A mecca for spiritual events

Throughout its history, Cape Girardeau has been a community rooted in religious activity and an attractive place for religious speakers and preachers to visit.

Whether it was a 1990s crusade focused on spiritual renewal in the community or a 1920s event that drew thousands to hear a simple preacher, religion news has been the talk of the town.

The list of religious dignitaries who have visited includes former Boston archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law, Evangeline Booth, who was the daughter of the Salvation Army's founder, and Moral Majority leader the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Cardinal Law served as bishop of the Springfield-Cape Girardeau Roman Catholic Diocese during the 1970s before being chosen to head the Boston archdiocese. Law resigned as Boston archbishop in 2002 after a clergy sex-abuse scandal.

Other reformers to visit were ax-wielding Prohibitionist Carrie Nation, who came to Cape Girardeau without her ax but plenty of sharp words for saloon patrons.

But none of these guests was as popular or as prominent as evangelist Billy Sunday.

Sunday was a plain-speaking preacher with a talent for baseball who had a disdain for card-playing, movies and the flapper fashion. He grew up poor in Iowa and played for the Chicago White Stockings and other teams from 1883 to 1890. He began preaching at YMCA meetings after being converted to Christianity.

Sunday visited Cape Girardeau twice during his preaching career, first in the mid-1920s and in 1933.

Sunday's first visit to the city was a phenomenon, with roughly 250,000 people coming to the nightly services over a five-week period. The meetings were first held in tents, but Sunday insisted they were unsafe. So city officials raised $6,000 for a wooden tabernacle built at the corner of Bellevue and Middle streets.

Accounts from March 21, 1926, stated that 17,500 people attended the service and at least one-third of the crowd was from out of the region.

Sunday stayed in Cape Girardeau from late February through Easter of 1926. His last sermon was preached in four services to nearly 20,000 people.

"At that point in his career he was very well-known nationally, a true national celebrity," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University.

"Sunday was as much of a celebrity as there was in the U.S. at the time."

His visit had a profound impact. "It promoted church growth and expansion in many of the rural towns in the area. It also served to increase church attendance throughout the region, and in Cape Girardeau," Nickell said.

Too often today, crusades don't do much to boost the membership at local churches or give people a chance to build relationships, said the Rev. David Dissen, pastor emeritus of Trinity Lutheran Church.

Dissen said guest speakers often speak with the same authority and on the same topic as local ministers, but congregations are more apt to pay attention when a dignitary speaks.

"People get used to hearing their own pastor and just need a different voice," he said. "The message is identical, which shows that God's word doesn't change."

And area preachers were emphasizing the same values and ideals that Sunday spoke about during his visit. And because of the era -- Prohibition and flappers were quite the buzz -- traditional values were hot issues in the community. Southeast Missouri was very much a "traditional" community, and that meant a great "outpouring of support for Sunday and 'revival' Christianity, Nickell said.

Even after the Scopes Trial in Tennessee, revivalism spread across the country and showed up here. With all that was going on in the country during the 1920s, people who valued a "traditional" way of life were concerned about the nation's future.

All of these issues -- jazz music, birth control clinics, women smoking and wearing flashier, more revealing clothes -- "called traditionalists forward to rally behind traditional religious values. And Cape Girardeans turned out for that purpose. To many this was a very real struggle for the soul of America," Nickell said.

Sunday's visits were organized by the Ministerial Alliance but supported heavily by the Naeter brothers, Fred and Harry, who owned the Southeast Missourian at the time.

Sunday died in 1935, two years after his last visit here.

Even 70 years after Sunday visited, Cape Girardeau is still the place for preachers. Community crusades were held several times throughout the 1990s, featuring guest preachers who spoke about issues of morality.

Lowell Lundstrom first visited Cape Girardeau in 1961 and said the city was much different in 1995, though the need for spiritual rebirth still existed.

The eight-day Impact America outreach was held at the Show Me Center and was sponsored by 30 churches.

A group of prominent congregations also joined in 2002 and invited the Rev. Jerry Falwell to town. He headlined a weeklong crusade titled "Hope for America" that included two nights with author Tim LaHaye, best known for his "Left Behind" series of Christian fiction.