old.
Billy’s music leader, Homer Rodeheaver, lived another twenty years and became a famous publisher of Gospel music. He was one of the first Christian artists to record songs on record labels. His best known songs were the Sunday Campaign theme song: “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” But he also recorded “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart,” and “In the Garden.”
Here’s something wonderful. There are a few video clips of Billy Sunday preaching. You can find them on YouTube. One is a short clip entitled “Billy Sunday Burns Up the Backsliding World.” Billy always fought the sale of liquor, and you’ll find some clips of his sermons about that. You can also find some Homer Rodeheaver clips online.
Here are some classic Billy Sunday quotes:
• Whiskey is all right in its place—but its place is hell.
• I believe that a long step toward public morality will have been taken when sins are called by their right names.
• Your reputation is what people say about you. Your character is what God and your wife know about you.
• If you took no more care of yourself physically than spiritually, you’d be just as dried up physically as you are spiritually.
• If you live wrong you can’t die right.
• There is more power in a mother’s hand than in a king’s scepter.
• Going to church doesn’t make a man a Christian, any more than going to a garage makes him an automobile.
But here is my favorite Billy Sunday quote. I sometimes wonder if he wrote it or found it somewhere else because it’s not rough as a corncob like he was, but eloquent. But Billy could also be eloquent too, and I’ve found it attributed to no one but him.
Twenty-nine years ago, with the Holy Spirit as my Guide, I entered at the portico of Genesis, walked down the corridor of the Old Testament art galleries, where pictures of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Isaac, Jacob, and Daniel hung on the wall. I passed into the music room of Psalms where the Spirit sweeps the keyboard of nature until it seems that every reed and pipe in God’s great organ responds to the harp of David, the sweet singer of Israel.
I entered the chamber of Ecclesiastes, where the voice of the preacher is heard, and into the conservatory of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley where sweet spices filled and perfumed my life. I entered the business office of Proverbs and on into the observatory of the prophets where I saw telescopes of various sizes pointing to far off events, concentrating on the bright and morning Star which was to rise above the moonlit hills of Judea for our salvation and redemption.
I entered the audience room of the King of Kings, catching a vision written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Thence into the correspondence room with Paul, Peter, James, and John writing the Epistles.
I stepped into the throne room of Revelation where tower the glittering peaks, where sits the King of Kings upon His throne of glory with the healing of the nations in His hand, and I cried out:
All hail the power of Jesus’ name!
Let angels’ prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem
And crown Him Lord of all.
Well, thank you for digging into an interesting slice of American church history with me.