'An Independent Baptist Church'

Billy Sunday
1862 - 1935

Contemporary Evangelism may probably never see the likes of a Billy Sunday again.  

William Ashley (Billy) Sunday was converted from pro baseball to Christ at age twenty-three but carried his athletic ability into the pulpit. When he stepped up to the podium, he didn’t just preach......he EXPLODED!

Born in a two-room log cabin near Ames, Iowa, on November 19, 1862, his father died in the Civil War of Pneumonia one month after Billy was born.  So Billy never knew his dad. All he had was a faded picture of his father, but his mother tried to raise him the best she could while she and the children lived with her father, Billy’s grandfather.

At age 10, Billy nearly drowned while swimming in a creek as he played with other boys.  He miraculously survived, and his mother cried, "It’s a miracle, God saved you!  God saved you for a reason, Billy!  God wants you to do something for him!

I wonder how many people here today have been spared from premature death so they could do great things for God?

I wonder how many boys and girls in this room have something special waiting for them in God’s Plan, like this little 10 year old?

Billy’s mother told him, "Oh, Billie, be thankful!  Never refuse to do anything God asks of you.  He saved you for something - find out what it is and do it, my boy!  Do it!"  

As Willie dozed his mother sang, "Where He leads me I will follow,  I’ll go with Him, with Him all the way."  Another song Billy’s mother would sing to him was , “Where is my Wandering Boy tonight?”  Billy’s mother taught him to say the following prayer every night before he went to bed:

"Jesus, bless this little lamb, weak and sinful though I am.  Lead me, guide me, day by day; Never let me from Thee stray."

Life was hard for Billy’s family with no daddy, and everyone had chores to do.  Farm work gave Billy endurance and strength.  At age 12, Billy and his brother were placed in the Soldier’s Orphan’s Home in Glenwood, Iowa. Billy took took odd jobs as a teenager, one helping breed horses, and another as an undertaker’s assistant, helping drive the hearst.

 A life of hard work paid off in athletic prowess.  Billy’s speed made him quite famous as a local baseball player.  A lady who lived in town was Aunt to the famous Cap Anson, leader of the Famous Chicago White Stockings (Later to become the Chicago Cubs).  She kept telling Cap Anson about this young man, Billy Sunday, who he ought to watch play ball, and especially notice Billy’s Speed.  He could outrun everybody.

 Billy went to Chicago to meet Cap and the team.  Here was this country lad with all of these great and famous ballplayers he had read about and admired. Billy later said it was the greatest team of baseball players ever assembled.   Cap said, "I hear you’re pretty fast, Billy."  "That’s right’" Billy Replied.  Cap said, “We have the fastest runner in the National League on our team.  Will you race him?”   They all went out on the field, and several of the players put on their special spiked shoes, and even put on their warm-up uniforms. 

These professional baseball players were making a big deal of it, and were having fun, because they believed no country kid had a chance to beat some of the fastest players to ever play the game, as they smiled to themselves.  They had the fastest player in the National League on their team at that time.  Billy took off his shoes and stood barefoot as they all looked at him.  “Don’t you have any running shoes”? They asked.  “Nope, I run barefooted.” Billy replied.

Well, they all got set, and Billy beat the fastest runner in the National League at that time by 15 feet in a 100 yard race!  So shocked was everybody that no one even remembers who came in third.  Billy was given a contract right then and there with one of the best baseball teams in Baseball at that time.  Billy went on to be one of Professional Baseball’s most daring base stealers and fastest runners to ever play the game.  He was the first runner to circle the bases in 14 seconds, and held that record for several years.

 In 1890, the last year Billy played, he stole 96 bases, a baseball record. In 1915, Ty Cobb stole 98 bases.  But listen to this, Billy accomplished his feat in 116 games, while Ty Cobb stole 98 bases in 150 games!  Billy Sunday had no peer when it came to stealing bases.  Billy’s peak batting average was .350 one year. Billy Sunday became one of the sport’s Idols of his day!

   
However, Billy’s early success in baseball was diluted by strong drink.

How many young men and women with so much potential for great accomplishments have had their dreams destroyed by alcohol?
One Sunday afternoon in 1886,  Billy and some of his baseball buddies were seated on a curb in Chicago ‘all tanked up’, but he was still able to listen with interest to a Salvation Army Gospel Team as they happened to be singing the song, “Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?”, his mother’s favorite song, and it broke his heart.

 Coming under Holy Spirit conviction, he remembered his mother’s prayers and accepted the group’s invitation to a Pacific Garden Mission church service that night.

I wonder how many young men and women here today have mothers still praying for them?

Billy went to the preaching service that night and was saved!  The next day, the news hit the newspapers, for back in that day it was rare for a professional athlete to become a Christian!  Billy wondered how his teammates would react, for they had a reputation of being the roughest of the rough!

Everyone to a man congratulated Billy and wished him the best in his new walk.  They promised if this was the path he chose, none of them would hinder him in anyway.

He immediately became actively involved in Christian work, while continuing to play baseball for 5 more years. During this time, he married his wife, Helen, in 1888 whom he met at the Church he was attending.

He had just received a big pay raise, but he felt God was calling him to leave baseball, and play on God’s Team!

Billy Sunday left baseball in 1890 after 8 seasons, at the very peak of his career at age 28!

He left a $500/month contract for $84/month salary working for the YMCA.  He did clerical work and the YMCA arranged speaking engagements for him to give his testimony, and he attracted crowds because of his baseball fame. At first he said he could hardly speak 3 sentences without ‘sputtering and sweating’!

He soon became an associate to evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, and in 1896, at the age of 34, Chapman abruptly decided to go back to the pastorate.  The Sundays were stunned! What was he to do? Now out of a job, he considered going back into baseball. He and his wife prayed for God’s guidance. The answer came a few days later when a group of Pastors from Iowa wrote him a letter wishing to hold a revival in their town, the following month in January of 1896.  He accepted, and left for Iowa with 7 sermons he borrowed from Chapman.  Billy did his best and preached those 7 and the crowds were so receptive, he preached the same 7 sermons over again the next week and gave his testimony and 268 people were saved in 10 days.  The Sawdust trail had begun.

He cried to the Lord and said, "God you’re going to have to give me some more sermons, this is all I have…" Well, God did help Billy and gave him more sermons that were used to help People renounce their sin and come to Christ!

 
As we stated before, when Billy Sunday stepped up to the podium, he didn’t just preach - he EXPLODED!
For years, Billy Sunday held his meetings in mostly small Midwestern towns, not rising to national prominence until 1911 when 3 crusades in Ohio saw 5000 to 7000 converts walk the aisle in each crusade!

Nothing short of Miraculous crusades were conducted from 1912 and on, and then in 1917, perhaps the greatest crusade in history by any evangelist....was the New York Crusade, held from April 8 to June 19.  Listen to this, there were nearly 100,000 conversions in ten weeks, with over 7000 making decisions on the final day!  This total amount was by far the largest single number of decisions for a single crusade that has ever been registered by research of historians in the history of Christianity!

Billy Sunday went on to hold some 300 crusades in 39 years, and during his peak, was considered one of the greatest evangelists in the world at that time. At the height of his ministry, he would pack out his specially-built tabernacles in the cities all across America. He would have these tabernacles built especially for his crusades before he came to a town or city. They all were built after the same pattern, with no balcony, and a saw-dust floor. Everything was fireproof, including the sawdust, and boards were nailed with only two nails so they could be broken down easily in case of an emergency.

Billy Sunday even came to Petersburg, IN. in December of 1927 and a Billy Sunday Tabernacle was erected on South 9th Street where the Old Orphan’s Home used to be.  There is still a pattern of a Sunday Tabernacle in Princeton, IN that you can go see. It is estimated that a hundred million people heard Billy Sunday speak in these great tabernacles, and more than a one million people 'hit the sawdust trail', as it was called when people walked the sawdust floor in the tabernacles to trust Christ as Savior under his preaching.

 His longtime associate, Dr. Homer Rodeheaver, affectionately known as 'Rodie', called him "the greatest preacher since the Apostle Paul."
Billy Sunday was one of the most unusual evangelists of his day, and in fact, of all time! He walked, ran, or jumped across the platform as he preached, sometimes even breaking chairs! One Editor estimated that Billy traveled one mile during every sermon! One of his famous baseball illustrations was when he would describe a person being a teenager and making it to first base.  “I’ve made it this far” he would say, “I don’t need Christ!” Then he would sneak to second, and be age 40. “I still don’t need Christ,” he would reason.  Then he would steal third and he would be age 60 – still not knowing Christ as Savior.  With everybody’s attention, Billy said, “I think I can make it home, so he takes off……slides in to homeplate,  as Billy would actually take off and slide across the platform as if sliding into home plate, and God says, “YOU’RE OUT!  YOU’RE OUT!” 

Right then and there many people would already decide they must trust Christ that night.

Often he would jump from the platform into the pews to preach to one man to be saved. His controversial style brought criticism but won the admiration of millions. During the height of his popularity, every meeting was covered by the National Newspapers across America and it is said he received more press coverage than the Presidents of the United States of that time!  In some instances, even WW1 coverage would be below coverage of the Sunday Meetings!

People were attracted to a man who brought a message that was so much different than many of the dead churches they were used to attending.
He attacked public evils of the day, but none more than liquor industry, and was considered the most influential person in bringing about the prohibition legislation after World War I. In several cities, after his crusades, taverns and booze joints would just shut down their business and close their doors because of lack of business, since so many men had stopped drinking!

In the famous Wilkes-Barre Crusade in Pennsylvania in February 1912, it is estimated that over 25% of the city’s population made decisions for Christ….. and during that following year, it has been told that 200 taverns in the city closed their doors and went out of business! One Biographer noted about this feat, "This has to be a most remarkable record, and one wonders if this was not REAL REVIVAL, where the entire atmosphere of a city is changed."

Two years after this crusade, a Philadelphia newspaper reported that 83% of the converts of that crusade were still active in Christian service!
Billy Sunday’s crusades had more influence in shutting down the liquor business in entire cities like no evangelist before him and like none to follow him! In one of his sermons, he declared:

"I'm against sin. I'll kick it as long as I've got a foot, and I'll fight it as long as I've got a fist. I'll butt it as long as I've got a head. I'll bite it as long as I've got a tooth. And when I'm old and fistless and footless and toothless, I'll gum it till I go home to Glory and it goes home to perdition!"

His associate, Homer Rodeheaver, told about one of Billy’s famous sermons, "The Devil’s Boomerang" or “When Chickens Come Home to Roost” in which Billy went into detail telling men the disastrous health effects that sexual disease would have upon their wives and children unless they stopped their infidelity and stayed faithful to their wives.  Based upon studies by some of the greatest Medical authorities in that day, he spoke plainly and bluntly about the consequences of Venereal Disease.  Homer Rodeheaver, his Song Leader, later said the following about that sermon,

“Billy made it so vivid and so tragic, that men would faint and have to be carried out.  One of these sermons, until he tempered it down a little, had one ten minute period in it where 2 to 12 men fainted every time I heard him preach it."

But as a result thousands of young men were kept from plunging into carnal sins, and thousands of men went home with lives rededicated to God and purity for the sake of the future health of their wives and babies!  I wonder how many young men and women her today need to rededicate their purity to the Lord?

Billy Sunday was not the first to organize his campaigns into great spiritual crusades, but nobody ever did it on a greater and grander scale before, and probably no one has ever done it any better.  The great Sunday ‘Tabernacles’ were built, some to seat 20,000, the sawdust trail, the promotion and organization, the great music and choirs, the follow-up programs, the cottage prayer meetings beforehand....all are a part of the great legacy Billy Sunday left evangelism.

 
It is evident that the power and results of the Billy Sunday Crusades were due to prayer and complete Surrender to God.  Associates would hear him praying for God’s help on the way to the meeting, and even as he was shaving in the morning!  His prayers were most unorthodox.  Often during a great crusade, he would lead in prayer and stop right in the middle, and would turn to his wife and say, "Ma, what was the name of that man we prayed for today in Cleveland to get saved?.....Oh, Yes, Bill Jones, Lord, help him Lord!”

Billy had an astounding habit of suddenly breaking off his talk with the Lord and beginning a conversation with the devil.  When he did this he imagined his Satanic Majesty somewhere below him. He would lean over as if gazing into the pit of hell and fire…. at the devil….and he would hurl all the excoriating, vilifying epithets he could command.  After he thought he had cleaned up on Satan sufficiently for the time being he would switch back and finish his conversation with the Lord.

One famous story of Billy’s prayer life goes back to his baseball days.  He was playing right field, and in a huge Major League Championship game, there were 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth. A ball was hit out toward him, deep to right field.  In that day, there were no outfield fences, so Billy just kept running with his great speed.  He yelled to the crowd, "Get out of the way!" He recalled that the crowd opened up just like the Red Sea parted for Moses!  Billy said he ran as fast as he could and prayed,

"O God, I’m in an awful hole, and if you’ve ever helped a mortal man in your life help me get that ball, and God, you haven’t got much time to make up your mind.”

Now recall back in that day they played bare-handed.  They didn’t have ball mitts or baseball gloves

like they do today.

Billy said, “God must have sent a current of air to hold that ball up.  I threw my hand out in the air…the ball landed in it and stuck….”  The crowd mobbed him and the Mayor of Cleveland shoved a $100 bill in his hand and said, “Bill, go buy yourself a suit, the best in town;  that catch won me $1,500.”

Billy said he later told that tale and an old Methodist preacher came up to him after a service stroking his bird-tail whiskers and said, “William, you didn’t take that $100 for a new suit, did you?”

He told the old preacher, “You bet your life I did!”

Billy and Ma Sunday had a summer retreat home in Winona Lake, Indiana where they lived from 1910 on, during their summer breaks. Helen (Ma) Sunday was Billy’s faithful wife and companion in the work of the Lord, and was at his side during his crusades all of his life.  What a help-meet and companion she was!

God bless faithful Christian wives and mothers.  What a noble and high calling!  She left a comfortable home, and stood by this young ball player when he gave up the popular job and the good salary and went into YMCA work.  She followed loyally when he felt called to preach, and the income was even less.

I wonder how many women in here would follow their husbands if they were called to leave their good jobs and the financial stability it afforded….to go preach the Gospel?

Helen worked hard for that little family of husband, 1 girl and 3 boys, and did the laundry in the bathtubs of the homes where they stayed in the early days.  She helped him with his sermons and his work and helped with many of the details of the work of the ministry.  She did without the little extras and comforts she deserved and other women had.  She listened as many would slander and criticize her husband, for few men are criticized as a preacher is, and Billy Sunday was criticized more than probably any preacher who ever walked to a pulpit. 

His motives were questioned; His preaching antics were mocked.  They both would be discouraged as once-loyal friends would turn on them and abandon them.  Every preacher knows the feeling…as you give your heart and soul to people…to have those very people turn on you……..it is a heartbreak few people know, but none experienced it more than Billy Sunday! 

It was Helen, his wife, who would be there to encourage Billy when he was down.  To Mrs. Sunday, a fine, brave, self-sacrificing woman – belongs much of the credit for the success of the Sunday Campaigns.

I wonder how many young ladies here today are ready to sacrifice every thing for their Lord Jesus and obey the Lord and follow Him where He would have them go?

Billy Sunday and his wife ‘Ma’ Sunday were quite a pair!  Some of Billy’s sayings were:  

“The best time for a man to sow his wild oats is between the ages of 85 and 90.”

’I’m no spiritual masseur or osteopath.  I’m a surgeon, and I cut deep."

"They tell me a revival is only temporary.  So is a bath, but it does you good."

‘The reason many do not believe in our religion is because they see so many poor specimens in our churches.”

“I have no faith in a woman who talks about heaven and makes hell out of her home.”

The man who drinks is the first man fired and the last man hired.”

“You say you have a bad temper, but it’s over in a minute; so is a shotgun, but it blows everything to pieces.”

“Don’t take away from teachers the right to punish kids.  I wore 4 pairs of pants when I went to school.”

“A lot of churches don’t need an evangelist as much as the need an undertaker.”

"It won’t save your soul if your wife is a Christian.  You’ve got to be something more than a brother-in-law to the church."

They say to me, "Bill, you rub the fur the wrong way."  I don’t; let the cats turn ‘round.

As Jesus suffered during this lifetime, so do many of God’s choicest servants.  Billy and Ma Sunday had 4 beautiful children, 3 boys and 1 girl.  None of their children lived past age 42.

In 1932, their only daughter, Helen, died at age 42. In 1933, just before going out to preach, Billy Sunday was shattered by the news that George had committed suicide by leaping from a building.  The others boys died in 1938 and 1944, each before age 40. Billy never recovered from these heart-breaking tragedies, and his ministry declined sharply.  Even many of the best of God’s servants will go to heaven and wonder why such tragedy has been allowed to come into their lives, much like Jesus had to suffer Himself.....

Friend, are you wondering why God has allowed hurt into your life?  He will explain it to you someday.

The real test of a man’s life is its close; not its beginning, nor its peak of popularity, nor its time of greatest activity, but its end.  By this test Mr. Sunday was supremely successful.  He endured to the end. Billy Sunday’s final sermon was in Mishawaka, Indiana in 1935 at age 72 and the Lord reward by moving some 40 people to respond to make decisions for Christ.  

Billy Sunday died November 6, 1935 at age 72. Billy Sunday once said, "I WANT TO BE A GIANT FOR GOD!"  He certainly was that.  His funeral was held in Moody Church, Chicago, and H.A. Ironside preached the funeral. On his tombstone is written the words, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”  Billy Sunday indeed kept the faith.
 
My friend, if God can use a stammering, poor country boy from an Ophan’s Home who nearly drowned, with only an eighth grade education, he can use you and me!

There never will be another Billy Sunday......
but then again, there will never be another YOU and ME either....

“Attempt Great Things for the Lord” is a challenge Billy Sunday took.  Are you and I willing to take that challenge?
Like Billy Sunday, let’s give OUR BEST to God and let Him take it and use it for His Glory.