Billy Graham
William Franklin Graham Jr. was an American evangelist, ordained Southern Baptist minister, and civil rights advocate, whose broadcasts and world tours featuring live sermons became well known in the mid-to-late 20th century. Throughout his career, spanning over six decades, Graham rose to prominence as an evangelical Christian figure in the United States and abroad.
According to a biographer, Graham was considered "among the most influential Christian leaders" of the 20th century. Beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Graham became known for filling stadiums and other massive venues around the world where he preached live sermons; these were often broadcast via radio and television with some continuing to be seen into the 21st century. During his six decades on television, Graham hosted his annual "crusades", evangelistic live-campaigns, from 1947 until his retirement in 2005. He also hosted the radio show Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954. He repudiated racial segregation, at a time of intense racial strife in the United States, insisting on racial integration for all of his revivals and crusades, as early as 1953. He also later invited Martin Luther King Jr. to preach jointly at a revival in New York City in 1957. 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 spoke to live audiences consisting of at least 210 million people, in more than 185 countries and territories, through various meetings, including BMS World Mission and Global Mission events.
Graham was close to US presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He was also lifelong friends with Robert Schuller, another televangelist and the founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, whom Graham talked into starting his own television ministry. Graham's evangelism was appreciated by mainline Protestant denominations, as he encouraged mainline Protestants, who were converted to his evangelical message, to remain within or return to their mainline churches. Despite early suspicions and apprehension on his part towards Catholicism—common among contemporaneous evangelical Protestants—Graham eventually developed amicable ties with many American Catholic Church figures, later encouraging unity between Catholics and Protestants.
Graham operated a variety of media and publishing outlets; 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 lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts, likely surpassed billions of people. As a result of his crusades, Graham preached the gospel to more people, live and in-person, than anyone in the history of Christianity. Graham was on Gallup's list of most admired men and women a record 61 times. Grant Wacker wrote that, by the mid-1960s, he had become the "Great Legitimator", saying: "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."
Early life
William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on November 7, 1918, in the downstairs bedroom of a farmhouse near Charlotte, North Carolina. Of Scots-Irish descent, he was the eldest of four children born to Morrow and dairy farmer William Franklin Graham Sr. Graham was raised on the family dairy farm with his two younger sisters Catherine Morrow and Jean and younger brother Melvin Thomas. When he was nine years old, the family moved about from their white frame house to a newly built red brick house. He was raised by his parents in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. Graham attended the Sharon Grammar School. 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. According to his father, that yelling led him to become a minister. Graham was 15 when Prohibition ended in December 1933, and his father forced him and his sister Catherine to drink beer until they became sick. This created such an aversion that the two siblings avoided alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives.Graham was turned down for membership in a local youth group for being "too worldly". Albert McMakin, who worked on the Graham farm, persuaded him to go see evangelist Mordecai Ham. According to his autobiography, Graham was 16 when he was converted during a series of revival meetings that Ham led in Charlotte in 1934.
After graduating from Sharon High School in May 1936, Graham attended Bob Jones College. After one semester, he found that the coursework and rules were too legalistic. 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."
In 1937, Graham transferred to the Florida Bible Institute in Temple Terrace, Florida. While still a student, Graham preached his first sermon at Bostwick Baptist Church near Palatka, Florida. 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's 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 practice preaching to the birds, alligators, and cypress stumps. In 1939, Graham was ordained by a group of Southern Baptist clergy at Peniel Baptist Church in Palatka, Florida. In 1940, he graduated with a Bachelor of Theology degree.
Graham then enrolled in Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. During his time there, he decided to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God. Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood in California was instrumental in helping Graham wrestle with the issue. He settled it at Forest Home Christian Camp southeast of the Big Bear Lake area in southern California. While attending Wheaton, Graham was invited to preach one Sunday in 1941 at the United Gospel Tabernacle church. After that, the congregation repeatedly asked Graham to preach at their church and later asked him to become the pastor of their church. After Graham prayed and sought advice from his friend Dr. Edman, Graham became their church's pastor.
In June 1943, Graham graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in anthropology. That same year, Robert Van Kampen, treasurer of the National Gideon Association, invited Graham to preach at Western Springs Baptist Church, and Graham accepted the opportunity on the spot. 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.
With World War II underway, Graham applied to become a chaplain in the United States Army. After he was initially turned down for being underweight, Graham was awarded a commission as a Second Lieutenant, but came down with a severe case of mumps in October 1944 before he could begin chaplain training at Harvard Divinity School and was bedridden for six weeks. Due to his illness and the fact that the war was expected to end soon, he was discharged from the army. After a period of recuperation in Florida, he was hired as the first full-time evangelist of the new Youth for Christ, co-founded by Torrey Johnson and the Canadian evangelist Charles Templeton. In his first year as a YFC evangelist, Graham spoke in 47 US states. He traveled extensively as an evangelist in the United States and Europe in the immediate post-war era, making his first overseas trip in 1946.
In 1948, in a Modesto, California hotel room, Graham and his evangelistic team established the Modesto Manifesto: a code of ethics for life and work to protect against accusations of financial, sexual, and power abuse. The code includes rules for collecting offerings in churches, working only with churches supportive of cooperative evangelism, using official crowd estimates at outdoor events, and a commitment to never be alone with a woman other than his wife.
Graham was 29 when he became president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis in 1948. He was the youngest president of a college or university in the country, and held the position for four years before he resigned in 1952. While serving in this position, Charles Templeton urged him to apply to Princeton Theological Seminary for an advanced theological degree after he himself had done so, but Graham declined and continued in his position as president of Northwestern Bible College.
Crusades
The first Billy Graham Crusade was held on September 13–21, 1947, at the Civic Auditorium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was attended by 6,000 people. Graham was 28 years old then, and would rent a large venue ; as the crowds became larger, he arranged for a group of up to 5,000 people to sing in a choir. He would preach the gospel and invite individuals to come forward ; 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 1949, Graham scheduled a series of revival meetings in Los Angeles, for which he erected circus tents in a parking lot. He attracted national media coverage, especially in the conservative Hearst chain of newspapers, although Hearst and Graham never met. The crusade event ran for eight weeks–five weeks longer than originally planned. Graham became a national figure, with heavy coverage from the wire services and national magazines. Pianist Rudy Atwood, who played for the tent meetings, wrote that they "rocketed Billy Graham into national prominence, and resulted in the conversion of a number of show-business personalities".
In 1953, Graham was offered a five-year, $1 million contract from NBC to appear on television opposite Arthur Godfrey, but he had prior commitments and turned-down the offer to continue his live touring revivals. Graham held crusades in London that lasted 12 weeks, and a New York City crusade at Madison Square Garden, in 1957, ran nightly for 16 weeks. At a 1973 rally, attended by 100,000 people, in Durban, South Africa—the first large mixed-race event in apartheid South Africa—Graham openly declared that "apartheid is a sin". In Moscow, Russia, in 1992, one-quarter of the 155,000 people in Graham's audience went forward at his call. During his crusades, he frequently used the altar call song, "Just As I Am". In 1995, during the Global Mission event, he preached a sermon at Estadio Hiram Bithorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico, that was transmitted by satellite to 185 countries and translated into 116 languages.
By the time of his last crusade in 2005 in New York City, he had preached 417 live crusades, including 226 in the US and 195 abroad.