Leighton Ford, associate evangelist and brother-in-law of Billy Graham attracted a crowd of 22, to the opening event as reported in the Canberra Times. Protestant church leaders expect a wave of religious fervour to sweep through the State in the weeks following the all-Queensland crusade. A total of 22, people, most of them carrying Bibles, went to the Exhibition Ground to hear the Rev.
Leighton Ford, an advance agent for Dr. Billy Graham. Crusade officials said afterwards that the meeting was the biggest religious rally yet held in Brisbane.
The climax of the meeting came at 5 p. Billy Graham held three meetings in the Exhibition Ground with the final one attracting a crowd of 80, The two week Brisbane crusade attracted 10, 'decisions for Christ' with a total attendance over the two weeks estimated at , with the final meeting relayed by telephone line to many other centres in Queensland and other states.
The population of Brisbane at the time was something less than , so the numbers attending the crusade were quite astonishing. The Crusade Bulletin for June shows a specially chartered aerial photograph of the final crowd. Crusade Bulletin, vol. One of the chief objectives of the crusade was to garner 'decisions for Christ' which were registered at meetings via a Commitment card. The Billy Graham crusades adopted the latest available technology to get the message out.
Films were sent out to regional centres and Billy Graham appeared on television and radio. The major meetings were also broadcast via telephone lines to regional centres. Leighton Ford returned to Queensland in and Billy Graham returned for one more crusade in when 67, people attended the final meeting. We welcome relevant, respectful comments.
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Bush invited him as well, but Graham was recovering from surgery the month before. By the time of Barack Obama's rise from an Illinois Senate seat to the presidency, Graham had already retired and no longer visited Washington.
Obama journeyed to Montreat, N. His fade from the public podium was a signal shift. For decades, Billy Graham had never missed a crusade. When he was bitten by a lethal brown recluse spider shortly before one event, he ignored doctors' orders to stay in bed and preached every night. The Mayo Clinic initially diagnosed him with Parkinson's disease in Later, when his symptoms did not progress like those of other sufferers such as Pope John Paul II or Muhammad Ali, the diagnosis was revised to focus on effects of hydrocephalus, water on the brain.
Yet even when he no longer could trumpet, pace and point, the evangelist still came forward to close the sale, like the Fuller Brush man he once was. In June , Graham collapsed during a speech before a crusade in Toronto. Doctors said an overdose of aspirin had caused intestinal bleeding.
They recommended a three-month respite from preaching. He still met with world leaders and, despite his trembling hands, he wrote his autobiography, Just As I Am. It came out with two different covers. One showed him in a suit, the other in his favorite blue denim jacket, a gift from close friend Johnny Cash. The New Republic reviewer Andrew Delbanco called the book unreflective celebrity fluff that "rattles off the great public events of the last 50 years with the hero in ubiquitous attendance, a kind of clerical Forrest Gump.
But he grasped the unique appeal of Graham in an era when other preachers churned out books that stoked fears of the apocalypse. His focus is resolutely on the individual life," Delbanco wrote. The public made Just As I Am a best seller. Ten years later, Graham updated the final chapters and added a new afterword for the book, published in The book is dedicated to his wife, Ruth, "the greatest Christian I ever knew," who died in June A week later, he was hospitalized, unable to attend his third international conference of 10, church leaders, theologians and pastors in Amsterdam in July Graham often said those evangelists, many itinerant Third World preachers who taught the Bible at the risk of their lives, were his true successors.
The crusade schedule cut back to two or three a year, and Franklin took over the administration of Graham's association. His last years followed a rough pattern. Graham would retire to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Then he would venture out to preach. A fall led to a partial hip replacement in January Five months later, he cracked his pelvis in another fall. Graham's parachurch organization bore his name—the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association BGEA —and its impressive publicity efforts always centered on the evangelist himself.
In the early years it seems likely that Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, and William Randolph Hearst, who owned a large chain of newspapers, were attracted by the anti-communism part of Graham's message. But in the main, the reasons for Graham's good relations with the press mirrored Moody's—the evangelist needed publicity, the press needed good stories. Graham soon had a weekly radio show and newspaper column.
His decision to televise the 17 Saturday night services of his New York crusade turned him into one of the most recognized and admired men in the country. Between crusades, Graham's friends and associates churned out a shelf full of books about the evangelist and his activities—often at Graham's urging, always with his approval.
With the help of his staff, Graham himself published 24 books. These were often pegged to topics that were popular at the time, and some sold millions of copies. He spent plenty of well-photographed time with the rich and famous, appearing on talk shows, campus tours, and celebrity golf tournaments. Nearly every book about Graham has a figurative trophy case, stuffed with photos of Graham with presidents, world leaders, and the otherwise rich and famous.
What makes all this attention-seeking paradoxical is that there was not a whiff of vainglory in it. Graham was unfailingly modest about himself and lavish in praise of others. He always treated ordinary people and lowest-level staff workers with great respect and dignity.
He never accepted honorariums for speaking engagements, and most of the millions of dollars he earned in book royalties he simply gave away. He always treated his antagonists with generosity and kindness. Niebuhr makes his criticisms about me, I study them, for I have respect for them. I think he has helped me to apply Christianity to the social problems we face.
Perhaps this explains why Niebuhr never would meet with Graham. Graham sincerely professed to dislike celebrity and to think nothing special of the company of the famous, but the reality was more complicated. As a young man in the first flush of fame, he pressed hard for an appointment with President Truman. In his late 70s, his claim in autobiography that he was reluctant to write about his famous acquaintances simply cannot be squared with the number of pages he spent doing just that.
William Martin, Graham's best biographer, shows that ultimately fame was irresistible to Graham because it was so helpful in pointing people to Christ. Reach more people he did. All over the world, Graham and his team set attendance records, from the , near London in to the , in New York City's Central Park in to the jaw-dropping 1. At the peak of his ministry, his newspaper column ran all over the country, Decision magazine topped out at some 4 million subscribers, and as late as his radio program aired on nearly stations around the world.
Graham's quarterly prime-time television shows have been seen all over the country for decades, attracting a much larger percentage of unchurched viewers than any other religious program.
Graham did more than evangelize. By the mids he shared the vision of Harold Ockenga, Carl F. Henry, and others for a new evangelicalism that would shed the skin of fundamentalist extremism. It would still be conservative at its theological core but would broaden beyond dispensationalism. The first step was to establish and strengthen parachurch agencies that would take this approach. He encouraged numerous evangelical entrepreneurs to start their own ministries.
Both Robert Schuller and James Robison began their weekly television broadcasts at Graham's instigation. It went on to sell 40 million copies. The second step was to engage the mainline Protestant world. Whereas the fundamentalists had shaken the dust off their feet as they left, Graham knew that there were many evangelical pastors and laypeople still in the mainline churches.
Early on, he decided to hold crusades only where sponsored by the city's main organization of Protestant churches. The New York City crusade of was a watershed. Graham had declined earlier fundamentalist invitations to come to New York, but he accepted the invitation of the liberal Protestant Council of New York. While fundamentalists fumed that Graham was giving his blessing to liberalism, most Americans perceived that the elite of the mainline churches were giving their blessing to Graham.
In one powerful symbolic move, Graham threw open the gates of the mainline churches to parachurch evangelicalism. The result was heavy traffic in both directions, as evangelicals saturated the mainline with their message and a preponderance of Protestants relocated to districts outside the mainline walls.
By the time Graham had finished his work, the old modernist dream of a non-supernatural Christianity was on life support, kept breathing only by the tenacity of mainline bureaucrats with their wistful memories of protest marches against segregation and the Vietnam War. In large measure, Moody's dream of a truly ecumenical evangelicalism had come to pass. Abroad, Graham was even more influential in setting into motion events that brought together evangelicals from around the world and gave them a sense that they were part of a worldwide ecumenical movement.
But before he could really devote himself to this work, he had to work through the most serious temptation that faced him in the first half of his career. Even before the Los Angeles breakthrough, Graham called together his inner circle of Beverly Shea, Grady Wilson, and Cliff Barrows and asked them to recall every stumbling block that had tripped up evangelists.
They all came up with the same list—financial misdeeds, sexual immorality, inflated reports of success, and non-cooperation with local churches. Thereafter they put all team members on a straight salary, never met alone with women, used conservative attendance reports, and involved local churches both before and after crusades. Their commitment to these safeguards, shored up by regular prayer, produced an unsurpassed record of integrity.
None of them anticipated that the greatest danger would be the temptation to exercise political influence. In Graham secured an act of Congress permitting him to hold the first-ever religious meeting on the steps of the Capitol.
He said he would interview every presidential candidate and communicate his preference to other clergy. At the behest of his friend Sid Richardson, a wealthy and politically well-connected Texas oilman, Graham traveled to Europe to try to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Republican.
For the next two decades, Graham dipped in and out of politics. Presidents would brief him before trips abroad and debrief him on his return. They'd ask his advice about policy decisions, as when Eisenhower was considering sending troops to Arkansas to enforce school desegregation rulings.
During the Johnson presidency, Graham—having concluded from a study of the Bible that Christians have a special obligation to the poor—aggressively lobbied Congress and did publicity on behalf of anti-poverty legislation. On celebratory occasions, like the —65 New York World's Fair, Graham could seamlessly blend the story of Jesus and an appeal to come to Christ with a message about how America was founded on faith in God and the Bible.
Graham's critics insisted that his gospel of personal conversion neglected social reform, but Graham's record was better than they admitted. On civil rights, Graham was early to insist that racism and segregation were completely un-Christian.
In he defied the governor of Mississippi and held racially mixed meetings. A year later—before the Supreme Court had overturned a single segregation law—he defied the Chattanooga crusade committee by personally taking down the cords that marked off the black seating section. In , he wrote in Life magazine that racial prejudice was a sin, and before the New York crusade in , he integrated his team by hiring Howard Jones as an associate evangelist. During the crusade he had Martin Luther King Jr.
Privately, King told Graham that his crusades were helpful in breaking down segregation. Certainly the segregationists saw it that way, swamping Graham with hate mail. It was Graham's strong friendship with Richard Nixon that drew him into deep political water. In the presidential race against John Kennedy, Graham introduced Nixon to prominent ministers, coached him on how to appeal to Christian voters, and issued numerous barely veiled statements of support.
As the election neared, Graham and his lieutenants organized a meeting that attacked the politics of Kennedy's Roman Catholic Church. However, Graham himself didn't attend the meeting, which provoked a furious backlash against its chair, Norman Vincent Peale. Liberal Protestants, Democratic politicians, Jewish groups, labor unions, and editorial pages—even pro-Nixon editors—issued scathing denunciations of anti-Catholic bigotry.
Several newspapers and radio stations canceled Peale's column and his program, and several speaking invitations were withdrawn. By not discussing his role in the meeting, Graham ducked the backlash. Later, on the eve of the election, Graham was asked to write a pro-Nixon piece for Life.
He did so, but at the very last minute withdrew it. In both cases, Graham walked up to the brink of throwing himself into partisan politics, only to withdraw at the last moment for fear it might hurt his ministry. Graham also promoted Nixon in the race, and his victory brought Graham into the heart of politics. Graham did many favors for Nixon: supporting his Vietnam program, reporting on meetings with world leaders, co-hosting a God-and-Country extravaganza on Independence Day, and regularly arranging meetings with conservative clergy so the White House could explain its policies.
Graham stayed in close contact with the White House during Nixon's re-election campaign and did it many favors, one of which was negotiating with Mark Hatfield to keep him from challenging Nixon for the nomination. Nixon, in return, did several favors Graham requested—making sure that evangelical parachurch workers got draft deferments, bringing a Christianity Today reporter on Nixon's momentous China visit, and, most importantly, meeting with a group of black ministers and solving some problems they were having with the Office of Economic Opportunity.
When the S. Nixon hit the Watergate iceberg, a good many of those around the president went down with the ship. Graham's initial public reaction was strong support for Nixon, but as damning evidence accumulated, Graham's statements modulated.
Soon he was taking fire from Nixon's friends as well as his enemies, and he was probably glad that he was out of the country for most of the controversy. Graham's deep personal love for Nixon made the Watergate revelations extraordinarily painful—he wept, he threw up—for they revealed a facet of Nixon's character that Graham had never even glimpsed.
Ruth later said that it was the most painful personal experience he had ever gone through. Graham resolved never again to get so enmeshed in politics. When the New Christian Right began to organize, some of the biggest names in the evangelical parachurch—Bill Bright, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson—succumbed to the Falwellian temptation and began grasping for political power.
Graham privately warned them not to go down that road. He'd been there, and it had nearly burned him. Besides, by this time he had caught a much grander vision—the challenge of building an international Christian movement that would be both evangelical and ecumenical. Evangelicals at mid-century had a curiously divided mind. When preaching the universal gospel of sin and salvation to Americans, they had a compulsion to varnish it with the old Puritan idea of America as God's chosen nation, facing special judgment for its sins.
They often talked as though the salvation of America was the object of conversion. Then the next week they'd pack their bags and head overseas, preaching a gospel stripped free of nationalistic themes.
So with Graham. He could preach America the Chosen with the best of them, but he also saw the entire world as his parish. A year later, as leaders of the world's Protestant denominations were about to open the first meeting of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, YFC convened delegates from 27 nations in a nearby Swiss town.
Graham attended both meetings. He came away from the WCC meeting disappointed with its liberal theology, but thrilled with the vision of Protestants from around the world cooperating.
The YFC gathering raised the question: Would it be possible for evangelicals working outside the denominational structure to build world-wide cooperative networks? But another question came first: Would a Graham revival work outside of America? Beginning with the crusade in the London neighborhood of Harringay, the answer was a resounding yes.
Twelve weeks of overflow crowds had the long-term effects of making the Anglican clergy more evangelical and making Graham an international figure. Contacts made there led to an astonishing series of mass meetings in India that produced far more inquirers than counselors were prepared for. In , crusades in Australia and New Zealand generated enormous stadium crowds and television audiences, and when Graham finally departed, his popularity there ranked second only to the Queen's.
But nobody had ever seen anything like what happened in South Korea in Inquirers numbered ,; they accelerated membership growth that was already spiraling upward. Graham's visit did much to bridge divisions between different groups of Korean Christians and give them a vision for evangelizing all of Korea. Soon Korean evangelists themselves were drawing crowds every bit as large as Graham's, and Korean churches were sending out more missionaries than any nation except the United States.
Traveling the world helped convince Graham that an evangelist has a broader set of responsibilities than merely preaching. In he visited Northern Ireland in a noteworthy attempt to reduce hostilities there. The next year he visited South Africa when the apartheid government finally agreed to his long-standing demand that all meetings be completely integrated.
The , in Durban and Johannesburg who heard the evangelist declare that apartheid was doomed were the largest interracial gatherings the nation had ever seen. A famine in nearby West Africa led the BGEA to adopt disaster relief as a permanent part of its mission, and the pre-crusade prayer meetings spawned an interracial women's prayer movement that had , members within five years. Traveling the world also damped down Graham's youthful anti-communism.
For five years Haraszti pushed and pulled his contacts in Hungary, and at the last minute Graham pulled some strings in the Carter White House. The visit was seen as a success by everyone concerned—Graham, the Hungarian government, leaders of the Catholic, Reformed, and Free Churches, and even Jewish leaders. Haraszti parlayed this success into an invitation to visit heavily Roman Catholic Poland the next year, a successful tour that also smoothed interfaith relations there.
As early as Graham had spoken out against the nuclear arms race, but on this trip, a visit to Auschwitz affected him so deeply that he began to make world peace a frequent theme in public talks. This, in turn, opened the door to the Soviet Union, which after much negotiation invited Graham to attend a pro-Soviet peace conference in After an initial go-ahead from the Reagan White House, Graham indicated he would accept the invitation, only to come under strong pressure from the State Department, other evangelicals, and his own organization to decline it.
He went anyway, but at times must have wondered at the wisdom of his decision. But the Soviet government came away from Graham's visit with new respect for his diplomatic skills, and this opened the door to visits to East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
After that came a very successful preaching tour of the USSR, and then a remarkable visit to repressive Romania, where over , people poured into the streets. Graham used every trip to arrange private visits with government officials, which he used both to present the gospel and to press them to ease religious restrictions in their countries. His team also used these visits to strengthen the churches and ease tensions between them.
The extent of Graham's influence is impossible to measure, but it is a fact that in the s religious restrictions behind the Iron Curtain eased while the churches grew stronger.
This put them in position to shelter and nurture the pro-democracy movements that helped bring down the Communist regimes.
There's no doubt that those regimes thought they could exploit Graham to bolster their image. He actually is the head of the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, the Protestants—everybody—in a spiritual way … because he is above these religious strifes.
By the s, Graham possessed tremendous international prestige, and his institutional location in an independent parachurch organization made it easy for him to work with Christians from all denominations. His first attempt to pull together a worldwide evangelical movement was the Berlin Congress on Evangelism, which he hoped would pull together an ecumenical movement along lines envisioned by Dwight Moody.
Henry led the 1, Berlin delegates—only from the US—in a day effort to work out a global theology of evangelism. So in the years following, the BGEA organized and financed conferences in those regions, as well as in Europe and North America, making sure that each conference had leadership drawn from its region.
The success of these conferences led Graham to begin planning for a major international conference to work out worldwide strategies for evangelization.
That planning bore fruit in , when some 2, evangelicals—half from outside Europe and North America, more than half under age 45—gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland. Lausanne gave a tremendous boost to evangelical foreign missions. Delegates learned from Fuller Seminary's Donald McGavran and Ralph Winter that nearly 2 billion of the world's people were unreached by the gospel. Since they had no form of indigenous Christianity in their midst, renewed efforts at cross-cultural missionary work were absolutely essential.
The result was unprecedented contact and collaboration between evangelicals across national and denominational lines, especially in the non-Western world. Despite this quantum leap forward in global evangelical cooperation, Graham wasn't finished. The group really on his heart was those who shared his calling as itinerant evangelists. So in the BGEA brought nearly 4, of them to Amsterdam for nine days, almost entirely at its own expense. They came from nations, 70 percent from non-Western ones.
Only 40 percent had any formal training, and only 10 percent had ever before attended a conference. Plenary sessions and some workshops focused on the priority of proclaiming the gospel, and on practical strategies—how to gather a crowd, keep their attention, preach a message in a few minutes, and get local churches to help with preparation and follow-up. The conference was so well-received that Graham's organization immediately started preparing a sequel in , which drew over 8, attendees from nations.
The Amsterdam conferences gave the BGEA a contact list of 12, evangelists all over the world, which it then tapped to organize a series of satellite crusades between and The first three targeted Africa, Asia, and Latin America, respectively; the final two reached 1, and 3, locations around the world—the latter requiring translation into different languages.
And still there were evangelists from all over the world who pleaded for a reprise of the Amsterdam conferences. So in the BGEA, again at its own expense, brought 10, conferees from countries. Graham himself was not healthy enough to attend, and though the delegates wanted to see him, his absence probably had little effect on the impact of the conference. Amsterdam and the satellite crusades may have been Billy Graham's finest moments. Many of the characteristic elements of his early years were absent—calls to save America, striving to make evangelicalism respectable, hobnobbing with celebrities, audiences of the middle class.
Amsterdam was evangelism purified. Graham and his organization poured themselves out for the entire world, encouraging and empowering men and women, great and small, who shared Graham's burden to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. William Martin observed that the forces gathered and unleashed at the Berlin, Lausanne, and Amsterdam meetings constitute a third worldwide ecumenical movement, every bit as important as the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church.
The amazing thing about the evangelical movement is that it is sustained not by a single organizational entity, but by multiple parachurch organizations, independent of each other but dreaming a common dream. Graham's genius was his ability to inspire people not to follow him, but to strike out on their own, following Jesus by proclaiming the gospel in their own way; and then to call them together, to inspire and equip thousands more to do the same thing.
We may never see his like again. And he and Moody, whom Graham was sure he'd meet in heaven, can stand together and look on in wonder at what God hath wrought. Michael S. Hamilton, vice president for programs and special initiatives at the Issachar Fund, is currently working on the book Calvin College and the Revival of Christian Learning in America Eerdmans, forthcoming.
I f you go to Charlotte, North Carolina, you will find that the farmland where Billy Graham grew up has been transformed.
The rolling fields of the earlyth-century agricultural South have morphed into the strip malls, office buildings, and subdivisions of the New South. But Charlotte of , the year of Graham's birth, was a sleepier town. Its first streetcars, creating new suburban residences, had just been built, and it wasn't until Billy was three years old that one of the nation's first radio stations graced Charlotte's airwaves.
A year later, Efird's Department Store, which described itself as "the only store south of Philadelphia with escalators," opened. It was in this Charlotte—straddling rural and urban, and experiencing the first pangs of transition into the world-class city people know today—that Graham was born.
Frank and Morrow Graham built, and reared their four children on, a thriving dairy farm. The children grew up in a colonial-style house with indoor plumbing. The family was close-knit. Indeed, Billy and two younger siblings, Catherine and Melvin, shared a bedroom until Catherine was Jean Graham Ford—the youngest Graham sibling, born almost 14 years after Billy and his only surviving sibling today—recalls the special bond shared by Billy and his mother. Billy was always doing little things to please her, like going out into the fields and bringing her wildflowers.
Jean also recalls that young Billy loved Morrow's cooking and had a seemingly insatiable appetite: "When you walked in the back door during the spring and summer months, Mother would always have tomatoes on the shelf in the back porch. He would pick up the tomato and eat it just like he would an apple. She would fix it by the quart, and he would drink it down. The Graham children's early years were quiet but full.
Morrow Graham recalled it as "just a quiet country life. The story of Billy Graham's conversion is well known. In the fall of , Mordecai Ham, a Kentucky-born Baptist revivalist, came to Charlotte and preached a powerful sermon.
The revival stretched over weeks, and for the first week or so, the Grahams didn't attend. Billy was persuaded to check out Ham by Albert McKain, one of his father's most trusted employees. There, in response to Ham's powerful teachings about sin, Billy famously made a decision for Christ. Later that night, standing in the Grahams' breakfast room with fixings for a sandwich, Billy shared his experience with his family: Putting down his sandwich, he turned to Morrow and said, "Oh, Mother, I've been saved tonight.
Doubtless, Billy's sense that stirring preaching could inspire a dramatic personal commitment to Christ inspired his own lifelong ministry.
And yet it is worth remembering that, as decisive as this experience was, it wasn't the beginning of Graham's Christian life. To the contrary, by the time Graham found his way to Ham's revival, he had already experienced nearly two decades of powerful formation in his local Presbyterian church and at home.
Both of Graham's parents were raised in the Presbyterian Church, although Morrow was more active than her husband before they married. As children, Jean recalls, the Graham family was at church every time the doors opened, and prayer was part of their daily life. They prayed together and read Scripture together—even on their honeymoon they knelt together. Throughout Billy's childhood, the family had devotions, usually at night, in which Frank or Morrow would read a Bible passage and then family members would take turns praying.
Sabbath was a special day in the Graham household. Morrow cooked all of Sunday's food on Saturday so that no more work than necessary cows do always have to be milked would be undertaken on Sunday.
This was the strong foundation on which Billy's decisive moment at the Ham revival was built. But Billy's early Christian formation was not the only aspect of his life in Charlotte that made an impact. His experiences at various schools would shape his intellectual life, and his understanding of Christian institutions, for decades.
Scholarship was not Billy's great strength; indeed, at first it was not clear to anyone that he would graduate from high school. His sister Jean recalls the day his homeroom teacher came to the house and warned Morrow that her eldest son wouldn't pass his senior year. He graduated from Sharon High School in His lackadaisical attitude toward schoolwork may have been more of a comment on his desire to follow his own intellectual interests than anything else.
He loved to read and read what he wanted to, even if it meant letting some of his assignments fall by the wayside. Jean remembers Billy often sitting cross-legged in a chair, "biting his fingernails and reading, letting the rest of the world go by. That Morrow Graham's children would attend college was a given, but before matriculating came Billy's storied stint as a Fuller brush salesman. He surprised his friends—who thought he was not the most hardworking person on the planet, and that he would be a flop—by selling brushes throughout the Carolinas.
Is it any coincidence that America's most famous and successful proponent of the gospel had his first career success persuading people that they needed a Fuller brush? Then came college. Where should a lanky farmer's son from North Carolina study? Morrow had her heart set on her children attending Wheaton, but Bob Jones College then located in Cleveland, Tennessee came to seem a better option because it was close to home and less pricey.
Yet Billy struggled at Bob Jones from the moment he arrived. As he recalled in his memoir, Just As I Am , students' social life and intellectual life were strictly regulated; students' mail was even checked to make sure nothing untoward got through the postal service.
Perhaps foreshadowing the showdown he and Jones would have years later, Billy chafed against the regulations. Indeed, Billy and his friend Wendell Phillips both broke enough rules to rack up about demerits—one more, and they'd be out. His schoolwork suffered, as did his health and, not surprisingly, his spiritual life.
So in , Billy transferred to Florida Bible Institute, which he found much more congenial. There, he learned a framework for thinking about critical issues that would stay with him for life: "We were encouraged to think things through for ourselves, but always with the unique authority of Scripture as our guide.
It was also in Florida that Billy started preaching. Their hosts invited Minder to preach that evening at a small Baptist church. Minder, perhaps determined to get his young friend into the pulpit but perhaps unable to imagine the awesome ministry that would result , declined the invitation, saying that Billy would be happy to take the service.
What could Billy do but agree? So that evening, in a small room where a potbellied stove warded off the chill, Billy stood up before a small group of Baptist preachers and recited not one but four sermons he had memorized from a Moody Press book.
This was, Billy later recalled, an "awkward debut," to say the least. Minder might have thought he saw in me was Raw, with a capital R. That night in Palatka was, of course, just the beginning.
Before long, the rough edges of Billy's earliest sermons were burnished through prayer and practice, and he grew from a tyro into a masterful preacher. The seeds of his phenomenal work for Christ were clearly evident in his early years. His love of reading and his willingness to think about challenging issues, always in a biblical framework, would find new direction when he finally matriculated at Wheaton.
And his understanding that powerful preaching could help lead even an ordinary North Carolina farm boy to make a decision for Christ would yield copious fruit in decades of evangelism around the world. Lauren F. Winner is associate professor of Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School and author most recently of Wearing God. B illy Graham had a life-long influence on me as a person and as a pastor. It began in my childhood with my grandmother. My grandmother told me, "I pray for two people every day.
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