Play Ball!

Play Ball!

This professional baseball player spoke to larger crowds than he played for.

HIS NAME was Billy Sunday, and he was born near Ames, Iowa, in 1862. His father, a Union soldier, died before he saw his son. His Christian mother then married a man who deserted her. Unable to provide for all her children, she was forced to send Billy and a brother to an orphanage.

After high school Billy moved to Marshalltown, Iowa, where he played on the local state champion baseball team. His amazing speed attracted the attention of the manager of the Chicago White Stockings, and he signed with Chicago in 1883.

One Sunday afternoon in Chicago in 1886, Billy and some of his teammates went to a saloon and, after drinking their fill, went outside and sat down on the curb. Across the street a Christian band was singing and playing gospel songs that Billy remembered his mother singing years before in their log cabin. Overcome with nostalgia, Billy began to sob. One of the young men in the band walked over to him and said, “We are going down to the Pacific Garden Mission. Won’t you come down to the mission?”

Billy hesitated for a moment before jumping to his feet. He told his teammates on the curb, “I’m through. I am going to Jesus Christ. We’ve come to a parting of the ways.” Sunday walked to the mission and fell down on his knees and into the arms of the Savior. Dreading his return to the ballpark the next day, he was pleasantly surprised to find his teammates supportive of what he had done.

Billy joined the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church and regularly went to Bible studies at the YMCA. In 1888 he married Helen Thompson, the sister of the White Stockings batboy.

In 1891 Sunday ended his baseball career to work full time for the YMCA for a fraction of what he had earned as a baseball player. After two years he went to work as an advance man for evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman. When Chapman suddenly stopped traveling as an evangelist in 1895, he invited Sunday to hold evangelistic services for him in Garner, Iowa. Billy did so, using Chapman’s sermon materials, and was never without invitations to preach from that time on. The Presbyterian Church did not license Sunday until 1898, and he wasn’t ordained until 1903, but he never let that stand in his way.

Sunday started out holding evangelistic crusades in small midwestern towns and gradually went to the larger cities of the Midwest and the East. His unorthodox preaching style, acrobatic antics, and flamboyant gestures attracted the press, making him a household name.

The climax of Sunday’s services followed the sermon, when he invited members of the audience to “walk the sawdust trail” to the front, indicating their decision to commit their lives to Christ. His most successful crusade was in New York City, where 98,264 people “hit the sawdust trail” in ten weeks.

Much of Sunday’s success was due to the organizational skills of his wife, Helen. At the peak of his career as an evangelist he had a full-time staff of twenty-three, including his song leader, Homer Rodeheaver. He preached to more than one hundred million during his lifetime, and hundreds of thousands put their faith in the Lord Jesus through his ministry.

Billy Sunday preached his last sermon on October 27, 1935, and forty-four came forward in the service. Ten days later he went to be with the Lord. No one else had done more than he in the early days of the twentieth century in America to keep the Christian faith vital and growing.

Reflection

How would you have reacted to Billy Sunday? Theologian J. Gresham Machen shared this reaction: “Much of it, I confess, left me cold. . . . But in the last five or ten minutes of that sermon, I got a new realization of the power of the gospel.” Have you ever had a negative reaction to preachers with a unique style? What should be our criteria for evaluating preaching?

Dear brothers and sisters, when I first came to you I didn’t use lofty words and brilliant ideas to tell you God’s message. For I decided to concentrate only on Jesus Christ and his death on the cross.

1 Corinthians 2:1-2