Biography and work​​ (Billy Graham)

Billy Graham
For other people with the same name, see Bill Graham.
William Franklin Graham Jr. (November 7, 1918 – February 21, 2018) was an American evangelist, a prominent evangelical Christian figure, and an ordained Southern Baptist minister who became well-known internationally in the late 1940s. One of his biographers has placed him "among the most influential Christian leaders" of the 20th century.[2]
As a preacher, he held large indoor and outdoor rallies with sermons broadcast on radio and television; some were still being re-broadcast into the 21st century.[3] In his six decades of television, Graham hosted annual "Crusades", evangelistic campaigns, which ran from 1947 until his retirement in 2005. He also hosted the radio show Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954. He repudiated racial segregation.[4] In addition to his religious aims, he helped shape the worldview of a huge number of people who came from different backgrounds, leading them to find a relationship between the Bible and contemporary secular viewpoints. According to his website, Graham preached to live audiences of 210 million people in more than 185 countries and territories through various meetings, including BMS World Mission and Global Mission.[5]

Graham was a spiritual adviser to U.S. presidents and provided spiritual counsel for every president from the 33rd, Harry S. Truman, to the 44th, Barack Obama.[6] He was particularly close to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson (one of Graham's closest friends),[7] and Richard Nixon.[8] He insisted on racial integration for his revivals and crusades, starting in 1953, and invited Martin Luther King Jr. to preach jointly at a revival in New York City in 1957. He was also lifelong friends with another televangelist, the founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, whom Graham talked into starting his own television ministry.[9] Graham operated a variety of media and publishing outlets.[10] According to his staff, more than 3.2 million people have responded to the invitation at Billy Graham Crusades to "accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior". Graham's evangelism was appreciated by mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic denominations as he encouraged new converts to become members of these Churches.[11][12][13] As of 2008, Graham's estimated lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts, topped 2.2 billion. One special televised broadcast in 1996 alone may have reached a television audience of as many as 2.5 billion people worldwide.[14] Because of his crusades, Graham preached the gospel to more people in person than anyone in the history of Christianity.[10] Graham was on Gallup's list of most admired men and women 61 times, more than any man or woman in history.[15] Grant Wacker writes that by the mid-1960s, he had become the "Great Legitimator": "By then his presence conferred status on presidents, acceptability on wars, shame on racial prejudice, desirability on decency, dishonor on indecency, and prestige on civic events".[16]

Early life 
William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on November 7, 1918, in the downstairs bedroom of a farmhouse near Charlotte, North Carolina.[17] He was of Scots-Irish descent and was the eldest of four children born to Morrow (née Coffey) and William Franklin Graham Sr., a dairy farmer.[17] Graham was raised on a family dairy farm with his two younger sisters, Catherine Morrow and Jean and a younger brother, Melvin Thomas.[18] When he was eight years old in 1927, the family moved about 75 yards (69 m) from their white frame house to a newly built red brick home.[19] He was raised by his parents in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.[20][21] Graham attended the Sharon Grammar School.[22] He started to read books from an early age and loved to read novels for boys, especially Tarzan. Like Tarzan, he would hang on the trees and gave the popular Tarzan yell, scaring both horses and drivers. According to his father, that yelling had led him to become a minister.[23] When he was fourteen in 1933, Prohibition ended in December, and Graham's father forced him and his sister, Katherine, to drink beer until they got sick. This created such an aversion that Graham and his sister avoided alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives.[24]
Graham had been turned down for membership in a local youth group for being "too worldly"[24] when Albert McMakin, who worked on the Graham farm, persuaded him to go and see the evangelist Mordecai Ham.[10] According to his autobiography, Graham was converted in 1934, at age 16 during a series of revival meetings in Charlotte led by Ham.[25][26] After graduating from Sharon High School in May 1936, Graham attended Bob Jones College, then located in Cleveland, Tennessee. After one semester, he found it too legalistic in both coursework and rules.[24] At this time he was influenced and inspired by Pastor Charley Young from Eastport Bible Church. He was almost expelled, but Bob Jones Sr. warned him not to throw his life away: "At best, all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks ... You have a voice that pulls. God can use that voice of yours. He can use it mightily."[24]

In 1937 Graham transferred to the Florida Bible Institute in Temple Terrace, Florida, near Tampa.[27] He preached his first sermon that year at Bostwick Baptist Church near Palatka, Florida, while still a student.[28] In his autobiography, Graham wrote of receiving his "calling on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club", which was adjacent to the Institute campus. Reverend Billy Graham Memorial Park was later established on the Hillsborough River, directly east of the 18th green and across from where Graham often paddled a canoe to a small island in the river, where he would preach to the birds, alligators, and cypress stumps. In 1939, Graham was ordained by a group of Southern Baptist clergymen at Peniel Baptist Church in Palatka, Florida.[29] In 1943, Graham graduated from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, with a degree in anthropology.[30] During his time at Wheaton, Graham decided to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God. Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood (Hollywood, California) was instrumental in helping Graham wrestle with the issue. He settled it at Forest Home Christian Camp (now called Forest Home Ministries) southeast of the Big Bear Lake area in southern California.[31] A memorial there marks the site of Graham's decision.
Family
On August 13, 1943, Graham married Wheaton classmate Ruth Bell, whose parents were Presbyterian missionaries in China. Her father, L. Nelson Bell, was a general surgeon.[32] Ruth Graham died on June 14, 2007, at the age of 87.[33] The Grahams were married for almost 64 years.[34] Graham and his wife had five children together: Virginia Leftwich (Gigi) Graham (b. 1945), an inspirational speaker and author; Anne Graham Lotz (b. 1948), runs AnGeL ministries; Ruth Graham (b. 1950), founder and president of Ruth Graham & Friends, leads conferences throughout the US and Canada; Franklin Graham (b. 1952), serves as president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and as president and CEO of international relief organization, Samaritan's Purse;[35] and Nelson Edman Graham (b. 1958), a pastor who runs East Gates Ministries International,[36] which distributes Christian literature in China. At the time of his death, Graham had 19 grandchildren, including former pastor Tullian Tchividjian, 41 great-grandchildren and 6 great-great-grandchildren.[37]

Ministry career 
While attending college, Graham became pastor of the United Gospel Tabernacle and also had other preaching engagements. From 1943 to 1944, Graham briefly served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Western Springs, Illinois, which was not far from Wheaton. While there, his friend Torrey Johnson, pastor of the Midwest Bible Church in Chicago, told Graham that his radio program, Songs in the Night, was about to be canceled due to lack of funding. Consulting with the members of his church in Western Springs, Graham decided to take over Johnson's program with financial support from his congregation. Launching the new radio program on January 2, 1944, still called Songs in the Night, Graham recruited the bass-baritone George Beverly Shea as his director of radio ministry. While the radio ministry continued for many years, Graham decided to move on in early 1945.[citation needed]

In 1948 at the age of 29, he became president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis and the youngest president of a college or university in the country, from which he resigned in 1952.[38] Graham initially intended to become a chaplain in the Armed Forces, but he contracted mumps shortly after applying for a commission. After a period of recuperation in Florida, he was hired as the first full-time evangelist of the new Youth for Christ (YFC), co-founded by Torrey Johnson and the Canadian evangelist Charles Templeton. Graham traveled throughout both the United States and Europe as a YFCI evangelist. Templeton applied to Princeton Theological Seminary for an advanced theological degree and urged Graham to do so as well, but he declined as he was already serving as the president of Northwestern Bible College.[39] Crusades Main article: List of Billy Graham's crusades From the time his ministry began in 1947, Graham conducted more than 400 crusades in 185 countries and territories on six continents. The first Billy Graham Crusade, held September 13–21, 1947, in the Civic Auditorium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was attended by 6,000 people. Graham was 28 years old. He called them crusades, after the medieval Christian forces who conquered Jerusalem.[citation needed] He would rent a large venue, such as a stadium, park, or street. As the sessions became larger, he arranged a group of up to 5,000 people to sing in a choir. He would preach the gospel and invite people to come forward (a practice begun by Dwight L. Moody). Such people were called inquirers and were given the chance to speak one-on-one with a counselor, to clarify questions and pray together. The inquirers were often given a copy of the Gospel of John or a Bible study booklet. In Moscow, in 1992, one-quarter of the 155,000 people in Graham's audience went forward at his call.[24] During his crusades, he frequently used the altar call song, "Just As I Am".[42]
Graham scheduled a series of revival meetings in Los Angeles in 1949, for which he erected circus tents in a parking lot.[10] He attracted national media coverage, especially in the conservative Hearst chain, although Hearst and Graham never met.[40] The crusade event ran for eight weeks – five weeks longer than planned. Graham became a national figure with heavy coverage from the wire services and national magazines.[41]

Crusades

Graham was offered a five-year, $1 million contract from NBC to appear on television opposite Arthur Godfrey, but he had prearranged commitments. He turned down the offer in order to continue his touring revivals.[32] Graham had crusades in London, which lasted 12 weeks, and a New York City crusade in Madison Square Garden in 1957, which ran nightly for 16 weeks. Student ministry Graham spoke at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's Urbana Student Missions Conference at least nine times — in 1948, 1957, 1961, 1964, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1984, and 1987.[43] At each Urbana conference, he challenged the thousands of attendees to make a commitment to follow Jesus Christ for the rest of their lives. He often quoted a six-word phrase that was reportedly written in the Bible of William Whiting Borden, the son of a wealthy silver magnate: "No reserves, no retreat, no regrets".[44] Borden had died in Egypt on his way to the mission field.
Graham also held evangelistic meetings on a number of college campuses: at the University of Minnesota during InterVarsity's "Year of Evangelism" in 1950–51, a 4-day mission at Yale University in 1957, and a week-long series of meetings at the University of North Carolina's Carmichael Auditorium in September 1982.[45] In 1955 he was invited by students to lead the mission to Cambridge University, arranged by the CICCU, with the London pastor-theologian John Stott as his chief assistant. This invitation was greeted with much disapproval in the correspondence columns of The Times.[46]

Civil rights 
movement Graham's early crusades were segregated, but he began adjusting his approach in the 50s.[50] During a 1953 rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham tore down the ropes that organizers had erected in order to segregate the audience into racial sections. In his memoirs, he recounted that he told two ushers to leave the barriers down "or you can go on and have the revival without me."[51] He warned a white audience, "we have been proud and thought we were better than any other race, any other people. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stumble into hell because of our pride."[51] In 1957, Graham's stance towards integration became more publicly shown when he allowed black ministers Thomas Kilgore and Gardner C. Taylor to serve as members of his New York Crusade's executive committee[52] and invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he first met during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955,[52] to join him in the pulpit at his 16-week revival in New York City, where 2.3 million gathered at Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, and Times Square to hear them.[10] Graham recalled in his autobiography that during this time, he and King developed a close friendship and that he was eventually one of the few people who referred to King as "Mike", a nickname which King asked only his closest friends to call him.[53] Following King's assassination in 1968, Graham mourned that the US had lost "a social leader and a prophet".[52] In private, Graham advised King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).[54]
Despite their friendship, tensions between Graham and King emerged in 1958 when the sponsoring committee of a crusade which took place in San Antonio, Texas on July 25 arranged for Graham to be introduced by that state's segregationist governor, Price Daniel.[52] On July 23, King sent a letter to Graham and informed him that allowing Daniel to speak at a crusade which occurred the night before the state's Democratic Primary "can well be interpreted as your endorsement of racial segregation and discrimination."[55] Graham's advisor, Grady Wilson, replied to King that "even though we do not see eye to eye with him on every issue, we still love him in Christ."[56] Though Graham's appearance with Daniel dashed King's hopes of holding joint crusades with Graham in the Deep South,[54] the two still remained friends and King told a Canadian television audience the following year that Graham had taken a "very strong stance against segregation."[54] Graham and King would also come to differ on the Vietnam War.[52] After King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech denouncing US intervention in Vietnam, Graham castigated him and others for their criticism of US foreign policy.[52] By the middle of 1960, King and Graham traveled together to the Tenth Baptist World Congress of the Baptist World Alliance.[52] In 1963, Graham posted bail for King to be released from jail during the Birmingham campaign, according to Long (2008),[57] and the King Center acknowledged that Graham had bailed King out of jail during the Albany Movement,[58] although historian Steven Miller told CNN he could not find any proof of the incident.[59] Graham held integrated crusades in Birmingham, Alabama, on Easter 1964 in the aftermath of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and toured Alabama again in the wake of the violence that accompanied the first Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.[52]

Following his death, former SCLC official and future Atlanta politician Andrew Young acknowledged his friendship with Graham and stated that Graham did in fact travel with King to the 1965 European Baptist Convention.[60] Young also claimed that Graham had often invited King to his crusades in the Northern states.[61] Graham's faith prompted his maturing view of race and segregation; he told a member of the Ku Klux Klan that integration was necessary primarily for religious reasons: "There is no scriptural basis for segregation," Graham argued. "The ground at the foot of the cross is level, and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross."[62]
 Lausanne Movement
The friendship between Graham and John Stott led to a further partnership in the Lausanne Movement, of which Graham was a founder. It built on Graham's 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin.[clarification needed] In collaboration with Christianity Today, Graham convened what TIME magazine described as "a formidable forum, possibly the widest–ranging meeting of Christians ever held"[63] with 2,700 participants from 150 nations gathering for the International Congress on World Evangelization. This took place in Lausanne, Switzerland (July 16–25, 1974), and the movement which ensued took its name from the host city. Its purpose was to strengthen the global church for world evangelization, and to engage ideological and sociological trends which bore on this.[64] Graham invited Stott to be chief architect of the Lausanne Covenant, which issued from the Congress and which, according to Graham, "helped challenge and unite evangelical Christians in the great task of world evangelization."[65] The movement remains a significant fruit of Graham's legacy, with a presence in nearly every nation.[66]