21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (21 page)

His youngest daughter, Ruth, was once a guest on my local radio show in Orlando. We spent a few moments talking about her illustrious father, and at one point, in her rich North Carolina accent, she gave me a profound insight into her father’s character: “My Daddy knows who he is, a flawed human being. In Daddy’s mind, he’s still just a farm boy from Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Billy Graham was raised on a dairy farm, the oldest of four children born to William Franklin Graham Sr. and his wife, Morrow. In 1933, when Prohibition was repealed, Billy’s father brought several bottles of beer home and took Billy and his sister Catherine into the kitchen. He opened the bottles and gave one to Billy and one to Catherine. “Drink it,” Mr. Graham said. “All of it.” Billy was fifteen at the time, and he and Catherine did as they were told—and they hated the taste of the stuff. That’s exactly what their dad had in mind.

“From now on,” he told them, “whenever any of your friends try to get you to drink alcohol, just tell them you’ve already tasted it and you don’t like it.”

Billy later recalled, “His approach was more pragmatic than pious, but it worked.”
¹

In 1934, a group of Christian businessmen in Charlotte, including Billy’s father, brought evangelist Mordecai Ham to the city for a series of revival meetings in a sprawling five-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle specially constructed for the event. Dr. Ham would be preaching every morning and every night except Mondays for almost three months. Sixteen-year-old Billy wanted nothing to do with those revival meetings, and he told his parents he wasn’t going.

One night, Mordecai Ham preached on the subject of teenage immorality. He spoke pointedly about some goings-on around the high school in Charlotte. This angered some students, and they hatched a plan to disrupt the next meeting. Billy and some of his friends decided to show up, sit in the back, and see if there would be a fight.

For some reason, the student protest never materialized. When Dr. Ham preached, young Billy Graham was spellbound. In spite of his inner resistance, the message was getting through to him. Later that night, Billy lay in bed, unable to sleep, unable to turn his mind off.

Billy kept attending the meetings, and, he later recalled, “I became deeply convicted about my sinfulness and rebellion. And confused. How can this evangelist be talking to me, of all people?…I had gotten into mischief once in a while, but I could hardly be called wicked…. So why would the evangelist always be pointing his bony finger at
me
?”
²
He began to realize he had been depending on his parents’ faith and his church membership as proof he was saved. The “miserable realization” dawned on him that he didn’t know Jesus Christ for himself.

One night, right around Billy’s sixteenth birthday, Dr. Ham invited anyone who wished to come forward and accept Christ as Lord and Savior. In contrast to some of Dr. Ham’s fiery sermons, this was a gentle invitation, and he quoted Romans 5:8 (
KJV
): “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The song leader led the audience in all four verses of “Just as I Am.”

Billy Graham got out of his chair and walked down the aisle, feeling strangely weightless. He was one of several hundred people who went forward that night. A man came up beside him, a family friend “with a deep love for souls.” The man put his arms around Billy’s shoulders and urged him to decide.

And Billy made his decision.
³

After graduating from high school in 1936, Billy Graham attended Bob Jones College in Cleveland, Tennessee—and was shocked to find an academic environment that was legalistic, intellectually rigid, and autocratically controlled. Graham left Bob Jones College after one semester and continued his studies at Florida Bible Institute.

While Graham was at Florida Bible Institute, the president of the college was accused of immoral behavior. Graham believed the college president (who was a close friend and mentor to him) was innocent. His accusers had an ax to grind, and their stories were inconsistent. Eventually, the scandal passed, the college president remained in office, but a quarter of the student body left. The accusations were never proven but never dispelled, either. The incident left the campus under a pall. “It was a big learning experience for me in many ways,” Graham later recalled, “and it taught me to be very careful myself.”
⁴

Graham was continuing his studies at Wheaton College in Illinois when World War II broke out. He applied to the War Department for acceptance into the Chaplains Corps. The War Department replied that his application would be considered after he completed his studies at Wheaton and took a seminary course. Though he wanted to serve as a chaplain, he never got to the battlefield.

At Wheaton, he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries to China. At the time, Ruth was inspired to follow the example of Amy Carmichael, an orphanage director and missionary in India who worked for fifty-five years without furlough—and was never married. Billy Graham needed all his powers of persuasion to change Ruth Bell’s thinking about marriage. He succeeded in convincing her, and they were married on August 13, 1943, and eventually had five children.

Billy Graham served as a pastor of a Baptist church in Western Springs, Illinois, from 1943 to 1944. In January 1944, he took over the “Songs in the Night” radio program begun by Torrey Johnson. Through that radio ministry, Billy became acquainted with singer and ministry partner George Beverly Shea.

In late 1944, Torrey Johnson told him of his idea for an international youth movement called Youth for Christ International. Through Youth for Christ, Graham became close friends with Charles Templeton. In 1946, Templeton resigned as pastor of a Toronto church and enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, believing that he needed to deepen his theological thinking. Templeton had doubts and questions about the authority of the Bible. Graham recalled, “My respect and affection for Chuck [Templeton] were so great that whatever troubled him troubled me also.”
⁵

Graham had been reading neo-orthodox theologians, such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, and the combination of Templeton’s questions and his own reading left him feeling confused. “I never doubted the Gospel itself, or the deity of Christ on which it depended,” Graham recalled, “but other major issues were called into question…. Could the Bible be trusted completely?”
⁶

In 1947, thirty-year-old Graham was hired as interim president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis—making him the youngest president of any American college and university. He would serve in that role until 1952. While Billy Graham was presiding over a Bible school and seminary, and preaching at evangelistic campaigns, he was troubled by doubts about his faith. His struggles left him feeling like a hypocrite.

His nagging questions about the Bible reached critical mass in the summer of 1949, as he prepared for the Los Angeles campaign, the largest citywide evangelistic effort of his career so far. He had agreed to a speaking engagement at Forest Home, a Christian retreat center in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles. Because of his doubts, he wished he could cancel—yet he felt obligated to keep the speaking engagement.

He went to the conference, which was organized by Miss Henrietta Mears of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. Graham’s friend, Charles Templeton, was also slated to speak. During the weeklong conference, Billy had many times of prayer and discussion with Miss Mears. She had a deep faith in the authority of the Bible, and he was hungry for any insight she could offer.

Meanwhile, Charles Templeton, with his passion for theological intellectualism, was trying hard to pull Graham in the opposite direction. “Billy,” Templeton said, “you’re fifty years out of date. People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do.”

During that week, Billy Graham underwent a crisis of faith. He knew he had to settle the question of whether or not he could trust the Bible. If the answer was no, he could not go through with the Los Angeles campaign. In fact, he believed that, as a matter of integrity, he would have to resign as president of the college and give up his ministry as an evangelist.

He got up one evening and took a walk in the moonlight, Bible in hand. He walked through the woods until he came to a tree stump, where he spread out his Bible. It was too dark to read the text, but the open Bible on the tree stump served as his prayer altar. He went to his knees and told God that there was so much in the Bible he didn’t understand, there were so many questions he couldn’t resolve. Yet he felt God prompting him to say, “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by
faith
! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”

When he got up from his knees, Graham sensed God’s presence in his inner being. He still had unanswered questions in his mind, but the crisis was firmly resolved. “In my heart and mind,” he later said, “I knew a spiritual battle in my soul had been fought and won.”
⁷

Graham launched the Los Angeles campaign in the fall of 1949. His organization erected a tent auditorium that would seat six thousand people and scheduled the campaign to run for three weeks. For reasons that are unknown to this day, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst—who had never met Billy Graham and was not previously known as a supporter of Christian evangelism—sent a decree to his editors to publicize the Graham crusade. Almost overnight, the Hearst newspapers turned Billy Graham into a household name.
⁸

Attendance soared. The Graham organization expanded the tent seating capacity to nine thousand. Graham extended the meeting schedule from three weeks to eight weeks. More than 2,700 people answered Billy Graham’s invitation to come forward and make a decision for Christ.
⁹

On July 14, 1950, at President Truman’s invitation, Billy Graham and members of his evangelistic team met and prayed with the president in the Oval Office. At one point in their conversation, Billy Graham asked President Truman about his beliefs.

“I try to live by the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule,” Truman replied.

Summoning his courage to speak boldly, Graham said, “It takes more than that, Mr. President. It’s faith in Christ and his death on the cross that you need.”

At that point, President Truman stood and ended the conversation.
¹⁰
From then on, Truman was no fan of Billy Graham. He later told Merle Miller, who recorded Truman’s oral autobiography, “I hadn’t ought to say this…but [Billy Graham] was never a friend of mine when I was President. I just don’t go for people like that. All he’s interested in is getting his name in the paper.”
¹¹

Perhaps it was Graham’s blunt question about faith in Christ that soured Truman. Whatever the reason, Truman was the only president who ever openly expressed dislike toward the evangelist. Dr. Graham went on to become a spiritual adviser to several presidents, and he has prayed with every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.

When President Eisenhower was on his deathbed in 1969, he asked Billy Graham how he could know for sure he was going to heaven. He also asked Graham’s help in reconciling with his former vice president, Richard Nixon, whose daughter Julie was soon to marry Ike’s grandson David. In 1974, President Gerald Ford sought prayer and counsel from Graham before he pardoned Nixon. Immediately after Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, Nancy Reagan called Graham to the hospital—and he was the first person Mrs. Reagan called when Ronald Reagan died in 2004.
¹²

Billy Graham also had a close friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He relied on Dr. King for counsel regarding racial tensions in America. Graham and King had several conversations about ending racial segregation in America. Dr. Graham never preached to a racially segregated audience. During his 1953 crusade in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham went into the arena hours before the first meeting and personally took down the ropes separating the white and black sections. The head usher of the event resigned in protest, and other segregationists there were enraged. But Billy Graham stuck to his principles.

At the Nashville crusade in 1954, Graham told a mostly white audience, “We have been proud as a race—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.” The
Nashville Banner
newspaper transcribed and published every sermon Billy Graham preached during the four-week crusade.
¹³

In 1957, Dr. King joined Billy Graham at his New York City crusade. And in 1963, Graham helped Dr. King post bail to get out of the Birmingham jail following King’s Good Friday arrest. In 1964, Graham took his crusade to Birmingham’s Legion Field, where he preached to an integrated audience of thirty-five thousand people just six months after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—a terrorist act that killed four girls. Graham later recalled, “The Ku Klux Klan went around and knocked out our signs. The State Police had to send policemen with us wherever we went…. They were afraid we would get shot.”
¹⁴

Graham conducted a crusade in Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1973—twenty years after he was initially invited to preach there. He wouldn’t agree to preach in South Africa until he was assured that the meetings would be racially integrated. The South Africa campaign showed blacks and whites what their world could become if apartheid were ended.