The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Billy Graham
1918–2018American
The American evangelist who preached in person to more people than anyone in history, and built his ministry on four rules written in a hotel room in 1948 to keep it clean.
Summary
- Lived 1918–2018, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Revivalists and The Awakeners.
The life
William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, North Carolina, on November 7, 1918. He was converted at sixteen under a travelling evangelist named Mordecai Ham. He milked cows before school, and said later that the discipline of it never left him.
He studied at Bob Jones College, then Florida Bible Institute, then Wheaton College in Illinois, where he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of a missionary surgeon in China. They married in 1943 and stayed married sixty-four years, until her death in 2007.
The decision that shaped everything came in a hotel room in Modesto, California, in 1948. Graham and his young team, Cliff Barrows, George Beverly Shea, Grady Wilson, sat down and listed the things that had wrecked other evangelists. Money. Sex. Exaggerated crowd numbers. Running down the local pastors. They wrote rules against all four. Graham took a fixed salary from then on and never handled an offering. He would not travel, meet, or eat alone with a woman other than his wife. The attendance figures he reported came from stadium officials, not from him. In a career of seventy years, no financial or moral scandal ever attached to him.
His breakthrough was a tent campaign in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1949. It was scheduled for three weeks and ran eight. The newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst is said to have sent its editors a two-word instruction: "Puff Graham." National coverage followed.
Then came the cities. London in 1954 for twelve weeks. New York in 1957, sixteen weeks at Madison Square Garden, ending in a crowd at Yankee Stadium. He insisted on integrated seating in the American South before the law required it, personally pulling down the ropes that divided the white and Black sections at a Chattanooga meeting in 1953, and he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at the New York crusade.
He preached in 185 countries. His organization put the number who heard him in person at around 215 million, with hundreds of millions more by radio, television, and satellite. He held meetings behind the Iron Curtain, Moscow in 1982, which drew heavy criticism, and again in 1992, and in North Korea. He counseled every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, a closeness he later said had sometimes cost him; the Nixon tapes caught him in remarks about Jews that he publicly repented of in 2002.
His message never moved. The Bible says. You are a sinner. Christ died for you. Come.
He left the road in 2005 after a final New York crusade, weakened by Parkinson's disease, and lived quietly at Montreat, North Carolina. He died there on February 21, 2018, at ninety-nine, and was buried in a plain plywood coffin built by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Sources: Billy Graham, Just As I Am; William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story; Grant Wacker, America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation; the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's published crusade records.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1930–today
- May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
- Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Billy Graham at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Preached in person to more people than anyone in history and never once handled the offering himself.
Hangs on The Revivalists: The men and women of the outpourings, Wales, Azusa Street, and the streams that followed. Hangs on The Awakeners: The preachers of the Great Awakenings, fields for pulpits, nations for parishes.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.