Preacher with a football pitch as his pulpit

THE CROWD outside Bramall Lane snaked around the block several times over, that week in 1985. But it wasn’t Sheffield United they had come to worship.

Billy Graham, the evangelist who preached to presidents, had brought his roadshow finally to Yorkshire. With a football pitch for a pulpit, he beckoned his flock to come forward and commit themselves to Christ. More than 26,000 did.

“May God help you to make that commitment tonight with these many people that are coming here in Yorkshire, Sheffield, England,” he implored an extended audience on TV.

His death yesterday, eight months short of his 100th birthday, brought to a close perhaps the most remarkable chapter of organised Christianity in the 20th century.

Graham had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and other illnesses, and died at his home in North Carolina.

He was a veteran of more than a dozen British crusades, and hundreds around the world, when he arrived in Sheffield on June 22, 1985 for a weeklong engagement. Cliff Richard came to hear him, not for the first time, and so did the Bishop of Sheffield. Richard sang to the crowd and acceded to the Bishop’s request to renounce his links to a still-divided South Africa.

The Bramall Lane grass was ringed by people in wheelchairs. Some 50 others had to be placed by the St John Ambulance Brigade in one, as hysteria took hold.

Such circuses were familiar to his disciples. His first in Britain had been in London, in the spring of 1954. His 12-week campaign defied expectations, drawing more than two million people. The Queen reportedly invited him to Buckingham Palace for tea and private counselling.

By that time he had been on the road across the US for seven years.

His practice was to rent a stadium, park, or street, and to preach to thousands at a time.

His global audience, through his pioneering use of TV and radio, extended to more than 200 million, and unlike traditional evangelists, he abandoned narrow fundamentalism and engaged broader society, turning evangelicalism into a force that rivalled liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the US.

They called him America’s pastor, and he was a confidant to presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W Bush.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. When the Billy Graham Museum and Library was dedicated in 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina, former presidents George HW Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton attended.

But one president, Richard Nixon, was his Achilles heel. Graham looked the other way during the Watergate scandal, and when, three decades later, tapes were released of conversations the two had held at the White House, they were littered with offensive comments. Graham apologised.

Racism was not in his nature, and in the segregated American south, he had refused to “preach Jim Crow,” as he put it, and – though he was criticised for being “too moderate” on the issue – made several “visits of racial conciliation” to the southern states, at the height of America’s civil rights era.

By his final crusade in 2005 in New York City, he had preached in person to more than 210 million people worldwide. No evangelist is expected to have his level of influence again.

It had been a 1949 Los Angeles revival that turned Mr Graham into evangelism’s rising star. Held in a tent they called the Canvas Cathedral, he had been drawing adequate, but not spectacular crowds until reporters and photographers descended without warning, apparently on the instructions of the publisher William Randolph Hearst. The publicity gave him a national profile, and over the next decade, his crusades made him an international celebrity.

His wife, Ruth, died in 2007 aged 87. They have five children.

May God help you to make that commitment tonight Billy Graham’s message for the people of Sheffield in 1985.