This article on Charles Templeton appeared in the August, 1953 Edition of "American Magazine.  I have converted it with OCR so there may be some errors in the text below.  Because it is 51 years old, I believe this article is out of copyright.

Photo Caption: Before a service starts Chuck Templeton often gathers spiritual strength from listening to his wife play the organ.

From across the Canadian border comes a handsome, athletic young evangelist with a brand-new look.   Replacing old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone with hard-hitting modern salesmanship, he not only converts his audiences, but keeps 'em converted!   His name is Chuck Templeton, and he's boosting church attendance wherever he goes.

by Edward Boyd

He ended his sermon that evening on a quiet note. He ended it, in fact, on a prayer, prefacing it with the remark: "No prayer is worth while unless half the time is spent in 'listening.' Prayer is a two-way intercommunication system, and God speaks only to those who take the time to be still and spend a few minutes a day in silence, listening."

For a few minutes, we all listened!

By that time, the audience was completely with the speaker. There was no cough, no rustle of a program, not even--mysteriously-the cry of a baby.

I felt I had witnessed a new kind of evangelism-twentieth-century style.

Chuck announced an "after service" for those who wished to stay. Hundreds remained, I among them. During this short session, there was prayer, meditation (the all-important "listening" again that Chuck always urged), and the distribution of cards for those who wished to sign them. These cards said, in effect, that the signer affirmed his faith in God and would try to become a part of the religious life of his community. I saw whole families sign them. These cards, I learned, were later forwarded to the church nearest that person's home, and the "follow-up" was left to the local minister.

At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, I would say Chuck is to religion what Mickey Mantle is to baseball or Perry Como to his singing fans. He makes religion as enjoyable as these people make sports or music enjoyable.

I stayed in Indianapolis the last three days of the "mission," and each day the crowds grew. This, I found, was the usual pattern. During the early part of a campaign, attendance at all services might be 3,000 to 4,000 a day. Toward the end of the two-week period, the figure would be up to 10,000, and finally people would be turned away for lack of space.

I attended all meetings, and the reaction was the same. After one sermon I saw a woman shake Chuck's hand and say, "I just wanted to see if you were real." The woman had not meant to sound like a gushing bobby soxer. She had just never heard anyone like him before and wanted to tell him so.

I spent as much time with the Templetons as their busy schedule would permit, and I also spent some time with the people whom Chuck had converted. I wanted to know what had moved them.

One woman, an assistant postmistress in a Middle Western town, told me, "Until I went to hear Chuck I was one of the most miserable and frustrated people in the world. Had been for more than six years. I heard him say one thing that changed my life. It was: 'You know what you are. Have you ever glimpsed what, with God's help, you can be?' That sort of stopped me." Ten days later, Chuck received a letter I from that same woman saying: " I've I been so happy for the past ten days that I wonder it doesn't overflow my life, run down the streets, and flow up over the curb!"

In Chicago, later, I ran into a student in a theological seminary who had changed his school as a result of one of Chuck's sermons. A year and a half ago he had been taking a science major in the University of Chicago. "But hearing Templeton made me feel that the thing that really matters today is the spiritual values," he told me. He changed his course and now is getting a graduate degree in theology.

One of Chuck's most spectacular converts, I learned, was a former streetwalker and dope addict in Toronto. This young girl, several years ago, had just taken her-sick, illegitimate baby to a hospital. She went back to her room, and considered suicide. She switched on the radio, and heard Chuck say a few words announcing a meeting that night. In desperation, she went. After the service, she walked up to Chuck and said, "Is there any hope for a person like me?" He assured her there was, talked with her, and prayed with her. From that time forward, her life was changed. Her baby recovered and she was cured of dope addiction. At the moment, she is happily working in a Salvation Army home for delinquent girls, a job he helped her to get.

But perhaps the most touching example of Chuck's power was related to me by his wife, Constance, who witnessed it.

It concerned a young couple from Youngstown, Ohio, who had just filed their divorce papers. They came to a meeting together. After the service they left, and just as Chuck was gathering up his papers to go home they returned, walked up the aisle of the half-darkened auditorium, and stood shyly before Chuck. They seemed to want to say something but couldn't get the words out. Finally, Chuck said, "Can I do anything to help?" The young man then said, "We were halfway home when we decided to come back and see if you could do anything to save our marriage. It's on the rocks."

"If you want it saved, that's half the battle," suggested Chuck. He talked to them right there, and finally suggested that they pray together. The couple had been alienated for weeks, but, during that prayer, Constance Templeton noticed the young man hook his little finger around his wife's and slowly draw their hands together. During the rest of the prayer, they looked at each other. When it was finished, they walked out of the auditorium with their arms around each other.

"I won't say Chuck solved their problem," said Constance, "but I certainly think he set them on the right track."

Fom Constance, from Chuck, and from others, I pieced together the unusual story of Templeton's life.

Although born in Toronto, he spent 9 of his boyhood years in Saskatchewan, where the winter cold often hit 40 below. Like another famous evangelist before him-Billy Sunday-he was fascinated by sports. A strong artistic strain ran through his family, and he, his brother, and three sisters would sit around the kitchen table, drawing pictures and comparing them. One day, when he was 17 and living in Toronto again, he was casting around for some way to help support his family. Those were the dark, depression days of the early thirties.

Suddenly he got the idea of drawing "sports cartoons. He made two sketches and took them to the office of the Toronto Globe and Mail. The editor was interested and asked him to draw a picture of Bobby Pearce, the Australian oarsman who was world champion at the time.

On the strength of that cartoon, Chuck got a job. Soon he was doing a daily sports cartoon that was syndicated in 24 Canadian papers. In the next three years, he was not only the main support of his family, but he found himself a minor celebrity. He was invited everywhere. He enjoyed drawing. He was making lots of money.

Then one night a strange and inexplicable thing happened.

He came home from a party at 3 a.m., feeling an overwhelming sense of loneliness and inadequacy. He was only 20 then, but as he walked through the quiet streets, he felt a strong desire to commit himself to some kind of cause. He was startled to notice that he had been gently crying. Life had suddenly rolled in on him and was unaccountably heavy.

When he entered the house, he stopped by his mother's room. She said something about trying religion (he had not been going to church up to that time), but he was in no mood for that approach. He answered with a tirade.

Nevertheless, when he got to his room and had shut the door, he sank down and prayed for the first time. He didn't know exactly how to do it, but he remembers what he said.

"Lord, come down," he repeated several times. "Come down!"

He admits he didn't know exactly what he meant by that, or just what happened, but he suddenly felt better. Life had purpose. "After that," he said, "life has never been the same for me."

From then on, he went to church, joining a fundamentalist group known as the Church of the Nazarene, and was often asked to draw religious pictures in church meetings. One day, an itinerant evangelist asked him to go on a two-week mission to Lowville, N. Y., where he would make drawings and lead the singing. As a result of that trip, Chuck knew he definitely wanted to be a preacher.

He took a correspondence course in the ministry (he had never gone beyond the first year in high school) and he studied public speaking. He practiced by preaching in empty churches to empty pews. He talked to mirrors. He read omnivorously to make up for his lack of formal education.

His brother, meanwhile, had grown old enough to help support the family, and so Chuck now gave his full time to traveling as an artist-evangelist, drawing pictures and preaching.

On one of these trips, he met Constance. They were both attending a mission in Grand Rapids, Mich. Before they got interested in religion, she'd been an MGM starlet who'd studied voice for a film career. Twelve days after they met, Chuck proposed. Two months later they were married. They've been inseparable ever since.

When he took his bride back to Toronto they decided to start a church. Chuck found a huge, empty building, which had once been a church, on one of the city's main north-south arteries-the Avenue Road. The building had stood unused for 14 years. It was in a sad state of disrepair.

"But we both felt," said Chuck, "that it could be a force in the community again."

He had $600 left from his career as a syndicated cartoonist, and he rented the church for 6 months at $100 a month. His wife and his mother helped him clean it. They painted and swept and washed. They made collection plates out of pie tins, painting them brown and lining them with felt. They selected a name: Avenue Road Church. On the night before they opened, Chuck said, "We have a church but no money. We have pews but no parishioners. We have an organ but no music. But I have a feeling this church will come to life!"

It did. Gradually word got around that the Avenue Road Church had something special in the way of a preacher. A few came, and they told others. At last, after a year and a half of hard work, attendance began to snowball. By the second year, the church's capacity of 1,200 was being taxed. People even stood outside in zero weather waiting to get in for a second service.

The Templetons decided to build a gallery to the church to hold an additional 600 people. They went in debt to do it.

On the night before the opening of the new addition, the parishioners held a cleaning bee. When it was all finished, Chuck went home to bed at 1:30 a.m., tired but happy. At 3 a.m., his phone rang. "Your church-is on fire!" a voice told him.

Chuck threw on his clothes and ran to the church. He got there just in time to see the roof fall in.

As he watched his dream go up in flames, he remembers thinking bitterly: "If there is a God, how could he let this happen?"

But, almost simultaneously, he had another thought, a quotation from the Bible: "All things work together for good to them that love God."

He wandered around for hours in the icy night (the firemen's hose had left frozen cascades on the ruins) wondering what to do. Then he had an inspiration. He went to his old newspaper office and wrote out an advertisement that said,: "Our beautiful church is burned, but 'all things work together for good to them that love God.' Come to the Masonic Temple and hear the story of the fire."

Two thousand people came, and the collection, including pledges, totaled $24,000. More money began to pour in as the story got around Canada and the United States, and soon a more beautiful and more spacious church rose on the ashes of the old. Within five years, all obligations were paid off.

During those five years, most of which were war years, Chuck's fame as a preacher grew. He was frequently asked to speak elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. He spoke to 18,000 in Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens. He talked to crowds ranging from 20,000 to 70,000 in such places as Soldier Field, Chicago, and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. He took part in the far-reaching Youth-for-Christ movement which was started during the war. After the war, he and another rising evangelist, Billy Graham, teamed up and toured Europe. They spoke on alternate evenings to overflow crowds in ten countries. He and Billy are still warm friends.

Back in Toronto again, Chuck began to have doubts. After seven years there, he had a big church, a wide following, an attractive home, and a comfortable, assured future. But he began to sense more and more what he called "the inadequacy of my intellectual preparation. I felt," he said, "that I was getting by on my enthusiasm and a certain natural ability for speaking."

Although he doesn't like travel (both he and Constance are devoted 'to their home), he felt he could be most effective as an itinerant evangelist. He wanted to help return evangelism to the heart of the church. For further preparation, he decided to turn his church over to another pastor and apply for entrance to Princeton Theological Seminary and three years of quiet, intense study. He was turned down because of the inadequacy of scholastic preparation (a college degree is required to enter). Finally, however, Princeton agreed to take him as a "special student." He never got a degree, but when the course was finished, he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

The Templetons had had to sell practically everything in Toronto to finance this new period in their lives, and in Princeton they lived on very little in an old dormitory. They worked hard, and soon began to love the charming old town.

During his last year at Princeton, Chuck was a regular preacher at the Ewing Presbyterian Church. As soon as he'd finished his course, the National Council of Churches, which had been watching him all along, tapped him as their only full-time evangelist. That was at the end of 1951. He has been preaching across the land with increasing momentum of success ever since.

Already, he has, of course, accomplished many things beyond winning people to the church. One of these has been to clean up certain questionable financial aspects of evangelism and eradicate the suspicion that it was largely a "racket."

Before Chuck began his touring, it had been customary for many evangelists to take up a collection called a "love offering" on the last day of the campaign in each town. This belonged traditionally to the evangelist. Chuck could have continued this practice. In his case, the final offering of each two-week mission currently runs between $4,000 and $6,000. This would make his "take" well over $100,000 a year at the present rate of his campaigning. Some evangelists have done even better. Although there have been and still are, of course, many earnest, sincere, and hard-working men in this field, the enormous profits of a few, plus their circus stunts, have made many people suspect the whole profession.

Determined not to profit in any way by religion, Chuck insisted that he be put on a salary-a comparatively modest one of $7,500 a year. This is paid by the National Council of Churches. Other funds collected during a missionary campaign go for the general evangelical work of all the churches. Since he has done this, other evangelists have followed suit.

When they are not traveling, Chuck and Constance live in Wheaton, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. There, on Saddle Road, is a 4-room, ranch-style house which they bought a year ago as a permanent home. They head for it eagerly whenever they can, because they are essentially "homebodies."

Between campaigns, they usually have about five days of rest. Constance confesses that she spends most of that time in the kitchen, because she loves to cook, especially the Mexican dishes whose recipes have been handed down in her family.

Chuck, when not working on sermons, is a skillful carpenter (he recently built a breezeway for their house with his own hands). He also likes to watch boxing on television. "I'm a boxing nut," he admitted. His wife accuses him of shaking hands rather hurriedly after Wednesday and Friday meetings so he can get back to their hotel room to watch the fights.

The Templetons told me they regret deeply that they have never had children of their own. Recently they "adopted" one under the Foster Parents Plan. His name is George, and he lives in Greece -an orphaned victim of the fighting against communist guerrillas. The Templetons send money for his support, as well as food and clothing. In return, they receive letters and photographs, the arrival of which is always a red-letter day in their household.

In his own words, Chuck engages in "side issues impetuously." Recently he took up flying, making him a "sky pilot" in a real sense. He learned to solo in two weeks.

According to his present schedule, Chuck preaches 7 months out of the year in the United States and 4 in Canada. The other month-August-is their vacation.

"Where do you go then?" I asked.

Chuck looked at me a moment and then laughed. " I go off and preach somewhere," he confessed with a grin.