This article about Youth on the March appeared in the April 1950 issue of Christian Life. The pages were scanned from a bound volume, so the title across the seam is somewhat obliterated. To view larger versions of the photographs, click on the desired image.
Fast paced "Youth on the March" reaches America's television audience for Christ
Almost everyone thought TV ought to be used to show as well as tell the world about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But problems loomed big. Television was a new and untried medium into which to move with so important a message. Costs were tremendous --twenty to thirty times that of AM radio. And there was the feeling in some quarters that television might be all right for wrestling bouts and beer commercials, but not for the preaching of the Cross.
Thus it remained for personable, fast-talking Percy Crawford, fortyish president of The King's College and director of one of the largest Christian broadcasts on AM radio, to do something about it.
Today Crawford can claim the distinction of launching the first Christian television program of network proportions. Embracing eighteen individual outlets from New York to Los Angeles, Youth on the March first flickered on the nation's television screens one Sunday evening last October. Now, six months later, the same program competes with some of the nation's top television shows for the cream of the television audience -- plumb in the middle of Sunday evening.
"It wasn't easy," insists Crawford. "In fact, without the Lord's blessing the program could never have started... And even if it had, it would have collapsed long before this."
But Crawford was not easily discouraged. "Even some of my friends said we would never receive enough money to stay on the air," he admits. "But God has seen that the need was met. Time alone comes to $5,000 each week, and some programs have cost as much as $20,000 when all bills were in. Yet week after week money enough has come in from listeners to put the program on the air again."
A fast-paced program, "Youth on the March," is probably one of the best musically arranged Christian programs on the air today-AM, FM or television. In format it compares favorably with similar variety-type television programs. Dramatic effect -- key to successful television and a perpetual problem when identified with the solemn and mighty working of the Holy Spirit in the act of conversion or reconsecration -- has been attempted occasionally.
Evidence that Crawford's method of employing the technique of television to present Jesus Christ is paying out is seen in bags of fan mail, the unusually high Hooper rating, and the compliments which have come from television experts.
