The Reverend Billy Graham’s final “crusade” is set to draw tens of thousands of Christians from around the world to New York next week. Yet the historic gathering is also having a profound local impact, invigorating the city’s Christian community in advance of the revival, and giving the faithful a renewed sense of long-term purpose.

As attentive New Yorkers may have observed on billboards, at bus stops, and in newspaper advertisements, the Greater New York Billy Graham Crusade is being held at Flushing Meadows Corona Park for three days beginning June 24.

The event is being described as the famed evangelist’s last, the capstone in a series of huge revival assemblies that, for decades, have brought believers together at sites around the globe to hear the Gospels and bear Christian witness, enshrining Rev. Graham, who is 86, as perhaps America’s best-known religious figure. His first major crusade was in New York, at Madison Square Garden, in 1957, and thus his evangelism has come full circle.

Madison Square Garden was considered as a venue for next week’s crusade but was ultimately dismissed as too small. Because the Garden’s seating capacity is only 20,000, organizers said, its use would limit total attendance to 80,000 over the crusade’s four main events.

Those are: an evening prayer meeting on the Friday; youth-oriented gatherings the next day, featuring a “Bibleman Kidz Gig” in the morning and an event for teens at night, and a Sunday afternoon meeting. Rev. Graham will preach at all of the meetings with the exception of Saturday morning’s, and his sermons will be enhanced by Christian musicians, from the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir to the rock group Jars of Clay. Admission to all the events is free. The Graham organization have planned seating for between 60,000 and 70,000 people, but the festival grounds can accommodate 150,000 people safely, officials said.

The crusade follows months of spiritual and logistical preparation and will entail months of evangelizing follow-up.

According to an assistant director of the crusade, Kent Withington, Rev. Graham was invited to New York by a small group of pastors over a year ago, and once he accepted, the Greater New York Billy Graham Crusade, a tax-free corporation, began preparations. Since last September, Mr. Withington said, the crusade has held around 150 seminar-style meetings with churches throughout the tristate area, covering a region within a 50-mile radius of Manhattan.

Local churches are the crusade’s lifeblood, and Mr. Withington said around 1,300 churches, representing over 80 Christian denominations, will be participating. The crusade relies on a large volunteer corps, and many of the seminars trained New York’s faithful to be ushers, choristers, and transportation guides, among other roles.

One of the most important volunteer jobs belongs to the “counselors.” At the crusade, participants come forward, pray with Rev. Graham, and announce their decision to follow a life in Christ. The new believers provide their personal contact information, Mr. Withington said, and are assigned a counselor who will follow up with them in the weeks and months after the crusade to help them keep their commitment to Christianity.

While the 6,000 counselors are primarily churchgoing types – around 5,000 from the New York area, Mr. Withington said – instructing others in the faith requires special preparation, and so the counselors have been groomed with four weeks of training, most of it last month.

“When people ask them, ‘How do you have what I don’t have?’ they can have good answers,” Mr. Withington said. The crusade trains counselors “so they can say the same thing Billy Graham is going to say,” he added.

Most of that evangelizing will take place after next weekend’s big show. Each night of the crusade, information collected from the participants is entered into a computer database by a cohort of 900 volunteers. Many of those who pledge their commitment to a Christian life include, in their personal information, a church with which they are affiliated. According to Mr. Withington, the Graham organization asks those churches to contact the participants within 72 hours of the crusade.

“We liken these people to newborn babies,” Mr. Withington said. “They’ve come into the world – the spiritual world, the Kingdom of God – and they need to be protected, cared for, fed. They need to be trained.”

This crucial follow-up, Mr. Withington said, is the reason the crusade office will stay open for two months after next week’s revival, “so we can leave town and say we did everything we could to get these people into a church, assured that they’re moving forward in this new life that we have.”

The degree to which the crusade’s success relies on local churches has given New York Christians a renewed sense of purpose, an associate pastor at Evangel Church in Long Island City, Andres Maldonado, said. The crusade, he said,”has done probably as much for our church as I think it will do for the city, and for those who hear the Gospel for the first time,” Rev. Maldonado said. Evangel Church has been one of the city’s most active in preparing for the crusade, and its senior pastor, Robert Johansson, is chairman of the crusade’s pastoral committee.

While churchgoing Protestants are the mainstay of the crusade, many of those who attend will be those either lapsed in their faith or lacking it entirely, invited to the Graham event by friends or colleagues who wanted to introduce or reintroduce them to Christ’s teachings. That outreach, Rev. Maldonado said, is undertaken even by the children of the church, who are inviting classmates and playmates to join them at the crusade. “A lot of people are committing to discipleship,” Rev. Maldonado said of his flock. “I’ve seen people reawaken to the whole idea of serving others.”

The pastor of New Hope Fellowship in Brooklyn, Roger McPhail, too, said the crusade is having an energizing effect on the local Christian community. “It reignites the passion for the body of Christ at large, and helps people understand that they’re part of something much bigger than just their little church,” he said.

According to some pastors, that renewed sense of meaning and purpose is especially important in New York.

Rev. Johansson acknowledged that New York is a hotbed of secularism. One of the problems faced by ministers in the city, he said, is that their message “is very much mocked by people who are averse to faith, people who are not serious about faith,” particularly academics and press elites.

“But I have to tell you that New York has a tremendous faith voice,” Rev. Johansson said, “It’s just bottled up, it doesn’t get out to the media. And it’s a growing voice because of the tremendous immigration of people from Korea, from Asia, South America – they’re all coming with a certain faith,” he said.

New York City’s five boroughs will provide about 50% of the crusade’s attendance, Mr. Withington said, with most of the remaining half coming from suburban areas, in addition to visitors from around the country and international participants.

And immigrants, Mr. Withington said, will be there in force, particularly Korean and Hispanic evangelicals. There will be scripture readings in 21 languages each night, and the crusade will be translated live into 11 languages, with the greatest demand for Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.

Event organizers and pastors emphasized that the crowds who would attend the crusade were as diverse as the city itself, and that participants come from all backgrounds. The most church involvement in the crusade has come from Brooklyn and Queens, but there is high participation across the city, organizers said. What unites everyone connected to the crusade, they said, was a desire to find God.

Organizers and observers pointed to Rev. Graham’s broad appeal, too, as part of the reason so many people from disparate backgrounds and denominations were gathering under the crusade’s umbrella. For example, even though events by prominent evangelicals typically draw protests, often from gay-rights groups, leaders of the gay community said they were unaware of any protests, probably because Rev. Graham is known for avoiding politically contentious issues seized upon by his more controversial colleagues. Indeed, the evangelist will be protested for being too permissive on homosexuality, by a fringe antigay organization based in Kansas, the Westboro Baptist Church, which promises to “picket the arch-heretic, traitor, and rebel against the Great King of Glory – Billy Graham” at the crusade.

They appear to be the exception, as others recognized the widespread appeal of Rev. Graham’s brand of spirituality.

The editor of First Things, a New York-based interfaith religious journal, Richard John Neuhaus, said part of the appeal of evangelical Christianity was that “it is a very experiential form of religion – the experience of being born again has a powerful attraction.” Moreover, evangelical Christianity styles itself as simple, populist, and rooted in Biblical authority, affording it a special portability and accessibility, Rev. Neuhaus, a Catholic priest who is a convert from Lutheranism, said.

And then there is its leader: “The influence of Billy Graham historically on American religious and public life is very difficult to overestimate,” Rev. Neuhaus said.

Rev. Graham’s influence on New York City’s municipal government, however, can be assessed more precisely. According to the chief of marketing and corporate sponsorship at the Department of Parks and Recreation, Elizabeth Smith, the Graham organization will pay $400,000 for the use of Flushing Meadows, a fee that will cover the services of a dozen city agencies, including the police, fire, sanitation, and health departments. Much of the city’s efforts will be directed to security, the preparations for which were “very, very extensive,” she said.

The Bloomberg administration, Ms. Smith said, has supported the crusade, which the mayor wanted to reflect well on New York.

“I think this is going to be a terrific thing for the city,” she said.