A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  “When I’m with Daddy, I feel like we communicate on a level that is not verbal. The Lord is just present when we’re together, and he seems strengthened and encouraged and blessed by it. For years and years, I felt like Daddy gave more attention even to the local reporter at the newspaper than to us, because that was where his focus was, and Mother had encouraged him in that. Then, at the end of his life, to see him come back and have the time with us is really wonderful. So precious! And my mother also. I have been with her in the hospital when she has had surgeries. She is always afraid she is going to be a burden to us. I told her it isn’t a burden; it is a blessing. For all these years, they have been so self-sufficient, so selfless, and if they had a need, they had a whole staff to answer it. We have not been able to do things for our parents. And then to find that I can actually do something for them that would be a blessing and help to them is just the highest privilege and the greatest blessing of my life. Daddy just hates growing old, but in the midst of all his physical infirmities and limits, to see the sweetness of his character and the gentleness and the same concern for others, it’s incredible. It’s such a testimony to a life that has been lived for Christ and focused on Christ, so that in the end you actually take on his characteristics. I look at my daddy and mother and I can see Christ in their faces. Sometimes when they are feeling the worst, are hurting the most, or things are not going right for whatever reason, you can see the countenance of Christ in them. And it gives me hope.”

  Concerned at both a personal and professional level, Franklin Graham made the eighty-mile trip from Boone to Montreat as often as his schedule permitted and often astride his Harley, but he also took extra pains to see that his father was well cared for when he was away from home. To take the place of T. W. Wilson, forced by a stroke in 1999 to relinquish his role as Billy’s faithful traveling companion, Franklin assigned two longtime staffers, David Bruce and Maury Scobee, to the task so that his father was never without one of them close at hand. In addition to handling details of travel, appointments, and meals, the men were also enjoined to make sure Billy’s hearing aid always had fresh batteries and to watch for such things as a crooked tie or a minor food stain on a lapel—details an older man might overlook before an interview or a television appearance. But Franklin’s overwhelming commitment was to help his father “finish well” and to provide him with ample assurance that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association would remain faithful to its mission. At least in part to facilitate his own ability to keep close watch on the operation, Franklin surprised many by announcing in mid-November 2001 that BGEA would move its headquarters from Minneapolis to a new and larger facility to be erected on the Billy Graham parkway in Charlotte, thus bringing the ministry back at last to the soul from which it sprung.

  Franklin faced the future with little obvious trepidation. Samaritan’s Purse is solidly positioned to continue its work indefinitely. As for BGEA without BG, he felt it could long continue what it was born to do and had done best for decades: evangelism. He and other associate evangelists will continue to hold crusades, using the time-tested model that seems always to bring out the crowds and gather in the harvest. And for a time, his father will also continue to proclaim the gospel—by means of the technology whose use he and his team pioneered.

  While still thinking big, Franklin thought that available technologies could be used in a more efficient and effective manner than in such undertakings as Mission World and Global Mission. “I never was totally comfortable with those,” he said, “especially when we came out of San Juan. I think what we were trying to do was good, but the world is a pretty big place and you just can’t do something all the way around the world at the same time. There are too many time zones. When it’s day here, it’s night there. What we ended up having to do was video it and delay it so that we could go around the world within a twenty-four-hour period of time. And I was thinking, ‘So what?’ What was so wonderful about that, other than that we could say we had done it? What I want to do is focus. We can take one of my father’s old telecasts and lip-sync it so that Daddy is speaking Chinese if we show it in China, Spanish if we show it in Central or South America, Swahili in Africa, and Hindi in India. Let’s just go in with the money and buy the time on state television and show it in prime time. That’s what we do in this country. And let’s go around the world. Let’s say we start with Central America. We put a local address and local telephone number on the screen and work with a local mission group or local church to be our representative for that telecast, so that all the requests will come in to them, and we provide the materials and pay them to mail them out for us and we keep that little office open for a month or two. We do that in every nation, so that people can respond to a local address. When we finish Central America, we move to South America, and when we finish South America, we move to Europe, and then to Africa and the Middle East and on into India. It might take us three years to go around the world and do it right in every country. And once we go around the world and complete it, we do it again with a different program, and the next time around we will be a little smarter, because we have been there before.”

  In addition to the immediate results, Franklin added, “By having a crusade on television, we would be giving a model to the church. People would say, ‘So that’s what a Billy Graham crusade is. That’s what the message is about. That’s how you give an invitation.’ That would spark an interest so that people will say, ‘We want to have a crusade like that in our city. Who has the gift of evangelism in our country? Let’s get together and help them. Let’s do this in our town, with one of our own.’” It would be far better, Franklin thought, to let people see a crusade on their state-run television at prime time than at four in the morning on some UHF Christian station that was coming in all scratchy.”

  Franklin also determined to extend his father’s ministry by using BGEA’s enormous collection of videotapes. “We have sat on my father’s videos,” he explained. “I am making them available to Jan and Paul Crouch [of Trinity Broadcasting Network]. Some people wonder why we want to give it to them, because they are ‘different.’ I’ll tell you why: They have a network. [Skeptics of the plan] say, ‘Yeah, but they are Pentecostals.’ So? At least they love the Lord Jesus Christ. We pay to be on NBC and ABC and CBS, and Daddy [would] be on and the program right after [would] be some godless program, with immorality and killing and violence and everything. I’d much rather be on Trinity Broadcasting, and I don’t have to pay for that. They are going to take my father’s telecasts and play them for free, and they are thrilled to have that opportunity. I think you can take some of these old telecasts and show them on Trinity Broadcasting. We’re going to put a little subtitle down on the bottom—Billy Graham Classic—so people will realize this is not live—and fifty years from now people can still come to know Jesus Christ. But sitting on those tapes isn’t leading one person to Christ.” TBN began airing “Billy Graham Classics” twice weekly in mid-2001.

  Franklin’s creative rethinking of ways to combine BGEA’s extensive archival resources, various forms of media, and time-tested organizational methods has proved astonishingly successful in an initiative known as “My Hope World TV Project.” Begun in 2002 and continuing to evolve, the program centers on regional telecasts of programs featuring Billy Graham “classics,” current presentations by Franklin, and films from Worldwide Pictures. Local churches cooperate to stir interest and support, as in traditional Graham revivals, but instead of gathering people into churches or public venues, church members trained in sharing their faith and leading people to Christ invite small groups into their homes to view the programs, as the World Television Series had pioneered with Operation Matthew in the 1990s. The results far exceeded expectations. In the first five years of the program, more than 2.2 million “Matthews” posted such gatherings, with 6.4 million people making decisions for Christ. Local churches reported explosive growth overnight, with 40 to 70 percent of those making decisions following through a
nd becoming integrated with the congregation. Several Latin American countries reported remarkable harvests—Venezuela, 234,000; Argentina, 321,000; Colombia, 705,000—and three Russian installments have garnered more than 320,000 decisions. But the clear standout has been India, with a total in excess of four million.

  Although he thought it plausible that within a few years BGEA and Samaritan’s Purse would share common boards, Franklin thought it unlikely the two organizations would ever merge formally. “I think we will keep them separate,” he said, explaining that “Samaritan’s Purse complements BGEA. The criticism that my father and his generation got, that people are more concerned with the soul and not the body—they can’t make that charge against me. Even the most liberal of liberal groups receive me because I had twenty years with Samaritan’s Purse before I started my evangelism. In their minds, that gives me credibility. I didn’t design it this way. This is just the way it happened. I never dreamed the media and others would treat me differently because of the humanitarian work, and I am going to use that to the advantage of evangelism.”

  Despite his intention to keep the two organizations separate, Franklin did see an advantage in having BGEA headquarters closer at hand. In November 2001 he announced that the central operation would move from Minneapolis, “all the address you need” for more than fifty years, to Charlotte. Dedicated in April 2005, the spacious new facilities (200,000 square feet) sit on sixty-three acres alongside the Billy Graham Parkway. The new location, not far from the Charlotte airport, is much closer to Samaritan’s Purse in Boone and the Cove in Asheville.

  The Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove has become and will doubtless continue to be a major component of BGEA ministries. Prominent Evangelical teachers lead seminars, most lasting three to five days apiece and focusing on such topics as “A Hunger for the Holy,” “Following Jesus in Tough Times,” “Shepherding the Heart of a Woman,” “Five Lies That Ruin Relationships,” “Christ’s Take on Investing the Rest of Your Life,” “Successful Aging,” and “Who Wants to Have a Million-Dollar Marriage?” The main conference auditorium seats 500 and features state-of-the-art electronic equipment. Two reasonably priced inns are tastefully furnished, but offer guests no radio or television sets, and recreation is limited to walks through the woods of the beautifully maintained 1,500-acre property. In the future the Cove will likely serve as the site for “mini-Amsterdam” conferences (now called “Beyond Amsterdam”) to provide intensive training in evangelism.

  In all these ways and others that may present themselves, Franklin Graham intends to use the resources of BGEA to further evangelism (to use the words of the association’s original charter), “by any and all means.” The great desire of his heart, he said convincingly and with a sense of urgency, is “to help other evangelists. I want BGEA to be in the forefront of the battle. We are not going to sit on the sidelines and say, ‘The glory days are behind us.’ We are going to be pro-active, out there, in the face of the devil and every demon in hell. We are going to fight for every soul we can, to give them a chance to hear the gospel, give them a chance to confess and repent before God, give them a chance to receive God’s provision through his Son, Jesus Christ. I like to build. For twenty years I’ve been building a ministry for my Father in heaven, and I don’t have any intention of quitting that. I want to build BGEA, and I want to build Samaritan’s Purse, and we want to take it for another generation. I’m forty-eight now; fifty-eight . . . sixty-eight . . . seventy-eight. . . . Maybe I’ve got thirty more years. You can say, ‘That’s a long time.’ But I’ve been here twenty years and it feels like it’s gone just like that. We don’t have a lot of time. So if we are going to do something, we had better do it now.”

  When he spoke these words in the spring of 2001, Franklin’s awareness of the swiftness of the stream of life had doubtless been quickened by the passing of those who had so long held up his father’s arms. Fred and Ted Dienert, Billie Barrows, Robert Ferm, Victor Nelson, Alexander Haraszti, and George Wilson had all died during the 1990s. Just two weeks after that conversation and a few days after finally making his retirement official, T. W. Wilson suffered a fatal heart attack in a restaurant near his home in Montreat. Walter Smyth had retired and was in poor health. John Wesley White was still recovering slowly from a devastating stroke suffered in 1996. Another of Franklin’s mentors, Roy Gustafson, died in April 2002. Cliff Barrows and George Beverly Shea appeared to be in good health, but Cliff was seventy-eight and Bev was ninety-two. And, of course, his own father’s precarious health was seldom far out of Franklin’s mind. Obviously and inexorably, the little team that had done so much to lead Evangelical Christianity out of the wilderness and into the central arenas of the religious world over the past six decades was about to pass into history.

  Awareness that an era was ending was not limited to Evangelical Christians. On September 14, 2001, three days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Billy Graham was once again called upon to fill the role of People’s Pastor at the observance of National Day of Prayer and Remembrance in Washington. Representatives of Judaism, Islam, and various segments of Christianity spoke, and spoke well, but the task of delivering the central message fell to the man who had borne its weight so many times before. Although he was obviously frail and accepted the assistance of two escorts to help him to his place on the dais at the National Cathedral, Graham’s voice was strong and his manner sure. He acknowledged that, when asked how God could allow such tragedy and suffering, “I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept, by faith, that God is sovereign, and He’s a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering.”

  Graham noted how the events of the week had underscored the brevity and uncertainty of life, cited the heroism and courage so many had shown in the aftermath of the attacks, called for spiritual renewal, and pointed to the cross as the symbol of hope for Christians—making it clear that “I’m speaking for the Christian now,” a tacit acknowledgment that not all present or watching on television shared the same convictions. Toward the end, he said, “I’ve become an old man now,” confirming that he understood what many in this global audience were seeing for themselves for the first time, “and I’ve preached all over the world, and the older I get the more I cling to that hope that I started with many years ago and proclaimed in many languages to many parts of the world.” The wounded nation and its people would recover, he felt confident, and he called upon them to rebuild on the solid rock of faith in God, quoting the words of the familiar hymn, “How Firm a Foundation”:

  Fear not, I am with thee; O be not dismayed,

  For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;

  I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,

  Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

  As Billy Graham returned slowly to his seat, the huge audience, silent throughout most of the service, signaled its respect and gratitude for the venerable evangelist with a sustained wave of warm applause for one whose like would not pass their way again.

  Sadly, troubling shadows soon clouded the aura of expansive goodwill Billy Graham and his ministry had come to symbolize. A few weeks after the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, many Christian leaders were working to ease and forestall expressions of enmity against Arabs and Muslims. On a day when President Bush was wishing Muslims “health, prosperity, and happiness during [the Islamic holy month of] Ramadan,” Franklin Graham publicly observed that he did not regard Islam as “this wonderful, peaceful religion.” On the contrary, he said, it is “wicked, violent, and not of the same God. . . . It wasn’t Methodists flying into those buildings, it wasn’t Lutherans. It was an attack on this country by people of the Islamic faith.” Irate Muslim leaders decried these comments, but when representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked to meet with him to foster better understanding, Franklin declined, claiming he could not fit them in
to his schedule.

  He did, however, offer a clarifying statement, in which he claimed he had been “greatly misunderstood” and said he did not believe Muslims “are evil people because of their faith.” He acknowledged that much evil has been done in the name of religion, including Christianity. Still, he did not temper his criticism of Islam, expressing concern about the treatment of women in Muslim lands and observing that the Qur’an “provides ample evidence that Islam encourages violence in order to win converts and to reach the ultimate goal of an Islamic world.” Muslims, of course, were hardly satisfied by such putative clarifications, but other observers also expressed bafflement. The White House distanced itself from Graham’s remarks, saying that President Bush “views Islam as a religion that preaches peace.” The president of an international relief organization lamented, “It doesn’t help the cause of Christianity. It doesn’t bring the faiths together. My question is, ‘What’s he trying to accomplish?’ I hope he was caught off guard.” More pointedly, veteran Newsweek religion editor Ken Woodward, a longtime Graham observer, volunteered that “obviously, Mr. Graham is tone deaf in this respect. He’s certainly not his father’s son in terms of discretion.”

  Unfortunately, in late February 2002 evidence surfaced that caused many to wonder if at least part of the father’s “discretion” had not been, in fact, “deception.” A newly released batch of tapes from the Nixon White House included a 90-minute conversation Graham had had with the President and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman on February 1, 1972, during which all three men made anti–Semitic statements. Although they both expressed admiration for Israelis, Nixon and Graham agreed that liberal American Jews played a prominent role in what they regarded as the largely unpatriotic news media and in the production and dissemination of an increasingly corrosive popular culture. Graham noted that he was not talking about all Jews and that he had many Jewish friends, but he admitted that, when in the company of liberal Jews such as those at the New York Times, he did not let them know “how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.”