The Big Event

He instructed the kitchen at the downtown Minneapolis Radisson, the Soviets’ base camp, to feed them a daily luncheon of the breads, sausages, and vegetables that they might get at home. Dinners would be American. “They loved prime rib,” he recalls. One night, he packed them into a van with the promise of a long-awaited dinner with an “average American family.” Twenty minutes later, the van pulled into the opulent family compound of Curt Carlson, where the group had dinner at the home of Glen and Marilyn Carlson Nelson. The visitors loved that, too, he says.

Awkwardness was averted when the cash-strapped Soviets expressed an interest in buying American-made items to bring home, particularly American blue jeans. Ridgeway introduced a van full of KGB agents to the American tradition of the garage sale. When the Aeroflot charter finally left for California, it was laden with American clothes, bicycles, toys, and even furniture.

For Ridgeway, the Gorbachev visit itself was almost an afterthought. His team of planners had meticulously accounted for every detail that they could control. They couldn’t help the dreary 50-degree mist into which Gorbachev’s plane landed that June. Nor could they control the Soviets’ late arrival. Otherwise, the event had gone off perfectly.

The Economist magazine compared Gorbachev’s visit in Minneapolis, “where it was cold and wet and the organization was impeccable” to his stay in San Francisco, “where it was warm and sunny and the organization a shambles.”

“I know when an event is wonderful and when it isn’t,” Ridgeway says. “The euphoria of a great event is like a legal high. The Gorbachev event was flawless.”

Demons and a Holy Spirit Blowout

Paul Ridgeway, evangelist, ascended an outdoor rostrum overlooking a 10-acre exhibition grounds in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India, on a series of five days in February 2006. He was there to address the crowds at an annual Billy Graham–type Christian crusade sponsored by the Gospel Association of India. Each night, audiences of up to 125,000 people sat festival-style on blankets or on the bare ground to hear how Ridgeway has devoted 40 years to creating a seamless link between building a successful business and maintaining an ardent personal ministry.

Yesupadam Bandela, president of the Gospel Association of India, followed Ridgeway with the primary sermon of the evening. From its headquarters in Little Canada, Bandela’s organization has ministered to Christians in India for 63 years. It sponsors 192 full-time pastors who work in more than 500 villages and towns in southern India. Bandela and Ridgeway met at a prayer breakfast in Maplewood and became friends. Soon after, Ridgeway joined his board of directors.

“I think we brought 25,000 people to Christ that week” in Vijayawada, Ridgeway says.

He counts his India experience as one of several spiritually significant events in recent years that seem to be blurring the distinction between his vocation and his ministry.

The most dramatic came in 1999. After attending a Super Bowl planning session with NFL executives in Miami, Ridgeway retired to a suite at the airport Radisson.

He awoke early the next morning to an experience that “I couldn’t process,” he says. As he lay in bed, the white ceiling of the room split in half and peeled back, exposing a black abyss. And from this chasm emerged “nine or ten giant demons from hell.” They were brown, gray, and black reptilian creatures with piggish snouts.