*Billy Graham and his men found well-deserved satisfaction at having managed to stand in the public eye for more than four decades while suffering only occasional seasons of doubts about their integrity or judgment. They were pleased with their past. They were less settled about their future, though they realized that the end of Graham’s ministry could not be far off. Graham acknowledged that “we have a committee that looks into that once in a while” but hinted that his own preference might simply be to let his ministry end when he died or retired. “It would take a lot of courage from the Lord just to close it,” he said. “Nobody’s ever done that—just said, ‘God had this ministry for a period of time, and now it’s finished.’ We have certain things that could be continued, like our little magazine and World Wide Pictures. Some of the television ministry could go on in other parts of the world for ten or fifteen years if I suddenly died today.” He conceded it was not likely anyone could simply pick up his crusade ministry and carry it forward at the same level. His voice conveying realistic assessment rather than obvious pride, he said, “There are a lot of wonderful young men around, but I don’t think anyone has arisen, probably, to be the kind of evangelist I have been.”
When Franklin Graham was ordained to the ministry in 1982, his father understandably began to think of him as a possible successor. Kenneth Chafin, former dean of the School of Evangelism, recalled when Graham first began to play with that idea. “We were in a crusade, and Billy called to say he wanted to see me right away. I told him I needed to introduce Robert Schuller at the School of Evangelism, but he insisted. He wanted to sit in the sun, so we went out to the stadium and sat on towels with our shirts off. T.W. sat off about fifty yards away. Billy asked me point-blank, ‘Do you think Franklin can succeed me?’ I told him, ‘I don’t think so. God chose you. He’ll choose your successor.’ He said, ‘But the staff says he’s good.’ I told him, ‘He is good, but he’s a novice. He can’t preach the way you do.’ Billy didn’t want to hear that.”
It must have been difficult for Graham to believe that God might not want his son to take over his ministry, since it seemed almost miraculous that he was even a Christian. Franklin was an able preacher and occasionally held crusades but saw his primary role as that of facilitating evangelism by demonstrating Christian love and compassion through two admirable Christian relief organizations he heads, Samaritan’s Purse and World Medical Missions. “I’m not an evangelist,” he said back then, “though I’m concerned about evangelism. Where my father has used the large stadiums of the world—the crusades—to reach people, I believe I can use the gutters. So we’re going down the same road. But he’s going high, and I’m looking low.”
With a staff of nearly forty people and combined budgets, in 1990, of approximately $7 million, less than 20 percent of which was spent for administration and fund-raising, the two organizations concentrate more on long-term benefits than on flashy one-time contributions. World Medical Missions coordinates the efforts of American physicians who visit Third World nations for four to six weeks at a time, performing surgery and assisting in establishing basic health care programs. The work of Samaritan’s Purse is more varied. In dozens of trips to Lebanon, some of which have put him at considerable personal peril, Franklin has overseen the building (and subsequent rebuilding) of much-needed hospitals in that war-torn land. In Ethiopia, rather than add to shipments of food that lay unused or rotting on loading docks, the organization provided local Christian leaders with money to buy diesel fuel, which enabled them to distribute the goods, then initiated an extensive program of drilling water wells and installing drip-irrigation systems that allowed farmers to grow food with less than half the water previously needed. In India, where women often trudge for miles to get a day’s supply of water, Franklin and his colleagues hit on the idea of drilling wells on the grounds of Evangelical churches and providing water freely to people in their villages. As villagers flock to the church grounds, pastors and lay leaders engage them in conversation about Christ. By the end of 1990, Samaritan’s Purse had fully funded 130 wells, providing approximately 350,000 people with access to fresh, clear water. In a similar gesture, the organization gives away coconut trees, which provide poor families with food and other materials that can cause a marked rise in their meager standard of living. By using these gifts to create bridges to Hindu families, one native evangelist was able to establish nearly 150 new churches in a single year. Additional programs tailored to local needs and possibilities have been launched in Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, Haiti, and several African countries.
Because of his firm insistence that winning souls is more important than ministering to bodies, coupled with impressive evidence that the latter facilitates the former, Franklin Graham largely managed to avoid the suspicion that he was trying to lead Evangelical Christianity into a rebirth of the old Social Gospel. On the contrary, his quiet, self-effacing dedication to his ministries greatly enhanced his stature in Evangelical circles and made his taking over the reins at BGEA seem less farfetched.
Despite his growing prominence and respect, Franklin was obviously skittish about trying to follow too closely in his father’s footsteps. “I really feel sorry,” he said, “when I see people like Richard Roberts [son of Oral Roberts], who is trying so hard to assume his father’s identity—by the way he combs his hair, his facial expressions when he looks into the camera. He’ll never be his father. . . . And I’m not my father. For me to try to comb my hair and act and look like him, I would always be a disappointment in people’s minds.” Few believed Franklin would attempt a major crusade ministry modeled on his father’s, but he was clearly a possibility to lead whatever would be left of BGEA when the elder Graham passed from the scene. “Franklin says he doesn’t want to do it right now,” Billy observed, “but it would be advantageous in some ways, because he has my name, he’s had experience in management, and he’s preaching. It would be easier for people who have given to us financially to give to him.” Board member Carloss Morris felt something might be worked out. “I think the Lord decides these things, but from the human side I can envision it. I think we could have a great ministry under Franklin. That boy’s got a big heart for the Lord and a big heart for helping people all around the world.” T. W. Wilson agreed. “Franklin is totally committed to the cause of Christ,” he said. “He has a world vision. And who better than a son would preserve Billy’s good name and that of his ministry? I’ve told Billy, ‘If a man has to lean one way or the other, I’d rather see him lean too far in the direction of conservatism than have one drop of liberalism in his blood. And Franklin believes something, thank God. He’ll keep this thing going for God’s glory, and honor you as well.’ Now, I haven’t always felt that way. He was a rounder, I’m telling you. But then he really got turned on for the Lord. I think he is one of the most highly improved young men that I know.”
Franklin’s theological conservatism was definitely in his favor. T. W. Wilson was not alone in fearing that a successor might depart from the course Billy Graham had followed, and some suspect that is one reason the evangelist had been reluctant to settle on a definite plan for succession. Johnny Lenning wondered aloud “if Billy would not just as soon have the whole thing closed down when he finishes, so there would be nothing left to go apostate. Then you would have had a ministry that for four decades has been clean and aboveboard, so that you could look back and praise God for what was done, instead of looking back and seeing what its roots were before it degenerated.” Despite such sentiments, however, few people seemed seriously to believe that BGEA would simply close its doors when Graham retired or died, but true to their professed belief that their own work had been divinely ordained and guided, most key figures in the association seemed willing to leave the future in the sure hands of God. Asked what he thought would happen when Graham passed from the scene, Maurice Rowlandson said, “My answer to that, in the true meaning of the words is, ‘God only knows.’ It isn’t man’s job to provide the successor. When men did that in the days of the apostles, they chose Matthias, and you never heard of him again. God’s choice was Paul. Our choice could be quite wrong. But if God lays his hand on the right man at the right time, he’ll provide him with the right organization.” Cliff Barrows sounded a similar note. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what will happen,” he said. “I don’t know whether there will ever be anyone to take Bill’s place or not. Somehow, I feel this has been an era that God has allowed to happen, and that now he is going to do it another way rather than continue to gather huge crowds together. But then, God may surprise us all.”
John Corts agreed that no single individual seemed ready to receive Graham’s mantle but thought it possible BGEA could continue to serve as an important enabler of world evangelistic efforts. “We’ve been struggling with this,” he said, “without a real design. We don’t have a formalized plan for the future, but a lot of us are thinking about it. Long term, the challenge is to take the resources that have been developed to support Billy Graham and use them in a way that will make them a resource for the Church of Jesus Christ for many years to come. Perhaps we could support a consortium of evangelists who need the kind of help we can give: promotion, accounting, spiritual counseling, literature, follow-up, mobilization of prayer and church support. We could become a support base, perhaps, for a number of ministries. We’re not quite sure that’s possible. If it’s not, then someday we may just have a funeral service. The honest answer is, nobody knows.”
As 1990 ended, there had been no funeral service, nor any indication one was being planned, but Graham had quietly set about to dismantle a substantial part of the ministry’s far-flung operations. Between 1986 and 1990, BGEA offices in London, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, Paris, and Munich had shut down, usually after turning over their tasks to other organizations. Russ Busby still operated a small photographic studio in Burbank, but virtually all other BGEA operations now proceeded from Minneapolis and Montreat. Whatever course BGEA took at Graham’s demise would be simpler to navigate with fewer ships in the armada.
As he moved inexorably toward the end of his life, Graham seemed to agree with those who felt that the most promising way to preserve and extend his ministry lay not so much in finding a single successor to carry on his work as in multiplying the resources for equipping and encouraging tens of thousands of evangelists. At the 1986 Amsterdam conference, Nilson Fanini observed that it would be impossible to imagine another evangelist of Graham’s stature. “There will be just one Billy Graham in church history,” he said. “You would need a thousand evangelists to do his job. And I believe that is what the Holy Spirit is going to have: a thousand Billy Grahams in Africa, a thousand Billy Grahams in Asia, a thousand Billy Grahams in South America.” The dozens of mini-Amsterdams organized around the world since 1986, most with assistance from BGEA, made Fanini’s prediction seem plausible.
The best bet for transmitting the inspiration and experience of the Graham team, however, was believed to be a new institution, the Billy Graham Training Center, just outside Asheville on Porter’s Cove, the parcel of land whose purchase by the WECEF raised so many eyebrows in 1978. Long before authorizing purchase of the Cove, Graham had toyed with the idea of establishing a center where Bible conferences of the sort D. L. Moody once sponsored could be held and where ministers and laymen could come to study the Bible in a retreat-type setting and to receive intensive instruction in the theory and practice of evangelism. In 1968 he went so far as to send George Wilson to talk to representatives of the Cunard Line about the possibility of buying the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner for that purpose. A stunning piece of land near the southern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Cove seemed ideally suited for such a center. Graham insistsed it would be neither a monument to him nor an embarrassment to fellow Christians. “It won’t be like PTL. It will be unpublicized, quiet, a place where people can come and study the Bible. It won’t be a showplace. It probably won’t even have a sign.” True to that promise, the buildings erected during the first phase of construction were modest structures, clearly fashioned for function rather than fame. Ruth Graham helped architects design a chapel, arguing for and getting a higher steeple than originally planned, and she decided where her and her husband’s graves would be. “We’ve already got the graveyard built,” Billy said brightly; “I’ve gone down and lain there.”
Some saw the Cove, rather than the Minneapolis office, as the place where the memory of Billy Graham’s ministry would be most faithfully preserved and his vision most imaginatively embodied. It could easily become the central location for continuing the work of the School of Evangelism that accompanied the crusades—a pilot effort in 1990 drew eight hundred pastors from forty states and fifty-six denominations. Since Graham never played any significant role in the school, younger men could conduct sessions throughout the year, both at the Cove and at other locations around the country. But some of the old warhorses were not quite ready to retire. “I see the latter part of our ministry as one of doing some basic teaching in the areas of evangelism,” Cliff Barrows said, his eyes gleaming at the possibilities. “I think we could have a communications center where Bill, when he is no longer able to travel, could still, by satellite, speak and minister about evangelism and discipleship and training and counseling and follow-up and Christian life and character—the whole business. Basically the same things Amsterdam ’86 was committed to. We could talk to Christian leadership around the world. With portable satellite dishes and technology just leaping ahead, you can conceivably get a little dish into every hamlet in the world. Technologically, it’s already available, and the price is coming down all the time. Through communications technology, the association can still have a great encouraging ministry. Bill can still make a tremendous impact on the world.”
Graham acknowledged that he could not maintain the pace he once did—“I’m slowing down. I can feel it. My mind tells me I ought to get out there and go, but I just can’t do it”—but insisted that “I’ll preach until there is no breath left in my body. I was called by God, and until God tells me to retire, I cannot. I may preach to smaller groups. I may go back to the streets where I began. But whatever strength I have, whatever time God lets me have, is going to be dedicated to doing the work of an evangelist, as long as I live.”
Street preaching in front of saloons, however, was not a likely finale to Billy Graham’s career. For more than fifty years as an evangelist, he fought the good fight and kept the faith. Now, surely on either God’s or nature’s gun lap, he was ready to finish the course and seemed determined to let the world know he planned to cross the line with an impressively strong kick. In 1988 he embarked on a missionary journey that not only added a new and important country to his own life list but also fulfilled a long-simmering dream of Ruth’s: to return to China, where she had been born and where her family had spent a quarter century, to encourage the spread of the gospel among a people who had never been far out of her mind. In 1980 she and her three siblings returned to the site of the mission compound where they had been reared, and people she met on that trip helped arrange the invitation that made it possible for her husband to accompany her on a return visit. Reminiscent of the circumstances of Graham’s visits to Eastern Europe, the invitation was a cooperative effort between the China Christian Council, a government-approved (and unofficially controlled) body that includes most of the nation’s regular Protestant churches (as distinguished from thousands of “house churches” not affiliated with Western denominations), and a state agency known as the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Like the Soviet bloc visits, the China trip was anything but a haphazard, spur-of-the-moment venture. A few months before leaving, Graham explained offhandedly that “Ruth has formed a committee of China experts,” then tossed off the names of a few of her committee members: “Richard Nixon has been helping; George Bush—people of that sort. We had a study group of luminaries pulled from the State Department here all day yesterday to give us suggestions. A China expert from Johns Hopkins is helping a great deal, and a man from Time magazine. We’ve gotten tremendous help from Zhang Wenjin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States; he’s a member of the Politburo now, and head of the Friendship Association that’s invited us. He’s the one that Chou Enlai sent to negotiate with Kissinger to get Nixon to come to China.” Another who played a key role was an American-born resident of China, Sidney Rittenberg. Fresh out of the University of North Carolina and filled with idealistic notions of communism, Rittenberg had gone to China in 1946 to help build the Utopian society he expected the Communist revolutionaries to create. His idealism suffered a sharp comeuppance when, suspected first of being a spy and then of being an enemy of the Cultural Revolution, he spent sixteen years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. In more recent years Rittenberg had been deeply involved in the modernization process in China, particularly with regard to greater use of computers, and had served as an interpreter and consultant to American media and commercial enterprises seeking to do business with China. “He charges [American businesses] seven thousand dollars a day for consultations,” Graham reported, “but he didn’t charge us a cent. He thought it would be a tremendous thing for relations between the U.S. and China for us to visit. He was the one who really started the ball rolling for us in China. He and his wife were visiting in [California] in 1979, and he saw one of our programs on television and said, ‘Let’s get that man to China.’ And he started doing what Dr. Haraszti was doing in Eastern Europe.”
The message the Grahams took to China was much the same as what Billy and Alexander Haraszti had delivered in Eastern Europe. “First,” Ruth said, “we want to explain what Christians believe and help [government leaders] understand that Christians make their best citizens—the most reliable, the hardest working, the most honest. They don’t get drunk and they don’t run around or gamble away everything they make. They are good family people.” A second aim would be to assure Chinese Christians that their efforts and successes were known and prayed about throughout the world and to help make them feel they are a vital part of international Christianity. And thirdly, “Bill will emphasize peace,” Ruth said. “Peace with God. They will be celebrating an International Year of Peace while we are there. It is interesting to read articles from the Beijing government. They all talk about peace. They want peace. But they don’t realize that they cut themselves off from the real source of peace.”
This ambitious three-pronged mission—originally scheduled for the fall of 1987 but aborted when Graham tripped over his briefcase in a Tokyo hotel room and broke several ribs—finally got under way in April 1988. The five-city, seventeen-day trip got off to a rousing start in Beijing, where Graham was feted at a welcoming banquet hosted by Ambassador Zhang in the Great Hall of the People. The ambassador welcomed Ruth as a “daughter of China” and introduced her husband as “a man of peace.” Subsequently, U.S. ambassador Winston Lord and his wife, Betty Bao Lord, hosted a luncheon for Graham and a collection of religious and political leaders. The diplomatic coup of the trip came when the Grahams were received by Premier Li Peng, who spent nearly an hour in conversation with the evangelist, discussing such topics as the role of religion in China’s future. Graham, as always, bore witness to his own faith, and Li, while stressing that he was and expected to remain an atheist, acknowledged that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion had not always been faith fully observed, and conceded that China needed “moral power” and “spiritual forces” to undergird its efforts at modernization. The previously unannounced visit was featured on Chinese television and made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country—-the only other foreign dignitary the premier had received was Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and generated widespread public interest in the rest of Graham’s visit.
Other notable sessions included lectures at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and at Beijing University (both of which have sprung from institutions founded by American missionaries), a preaching appearance before an overflow crowd of approximately 1,500 at the Beijing Christian Church, and an address to a large gathering of foreign diplomats and business people at Beijing’s International Club. Having been advised by Ambassador Zhang that if he did not ask to visit major historical sites, “People will notice,” Graham visited a section of the Great Wall. When someone explained to a lively group of third graders that their fellow tourist was a famous American, they entertained him with several patriotic songs, and he did his best to respond in kind. When one of his guides taught the children to sing “Jesus Loves Me” in both Chinese and English, the evangelist gamely joined in, making it clear both that his tone deafness is cross-cultural and his memory for lyrics less than flawless. If any of the children could understand his words, they heard the smiling tall man sitting cross-legged in their midst proclaim the un-Evangelical news that “He is weak, but we are strong.” Still, an Australian couple who were taken aback when they recognized him correctly guessed his intentions. “What do you think he’s doing here,” the husband asked. His wife gave the only answer that made sense: “Probably what he does everywhere.”
Other cities on the agenda included Huayin (where Ruth had spent her childhood), Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In each, he spoke to large gatherings of Christians and met with key political and civic leaders to discuss the necessity and social advantages of removing all restrictions on religious belief and practice. He found the clearest example of a growing tolerance toward religion in Nanjing, where he visited a thriving new religious press. During the Cultural Revolution, most copies of the Bible had been destroyed; if believers had access to a copy at all, it was likely to be one that some dedicated saint had laboriously copied by hand. Now, in the first year of its operation, Amity Press was in the process of printing 600,000 copies of the Bible, with plans to print and distribute a million copies a year after that. Graham also spoke to students at Nanjing Seminary, where he gave the ministers-in-training his familiar exhortation to preach the gospel with authority; to preach it simply, boldly, and urgently; and to preach it again and again. After an extended question-and-answer session, a representative of the student body gave Graham a banner to remind the evangelist to pray for him and his fellow seminarians. Then, with touching timidity, he said, “All of our students hope someday to be like you.”
China had never received so prestigious a religious leader before, and Chinese media gave the visit impressive attention. Various events on Graham’s itinerary, particularly his visit with the premier, drew wide radio, television, and newspaper coverage, both at the national and local levels. The influential World Economic Herald, published in Shanghai, carried an interview with the evangelist on its front pages, and Ruth Graham was interviewed by writers for the Beijing Review and Chinese Women magazines. While no one would dare suggest that any substantial proportion of China’s billion-plus population was about to convert to Christianity, Sidney Rittenberg did venture that Graham had represented Christianity to Chinese leaders as “a powerful moral force to support the Chinese people in their mighty, backbreaking efforts to escape from poverty, both moral and material,” and that he had impressed them with his suggestions on “how they might better shape and administer their policy on religious freedom. In this manner, Mr. Graham is opening the big door for the advance of Christianity in China. In doing so, he will promote the opening of all the little doors.”
Shortly after the China visit, Graham returned to Russia to celebrate one thousand years of Christianity’s presence in that country. As a guest of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was treated as a major dignitary. “The millennium celebration was fantastic,” he reported. “Television and newspapers were filled with it all day long. That’s the first time the present generation of Soviet people realized their roots were in Christianity. This made a real impact on them. I suppose I was the main foreign speaker. They put me right up there behind Mrs. Gorbachev, and I had an opportunity to talk with her twice during breaks. They received me everywhere—the Central Committee, the Politburo, everywhere. They gave a luncheon for me the last day I was there, and Georgi Arbatov came and gave a speech. He talked about what I had contributed to better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. I was amazed he was even there, and even more amazed he was a speaker. I thought the way they treated us was a little bit historic.”
When he returned to the United States after that visit, Graham found himself faced with another political campaign and the quadrennial challenge to be a neutral observer. “I almost got into it this time,” he said, “because I went to Atlanta to the Democratic convention and led a prayer there. I had a good talk with Governor Dukakis out at the [Georgia] governor’s home. All the [Democratic] governors were there, and I was the only outsider. I was there to lead in prayer, and they put me right beside Governor Dukakis. The chairman of the Democratic party was there, but the conversation was almost totally between Governor Dukakis and me.” At the convention itself, Graham led another prayer, in which he invoked both Scripture and the memory of John F. Kennedy. He noted that in contrast to some conventions he had attended, the mood seemed “quiet and reverent. It was sort of a religious spirit. While I was praying and when I finished, you could hear a pin drop. Usually, they’re just walking and talking, but they were just as quiet as could be. And when I finished, there were ‘amens’ from all over the place. I think it had something to do with the fact that there were so many blacks there. And I noticed that the whites began to dress up, because the blacks were dressed up just like they were going to church, and this had a great impact on some of those white delegates. I felt that, from a religious point of view, the black people made a very positive impact. It was very interesting. My talk—my prayer—came at the prime time of the evening, but no one carried it except CNN and C-SPAN. And one other network, maybe for a minute, I heard later.”
Some political observers surmised that Graham’s prominent presence at the convention might be a signal that the Democratic party was once again acceptable to the white Evangelicals who had so largely deserted it in the two previous presidential elections, but that interpretation did not last long. The Republicans were not about to concede Billy Graham to the Democrats. “I was invited to the Republican convention,” Graham recalled, “and I went. And they wanted me to lead the prayer after Reagan spoke, and I did. Then they asked me if I would stay over for the Bush speech, and I was glad to do it. I didn’t know I was going to be sitting with Mrs. Bush the whole time.” But there he was, smiling and applauding the nominee, and looking every inch as if he felt quite comfortable in the Republican box, even though he told the Associated Press, “I always stay politically neutral.” Five months later, he would once again look quite comfortable as he mounted the platform at the inauguration and thanked God that “in Thy sovereignty Thou has permitted George Bush to lead us at this momentous hour of our history for the next four years.”
Graham took no public—and, as far as is known, no private—role in the campaign, but he never claimed he had no favorite in the race. Graham and Bush had, in fact, been friends for many years—“the best friend I have in the whole world, outside my immediate staff,” according to one account. The evangelist met George’s father, Prescott Bush, through friends converted during the 1957 New York crusade, and the Grahams had spent several short vacations at the family’s summer home in Hobe Sound, Florida. “George’s mother [was] one of the most remarkable Christian women I had ever known,” Graham observed. “Whenever we went down there, she would ask me to teach a Bible class. I don’t remember exactly when I met George, but we were thrown together at several things, and we became good friends. Then they began to invite us up to Kennebunkport. We’ve been up there five of the last seven years, I think. In fact, he just invited us to come to Camp David. I was there with Johnson twice and with Nixon once. Interestingly, George and I have never talked politics. Not one time. Never mentioned them. He’s never asked me to do anything for him.” Perhaps not, but on the evening of January 16, 1991, when American and allied forces launched the devastating air attack on Iraq, Billy Graham’s well-publicized presence in the White House and his oversight of a worship service for key political and military leaders the next morning lent powerful symbolic legitimation to the president’s claim to be conducting a just war.
Graham also continued to stay in touch with another old Republican friend, Richard Nixon. “I visited him in New Jersey just recently,” he reported. “He was explaining his vision of America and the world in foreign policy. But he talked more about spiritual things and the Lord about as much as I had ever heard him talk before. I had a feeling that he was willing to talk now about things that he used to be reluctant to talk about. I think part of that was his Quaker background. He was a very staunch Quaker, and it was hard to express things having to do with spiritual matters. But I never had a doubt from the time I got to know him that he was a very religious man.”
In 1982, Alexander Haraszti, who had accomplished what many believed impossible, conceded that “it is, humanly speaking, just impossible, even unimaginable, that a Christian minister of the gospel would actually be allowed in any communist country to preach from an open place like in a stadium, a large square, or on any secular premises.” Just seven short years later, in the summer of 1989, Haraszti stood at Billy Graham’s side on a platform erected in the center of Hungary’s largest stadium, and there, before an estimated 110,000 people—inevitably, a stadium record—and the largest known religious gathering in Hungary’s history, he translated into his native tongue a sermon the evangelist had based on Galatians 6:14: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . .” At the conclusion of the sermon, which Haraszti reproduced right down to the classic Graham gestures and the story of the ex-convict who came home to find a yard filled with yellow ribbons, more than 35,000 people came forward—-nearly one third of the crowd and the largest response the evangelist had seen in more than a half-century of inviting people to accept Jesus Christ. When the service was carried on the state television network a week later, many others contacted the sponsoring religious bodies, pushing the decision total even higher. One newspaper headlined its front-page story on the event with “An angel came upon the stadium.” Matyos Szuros, the president of the Hungarian parliament, filmed an interview for Graham to use on the television program that would air a few months later in America. Hungary was changing, he said. There was now greater freedom of religion, freedom for Christians to speak out about what they believed, freedom even, he noted with some sense of historical awareness, to preach in public to 100,000 people. The churches of Hungary, he said, were in the process of renewal, and that was good, because the nation needed to have them involved in the moral education of its people. Szuros’s statement amounted to an official admission that the ideological reasons for the suppression of religion had been proven wrong. These were not empty words. A month after this interview, the State Office for Religious Affairs was abolished as the government announced it was removing all barriers to the free development of church life in Hungary.
The following spring, Graham registered another triumph over long odds. In 1960, shortly before the Berlin wall went up, he preached to a huge throng gathered in front of the historic Reichstag building near the Brandenburg Gate. The East German government and press denounced him as a warmonger, and Communist military troops tried to drown out his sermon by staging artillery practice a few hundred yards away. Thirty years later, the wall was in ruins, the Communist government in a state of collapse, and Billy Graham, the Great Survivor, was again preaching on the steps of the Reichstag, this time as the guest of both West and East German churches, which had jointly invited him to bring a spiritual dimension to the momentous upheavals destined to produce a reunified Germany, a reconfigured Europe, and an end to the cold war. As 15,000 people, most from East Germany, huddled in near-freezing rain under umbrellas and plastic sheeting, Graham told of the tears of joy he shed while watching the grim symbol of enmity come tumbling down and declared that “God has answered our prayers for peace.” He warned, however, that abandoning moral and spiritual values at this critical point in human history “could be just as devastating to society in the long run as weapons of mass destruction.” Announcing that “God is giving this country another chance,” he proclaimed the same message he had preached for over fifty years in more than sixty countries: “There is no hope for the future of Europe, America, or any other part of the world outside of the gospel of Christ.” His text was John 3:16.
Dan Rather, who had scored Graham for naïveté at the time of his 1982 visit to the Soviet Union, acknowledged that “before anybody else I knew of, and more consistently than anyone else I have known, of any nationality, race, or religion, Reverend Graham was saying, ‘Spirituality is alive in the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist states. . . . Frankly, there were those years when I thought he was wrong, or that he didn’t know what he was talking about. It turns out he was right. And give him credit—he also took the time to go and see for himself.” And Richard Nixon volunteered, “There is no question that he helped bring about the liberation, the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, and some of the present opposition to Communism in the Soviet Union.”
These dramatic ventures underlined Graham’s stature as a Christian world figure, but they did not displace his dedication to his primary and continuing call: preaching the gospel to as many people as humanly possible in whatever time is left to him. Fittingly, the undertaking he and his colleagues devised to provide a climax, though not a finale, to his career as a globe-circling evangelist, is known as Mission World. The original plan was to have him address crusade audiences in virtually every country on the planet simultaneously—or nearly so, with brief delays to accommodate differences in time zones. As the project took shape, Graham and his colleagues, including a skeptical BGEA board, decided that the logistic complexity and enormous financial requirements of a one-shot, worldwide mission were too great to justify, and that a more modest, stage-by-stage approach would be more effective and efficient in achieving the desired goals. Had it not been for the scope of the original vision, however, no one would have dreamed that what actually occurred was a scaled-down version of something even grander. “Mission World arose as a response to cries for help from men and women who attended Amsterdam ’83 and ’86,” Bob Williams explained. “We can’t keep pushing Mr. Graham physically, but wherever he goes, we try to let his shadow fall as far as possible, through available technology, without having to extend him personally.”
In Mission World’s 1989 incarnation, Graham’s shadow stretched across the British Isles and over 33 countries of Africa. In London itself he addressed nearly 400,000 people at services in four venues and more than 800,000 in 247 “live-link” centers throughout the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In Africa the satellite signal from London was aired live on the national television network in 13 countries. Another 20 nations received the program by videotape a week or two later, usually after translation into one of nine different languages. The initial African effort included 16,000 fully prepared crusades, with an aggregate attendance of 8.5 million. An additional 4,000 film and videotape missions in areas without TV reception were still going on six months later. As Williams pointed out, “We are not talking million-dollar high tech. We have been working with manufacturers. For five hundred dollars, and the cost is dropping all the time, we can buy a whole set of video equipment that a little guy in the jungle can learn to use right away. We put that into the hands of evangelists from Amsterdam ’83 and ’86 and let them tramp all across the country with it. They don’t have the stature to organize a crusade in Lagos, but they copy tapes just by jacking between recorders and then courier them out by bicycle or train or bus to locations all over Nigeria. We figure we were able to reach Africans at a cost of about 3.5 cents per viewer.” No attempt was made to get an accurate accounting of decisions from all meetings, but crusade leaders distributed 2.5 million pieces of follow-up literature. “We are not claiming there were 2.5 million inquirers,” Williams said, not mentioning that such a response would be larger than the number of inquirers who responded to the invitation in all of Graham’s crusades over the previous forty years. Still, he observed, “We can think and hope and dream and pray and wonder about how many there were and about what will happen now.” Furthermore, developments in technology have been so astonishing that achievements undreamt of when Mission World was first conceived now seem almost quaintly modest. “Five or six years ago,” Williams noted, “there were 140,000 television sets in all of India. Today, there are 30 million. In Thailand, one of every four homes has a VCR; five years ago, they were unknown. Now we have avenues and vehicles that would work only in more developed countries just a few years back. This approach could be a key to the ministry’s future after his death. People know exactly what you mean when you talk about Billy Graham evangelism or a Billy Graham School of Evangelism or an Amsterdam-type conference. They know what BGEA is and what it stands for. We can still have a tremendous ministry in being a catalyst and providing resources for genuine biblical evangelism. I don’t know what the Lord wants to do. We are getting a lot done now in Africa, Asia, and Latin America because of what we have done in the past. That doesn’t mean we have a future. But the Lord has gone before us, and He’ll have his hand on what happens next.” For now, however, Williams did not think it necessary to worry about what happened when Billy Graham departed the scene, for the evangelist was still on hand and going strong. “I’ve seen a greater passion, a greater urgency in Mr. Graham during the last five or six years,” he said. “I think he has a renewed strength and vision and courage. He won’t stop. I don’t know if he feels the days are coming when the world will be less receptive to the gospel, or if it’s something about the Second Coming, or what. Maybe it’s just that the helplessness and hopelessness of the world is becoming more evident. But there is a definite sense of urgency. It’s always been there, but it’s greater today than ever.”
And so it seemed. Late in 1990, as crusade organizers in 70,000 locations in twenty-six countries of Asia eagerly awaited the falling of his shadow on their lands, Billy Graham launched the oriental expression of Mission World. On November 7, exactly seventy-two years to the day after Frank and Morrow Graham first proudly beheld their firstborn son and wondered what lay in store for him, he stood on the deck of a traditional Chinese junk as it crossed Victoria Harbor on its way to Hong Kong, whence, yet again, he would address the largest aggregate audience—an estimated 100 million souls—ever to hear the good news concerning Jesus Christ.