*Franklin Graham’s emergence as a respected evangelist and Christian leader surprised many who had watched him grow up. Middle sister Anne Morrow also seemed an unlikely candidate for public ministry, not because she ever displayed a wild streak, but because she professed to be terrified of speaking to any sort of audience and, more importantly, because she had been groomed to be a Southern Christian Woman in the Southern Baptist Church.
After marrying Danny Lotz when she was eighteen, with the expectation of following her mother’s example as a full-time wife and mother, Anne went through years of infertility and miscarriages before finally giving birth to three children, a son and two daughters. Instead of feeling fulfilled, she felt “immersed in small talk and small toys and small clothes and small, sticky fingerprints. . . . I felt trapped. . . . My whole life was small.” She struggled through bouts of depression and guilt over feelings of inadequacy. Trying to fathom how her own mother had maintained such a relentlessly positive disposition while spending much of her life as essentially a single mother of five, Anne recalled the many times she had gone into Ruth’s room and found her with an open Bible on her lap or kneeling in prayer by the side of her bed. “My mother raised five of us, and I never saw her lose her temper. And I knew she drew that kind of strength from her time in Scripture and her time in prayer, and I wasn’t doing that.”
Finally, in 1976, to meet her need for intellectual stimulation and spiritual nourishment, Anne organized a Bible class for women, using guidelines furnished by an international organization called Bible Study Fellowship. She didn’t realize when she filled out an application for the program that she was expected to become the teacher. Hundreds of women signed up, probably assuming that Billy Graham’s daughter was bound to be an experienced instructor. “They didn’t know I couldn’t teach,” she said. “I’d never taught Sunday school or anything in my life. It was totally contrary to my personality. Surely God wouldn’t call me outside of my personality—yet he did! He called me to do something I didn’t have a clue that I had a gift for.”
Anne admits that her parents had mixed feelings about her undertaking such a demanding role. “It wasn’t so much my daddy,” she said, “as my mother. Her call in life was to stay at home and raise us, to free up Daddy to do what he has done, and I think in her mind she transferred that to a Christian woman’s role—a Christian wife stays at home and raises the children and serves the husband, so he can be free to serve the Lord in whatever capacity. That was her mind-set, even though she had a mother who was very strong, who ran the nurses clinic in China and did a lot outside the home. I think Mother felt I had to devote all my time to raising my children, cleaning and cooking and that kind of thing, because that’s what she had done.” That changed within the first year, after Billy and Ruth showed up at the class unannounced as a birthday surprise for Anne. “I didn’t know they were coming until I stood up in class that day and looked out and there they were. I don’t like surprises like that, but as a result, Mother was able to see me in a normal week, to see that my children were happy and well behaved, my house was clean, and I had a wonderful meal on the table. She and Daddy were thrilled at the class itself as they saw 500 women with their Bibles opened, taking notes, and they saw the seriousness of the commitment. They just sensed God’s presence in that place. And just like that, their attitude totally changed and they knew this was of God. I can’t tell you how supportive they were after that.”
The classes were nondenominational and included women from approximately 120 churches, but they met at the Hayes Barton Baptist Church, Anne’s home church. After nine years of sustained success, church leaders asked her to take her classes elsewhere. While acknowledging that “there were other things going on, swirling around underneath, as is usually the case,” she felt the primary reason for the church’s action was her strong view of biblical inerrancy. Since the late 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention has been embroiled in controversy between a hard-line conservative faction that insists that the Bible is divinely inspired, even to the precise words in the original manuscripts (which no longer exist), and entirely free of error, and a more moderate faction that allows for somewhat greater latitude in interpretation. “I do believe with all my heart that the Scriptures are true,” Anne explained. The Hayes Barton church, she said, was “aligned with that side of the convention that takes a more liberal view. I think because they knew how I felt, they believed I would be aligned with the more conservative side of the convention, and they didn’t want that identification.”
Scarcely missing a beat, Anne moved her class—and her church membership—to Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh and continued to teach the class there until 1988. At that point, her reputation as a speaker had generated so many invitations that she felt she could no longer continue the task of teaching the class and “discipling” the sixty-five assistant teachers who led the discussion groups. “It was like pastoring a church,” she said. She also knew the class could continue without her. The Providence class continues at full strength—Bible Study Fellowship insists on a limit of 500 women—and has spawned several more classes of similar size in Raleigh.
Freed from the class, Anne founded AnGeL ministries, using her initials as pillars and filling in with her view of angels. “Angels in the Bible,” she explained, “were messengers of God, and they went where God sent them and gave the message He put on their heart. I felt that describes what I do.” The prime message on Anne Lotz’s heart is the need for revival in the churches, even in the South, even in a city where thousands of women engage in regular Bible study.
“Many people still go to church in the South,” Anne acknowledged, “unlike Seattle and some of these other places, but I feel like a lot of it is cultural. On Sunday, you go to church. That’s where you meet your friends, dress up, and maybe have a special lunch afterwards. A lot of your social life is rooted in the church. It is just part of the way we live in the South. Yet many people sitting in church, going through all the ceremonies and traditions and rituals, don’t have a personal relationship with God. I get frustrated even with professing Christians. They add Jesus to their lives, but when it comes to a choice and they would have to give up something—whether it is vacation time, time with their families, a social event, or a club membership, or even a friendship—they don’t choose to put Christ first. He’s not that important to them. And that’s why we’re not passing our faith on to the next generation, because if you treat Jesus as if He’s not important enough to make a sacrifice for, your kids—I don’t care what you teach them—pick up on that and it’s not only as if He’s not important; it’s as if He doesn’t even exist.
“I think our culture across the board is deteriorating morally and spiritually. We can point our finger at the politicians and the media, but I would point my finger at church. If we had kept our focus and were transmitting real faith in Christ, if He were preeminent in every person’s life who professes to be a Christian, so that we live only for Him and He dictates what we think, what we see, where we go, what we do, I don’t think our country would be in the shape it is in. In [II Chronicles 7:14], God promised Solomon that when things are not going right in your country, ‘If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sins and will heal their land.’ So the believer’s faith and relationship with God directly impacts the land. But even if it makes no impact on America, I feel like the church needs to be what God has called us to be. I believe God has called me to do whatever I can to help professing Christians refocus on the person of Jesus Christ and His preeminence in their lives.”
As her reputation grew, Anne had many opportunities to speak at churches, retreats, and conferences, but grew frustrated that her call for revival was often lost amid the clutter of announcements and business sessions. “There were times when I thought revival could have broken out,” she recalled, “but it wasn’t on the program.” AnGeL Ministries gave her a greater opportunity to control both the content and the context of her presentations. To reduce distractions, she developed a format of two-day revival meetings, primarily but not exclusively for women, usually scheduled for a Friday evening and an all-day session on Saturday. (Still influenced by her mother’s example, she makes a point of being at home on Sunday, to attend church and cook Sunday dinner.) She is often joined by other noted Evangelical women teachers such as Kay Arthur and Jill Briscoe, but the centerpiece of her programs are three hour-long messages on the theme “Just Give Me Jesus.” Reminiscent of her father’s crusades, the revivals are followed by an eight-week Bible study taught in local churches. Also reminiscent of her father, she said she expects to see real revival as a product of her meetings. “It will be characterized by repentance of sin growing out of a deep conviction of sin . . . , by a recommitment to Jesus as Lord and Savior . . . , by a recommitment to the word of God, [and] to obeying God’s word. When revival comes, it’s not just for a weekend. It’s a lifetime commitment.”
Anne explained that the title of her revivals, “Just Give Me Jesus,” arose from “a desperate cry of my own heart.” Interviewed for television by Larry King in May 2000, she ticked off the tribulations she had experienced in recent years—hurricanes, floods, snowstorms that had devastated their property in eastern Carolina; the destruction of her husband’s dental offices by fire; the diagnosis and successful treatment of her son’s cancer; the marriage of all three of her children within an eight-month period; and her parents’ deteriorating health. “I don’t want to be entertained,” she said. “I don’t want visuals or musicals. I don’t want a vacation. I don’t want to quit. I don’t want sympathy. The cry of my heart is, ‘Just give me Jesus.’” She has also written a book with that title, structuring it around the Gospel of John. Several other books, some with companion CDs and videos, have sold widely and garnered awards from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. In most of these she moves through the text systematically, expounding on its meaning and applying it to the lives of her audience. In 1998 the International Bible Society honored her, along with her father, with the Golden Word Award for “her special ability to encourage people to search the Scriptures for themselves.”
Interestingly, Anne prefers to call herself a “Biblical Expositor” rather than a preacher, but adds that when she speaks to Southern Baptist pastors, she describes herself as a waitress simply trying to serve the Bread of Life. Yet, when she enters a pulpit or stands on a simple stage, bare except for a thick, rather short wooden cross, precise labels don’t really matter. Anne Lotz can preach.
Like many preachers, especially from the South, Billy Graham usually began his sermons by telling a joke or two, recycling the same jokes for half a century. Anne occasionally allows herself a small ironic chuckle after describing some foolish human behavior, but she is not in the entertainment business, even as a warm-up technique. In a typical session, after a few introductory remarks she consciously focuses attention by saying, “Listen to me!” and launches into a brief set-piece in praise of Jesus. An example:
His office is manifold and His promise is sure.
His life is matchless and His goodness is limitless.
His mercy is enough and His grace is sufficient.
His reign is righteous, His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.
He is indestructible, He is incomprehensible, He is inescapable;
He is invincible, He is irresistible, He is irrefutable, He is indescribable.
I can’t get Him out of my mind and I can’t get Him out of my heart.
I can’t outlive Him and I can’t live without Him.
The Pharisees couldn’t stand Him but they found they couldn’t stop Him.
Satan tried to tempt Him, but found he couldn’t trip Him.
Pilate cross-examined Him but found no fault in Him.
The Romans crucified Him but couldn’t take His life.
Death couldn’t handle Him and the grave couldn’t hold Him.
Just give me Jesus!
(Applause)
Then, during the presentations that last nearly an hour each, she might tell a single story of the non-humorous sermon-illustration genre or refer to some difficult period or episode in her own life, but mostly she draws again and again from biblical texts to note the fallen nature of all humans, the failures of Christians, the inevitability of suffering, and the need for repentance and recommitment. Despite a strong emphasis on the complete sufficiency of God’s grace, made available through Christ’s sacrifice, she does not portray the redeemed life as an easy one. In a pointed reference to the optimistic and materialistic “Name-it-and-claim-it-God-wants-you-to-be-rich” message so popular in some conservative Christian quarters, particularly among Pentecostals, she told a Kansas City audience, “Don’t listen to that health and wealth and prosperity gospel, because it’s a lie. Let me tell you something: Jesus didn’t promise us health and wealth and prosperity. He promised us a cross. And after the cross comes the resurrection and the glory. But you’ve got to deny yourself and take up the cross and follow him.”
Anne speaks in a direct, intense, driving style that, though lacking much variety in tone or pace and practically free of self-conscious dramatic technique, is nonetheless quite arresting. She is a serious woman with a serious message, and she imparts that seriousness to her listeners. Renowned preaching expert Stephen Olford, who directed a school for evangelists in Memphis and had also been something of a mentor to Anne before his death in 2004, said of her rhetorical style, “In a day of superficiality, in a day when so much preaching is tickling people’s ears—she eschews all that. She has something to say. It’s solid. It’s biblical. It’s a no-nonsense presentation. That’s what makes her attractive. . . . She has a tremendous gift of communication, and a dignity and presence which is most impressive.” Other notable observers have agreed. Billy Graham was often quoted as calling her “the best preacher in the family,” and Time magazine agreed that she had “inherited the greatest share of Billy’s gift.” With no trace of sibling rivalry, brother Franklin has described her as “an anointed, powerful speaker” who is “the best in the country, or anywhere in the world for that matter, at what she does.”
Addressing the inevitable comparisons to her father and brother, Anne observed that “we’re on the same team, but our gifts are different. . . . Franklin and Daddy are like the obstetrician; they bring the baby into the world. We at AnGeL Ministries are like the pediatrician; we help the baby grow up.” Although she offers an invitation at her revivals, Anne aims her message mainly at people who already profess to be Christians, for she sees her mission as a continuation of the work of evangelists, who seek to bring people to Christ for the first time. She sees her role as supporting people after they are converted and and restoring them to active faith and commitment when they have drifted away. On occasion, however, she is quite willing to assume the role of evangelist. Invited to speak at the Millennium World Summit for Religious and Spiritual Leaders at the General Assembly of the United Nations, she made no effort to note the commonalities among world religions, but preached a brief sermon on John 3:16, observing afterward that “I did my best in seven and a half minutes to present the gospel as clearly as I knew how.”
Many conservative Christians are far less concerned with the distinctions between an evangelist, an expositor, and a preacher than between that most basic of human distinctions: male and female. Even among those who have wholeheartedly supported her father’s ministry and agree completely with the aim and content of Anne’s revival message, opposition to a woman in the pulpit is widespread. Anne encountered a striking manifestation of this attitude in the late 1980s when she addressed a pastors’ conference. Although she has referred to this frequently, she declines to identify the organization, except to say that it was not a Southern Baptist event, but regional and nondenominational. “I was the only woman on the program for the convention. I was always afraid to stand in the pulpit before a large group, but it never crossed my mind to be afraid because there were men in the audience. I guess that’s how naive I was. I was astounded when I stood up and looked out and saw that some of them had just turned their chairs around and put their backs to me. I don’t know how many did that, but there were enough that it caught my attention. Today, I can still see them in my mind’s eye. I finished the message, but it terrified me. I had an experience right after that in a much smaller group, in a totally different region of the country, with another group of pastors. They didn’t say anything or do anything, but when I stood up, it was like a glass wall, and my voice got softer and softer until they turned up the microphone full force, and they still had trouble hearing. I was just shutting down. I could just feel the hostility. But I’m glad I had those experiences, because I needed to get on my face before God and find out what He was saying to me. My concern was that—because these were pastors and men of God, men who knew the Scriptures—in my zeal to serve the Lord I was serving Him outside of what He had expressly commanded in His word. I didn’t want to be in ministry that contradicted what God had said. And as I knelt before God and prayed that through—it wasn’t quick; it was a process—I feel like He clarified it for me in such a way that my confidence is unshaken.”
The key, Anne said, was the story of Mary Magdalene. “After the resurrection of Christ, He appeared first to the women, and Mary Magdalene was among them. He told her and these other women, ‘I want you to go back to Jerusalem and tell My disciples—eleven men—what you have experienced today, that you have seen Me and have had an experience with the risen Christ. And I want you to tell them to meet Me up in Galilee.’ So He was telling those women to do two things: (1) to share their personal testimony as to who Jesus was in their lives, and (2) to give out His words to the disciples. I felt like God was letting me know that He has commissioned women and that commission has never changed, that we are commissioned just like anybody else to be ready ‘in season and out of season’ to share a word of personal testimony as to who Jesus is and what He means to us—our experience of the risen Christ. When people have a problem with women in ministry, they need to take it up with Jesus, because He is the one who put it there.” That sharing, she continued, can be with one’s children or neighbors, but it can also include “a more formal presentation from the pulpit.”
As for the pivotal verse in the dispute over women preachers, I Timothy 2:12—“I permit not a woman to teach or have authority over a man”—Anne is convinced that the emphasis is on “authority,” not teaching. Unlike some women, including Southern Baptist women, she feels it would be improper for her to be a senior pastor, with authority over men in a church. “That has nothing to do with just presenting the word from the pulpit when I am invited,” she insists. “The authority that I speak with has nothing to do with my position. I’m not a scholar. I don’t know Greek and Hebrew. It is the authority of God’s Word. It is the authority of the Holy Spirit Himself as He speaks through us to our hearts. It has nothing to do with my having authority over my audience. I know He has called me, and I know He has told me that the audience is not my concern, that He will put into that audience whom He wants to put there, whether they are men or women or young or old or Americans or Africans or Russians. The audience is His responsibility. My responsibility is to be faithful to the message He has put on my heart.”
Anne expressed rueful amusement at the ways some church leaders have tried to deal with the issue. “I’ve spoken in church sanctuaries where I’m not allowed in the pulpit. They will put a podium down on the platform or on the floor. That doesn’t bother me—in fact, I’ve gotten to where I prefer nothing at all, but just stand in front of the audience without any barrier—but I don’t see any scriptural basis for that.” Referring to the television program 60 Minutes, which had aired a segment about her a few weeks earlier that had mentioned the chair-turning incident, she said, “When the world looks at something like that, . . . they immediately spot the hypocrisy and inconsistency, and then they just throw out the baby with the bath water. And they miss the message of the church that is true, the gospel that should be preeminent in our teaching and our presentation and the way we live. They miss that because they see this prejudice and hypocrisy and they just don’t get it. And I don’t get it either. I don’t want to be in anybody’s pulpit or podium. I just want lives changed. They have no problem if I am sitting on a plane and sharing the gospel with a man next to me. Why do they have a problem with my sharing the gospel in an arena when men are in the audience? Where does the Bible say I can do it with one, but I can’t do with 10,000? They have no answer for me on that.”
Resistance has clearly diminished. In the summer of 2000 Anne became the first woman ever to address a plenary session at the 125-year-old Keswick Bible Conference in England, where she not only spoke but also shared the program for an entire week with John Stott, one of England’s most prominent clerics and theologians. The male leaders at Keswick, she said, “couldn’t have been more supportive or affirming. It was almost as if they were my big brothers and wanted to encourage me and support me and promote me. It was precious. I’ve felt that at Amsterdam and a lot of places I have been. And it has been the sweetest thing to have my mother and daddy and both of my brothers and both of my sisters totally supportive, without blinking. That has been really special.”
The Keswick appearance led to an invitation to do a leadership retreat for Operation Mobilization, an Evangelical mission organization based in the Netherlands. “I think [resistance] has softened,” Anne said. “Eastern Europe might still have a problem with this, and any Arab country, but I have been all through South America and Central America, where men are so macho, and have been so warmly received. I don’t want women to assert themselves and lord it over others in the church out of a prideful attitude. But I wouldn’t want a man to do that, either. Some denominations out there are struggling with this, and I just pray that it will balance out and the leadership would look at it in the light of what God’s Word actually says and not just in the way they were raised to believe or [from] some kind of cultural prejudice.”
Anne acknowledged that position statements by her own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, had exacerbated tensions over this issue. In 1998 the SBC had drawn widespread attention by its instruction to women “to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” Then, at its annual convention in Orlando, Florida, in June 2000, another clause was added to the “Baptist Faith and Message,” stipulating that “while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Of this, Anne said, “I think a lot of pastors took that statement—even though that’s not what it says—as a reason to deny women any position in ministry, unless it’s in the nursery or with a woman’s group. I think that stirred up some hostility that wasn’t there before, or maybe it was just sort of dormant. The line was much fuzzier, but now it’s drawn, and the way many people are drawing it, I don’t think it’s biblical.” She attributes such actions as a reaction to the feminist movement. “I think there are women in ministry,” she observed, “who, like the feminists, are trying to assert themselves and take a role in the church that is not really Spirit-led but [stems from] pride. That, coupled with the atmosphere in our country about women—women’s rights, women’s positions, that sort of thing—[the pastors] feel the world may be creeping into the church. But when there is an issue like that, we can’t react on the basis of how we feel. We have to take it back to Scripture, and some of their positions have no basis in Scripture at all. I think it is just coming out of their own prejudice.”
At its 2001 convention, the SBC took an additional step, declaring women ineligible for future ordination, though it did not insist that Southern Baptist women who had already been ordained renounce their status. Anne has expressed some uncertainty over whether women should be eligible for ordination, but considers it irrelevant in her own case. “To me, to be ordained means that you can marry, bury, and baptize. That is not something that I aspire to at all. I have no desire to be pastor of a church. I feel like that would almost limit what God has called me to do. I believe God has forbidden me to be ordained. But,” she has conceded, “if another godly woman searches the Scriptures and believes God wants her to be ordained and to be a pastor, that is between her and God. I respect her view.”
As her parents neared the end of their remarkable lives, Anne reflected on the influence they had exerted on her. “I was raised primarily by my mother,” she told one interviewer, but added, “Although [my father] was gone for months at a time, he was adored. I believe he’s been a biblical father in that by living his life he has passed on the reality of his faith and taught us about God. It wasn’t just the things that he said that impacted us, but the way he lived and stayed faithful to his call. To me, that’s the best a father can do. I love, honor, and respect him.” She speculated that her father’s prolonged absences might even have had a positive spiritual effect on her. “Because he wasn’t there,” she explained, “I developed a relationship with God that I may not have had with a more normal relationship with my father. I may have looked to my earthly father to meet my needs, or depended on him to fill the voids in my life. I didn’t have that, so I looked to God for those things. And God has been my father in the most precious ways, which I wouldn’t trade for anything. I thank God for the family that He gave me.”
Ned (Nelson Edman), the youngest of the five Graham siblings, still runs East Gates Ministries International, which has been deeply involved in the publication and distribution of Bibles in China as well as supporting the construction of churches, training of ministers, and equipping churches to provide Christian education for children in that country’s restrictive atmosphere. Following his father’s example, Ned has sought to work within the confines of Chinese law rather than engage in Bible smuggling or other activities that might antagonize authorities and cause problems for Chinese Christians. Also like his father, he has been criticized by Christian groups that feel he is not being sufficiently critical of a regime that closely regulates religious behavior and uses forced abortions and compulsory sterilization to restrict population growth.
More severe criticism has stemmed from difficulties in Ned’s personal life. During the mid–1990s the stresses inherent in his ministry, tension with a key member of his board, and an increasingly troubled marriage led him first to take refuge in alcohol and then to enter a holistic recovery program that he says not only helped him gain control over alcohol abuse but greatly improved his general health and vitality. After returning to his post at East Gates, he and Carol, his wife of nineteen years, agreed to seek individual and joint counseling to heal their marriage. But in October 1998, as he arrived at the Seattle airport from a trip to China, she had him served with divorce papers accusing him of a variety of misbehaviors. He categorically denies most of them, characterizing them as inventions of an aggressive lawyer who was counting on him and his family to provide a generous settlement to avoid public embarrassment. He did, however, acknowledge that the marriage had long been a hollow shell. The divorce was handled through mediation, and records of the proceedings were sealed. Ned and Carol were awarded joint custody of their two sons.
Troubled by these developments, several members of the ministry’s staff and board members resigned. In addition, the Grace Community Church (in the Seattle suburb of Auburn), whose senior pastor was Ned’s chief antagonist on the East Gates board, revoked his ministerial credentials and enjoined him to stop using the title “Reverend” in East Gates materials and correspondence. Instead of resigning from the organization, which his mother had helped found and which BGEA had supported generously, Ned appointed new board members, including his sister Ruth (Bunny) and his then-brother-in-law Stephan Tchividjian, and persuaded sister GiGi Tchividjian to work in the office until the crisis passed. In an even more important familial contribution to the rehabilitation of his son’s image, Billy Graham provided a statement for the East Gates website and other publicity materials assuring the ministry’s supporters that “Ruth and I are proud of and grateful to God for our son Ned.” Noting that East Gates has distributed two million Bibles to Christians in China, the elder Graham added, “Our family stands solidly behind East Gates and all it stands for and would encourage Christians interested in China to back this unique and effective ministry.” In February 2001 Ned and Christina Rae Kuo, a Chinese-American woman who is now actively involved in the East Gates ministry, were married in Ruth Graham’s bedroom at Little Piney Cove. Billy Graham performed the ceremony. During the last years of Ruth’s life, Ned spent most of his time in Montreat, caring for his mother.
The oldest of the Graham offspring, GiGi (Virginia), though not heading a formal Evangelical institution, has nonetheless engaged in an extensive ministry of speaking and writing. She has written several well-regarded books for various Evangelical publishers and helped her mother produce Footprints of a Pilgrim, an effective recounting of Ruth’s life that uses her prose and poetry together with new anecdotes and comments from some of the many famous people the Grahams have known. As age and illness kept her parents confined more and more to their home, GiGi spent long stretches with them, living in a small residence in Montreat, where one of their sons also lived.
GiGi has long been in demand as an inspirational speaker at women’s conferences in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and while living in Montreat took a strong interest in the children’s health center of the Mission Hospitals in Asheville. After settling in Montreat when World War II forced him to leave his beloved medical mission in China, Ruth’s father, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, joined the staff of Mission Hospital in Asheville. There he played a key role in merging four smaller medical facilities to form Memorial Mission Hospital, seeking to bring a higher level of medical care to the families of Appalachia, and to children in particular. Thus it seemed fitting that when the hospital system opened a major new health center for children in 1994 and named it for two of Asheville’s most famous citizens, Ruth’s name came first, in recognition of her father’s concern for and contributions to the health needs of people in that region. Renamed the Ruth and Billy Graham Children’s Hospital in 2001, the center can deal with virtually the entire range of children’s health problems except for open-heart surgery and burn treatment. It also sends “Toothbuses,” fully equipped mobile dental clinics, into rural areas to provide free care to children without regular access to professional dental services. “Most people simply don’t realize that many people in Southern Appalachia live in Third World conditions,” GiGi observed. “Many counties, for example, don’t have a single physician to provide obstetrical services.” Seeking to keep alive her grandfather’s and her mother’s commitment, GiGi has devoted considerable time to raising money for the institution. In 2005, to avoid confusion over funding and organizational ties, the Graham name was dropped from the center, but the Missions Hospitals website identifies them as great friends of the program, and pictures of Ruth and Billy are prominently displayed in the facility.
In 2004, GiGi and Stephan Tchividjian surprised family and friends by ending their marriage of more than thirty years. The following year she married Chad Foreman, an ex-Marine and Florida-based private investigator. A squabble in a parking lot in June 2005 drew the attention of passersby and the police and resulted in a charge of misdemeanor domestic violence against GiGi and a night in jail, a charge and penalty she and her husband both characterized as distinctly inappropriate. After a brief flurry of public attention, the incident drew little further notice. Stephan Tchividjian, whose work included counseling, business consulting, and hosting a radio talk shown, also remarried.
Franklin’s early rebellion, its memory kept alive in story and sermon, and Ned’s divorce and problems with alcohol and drugs, not widely publicized but well known to Evangelical insiders, made it clear that Billy and Ruth Graham had not escaped the problems and heartaches that trouble millions of American families. Yet many continued to hold up their family as an ideal toward which all Christian households should strive. Armchair and professional psychiatrists alike might reasonably point to the nonconforming behavior of both sons and the teenage marriage of all three daughters as evidence of a less-than-perfect home environment. But publicly, and to a large extent privately, the five Graham siblings have seldom said anything more detracting than “we weren’t perfect,” followed by a nearly complete lack of supporting evidence or a willingness to shoulder all the blame themselves. In recent years, youngest daughter Ruth—formerly but emphatically no longer known as “Bunny”—has been more outspoken about what she regards as the disadvantages of growing up in a famous family.
In a conversation in mid–2001, Ruth referred to an insightful Atlantic Monthly article by Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of the famed psychiatrist Erik Erikson, about the costs fame extracts from famous people and their families. Ruth obviously saw many parallels in her own life. She said, “My father’s relation with the family has been awkward, because he has two families: BGEA and us. I always resented that. We were footnotes in books—literally. Well, we’re not footnotes. We are real, living, breathing people. There is no question Daddy loves us, but his ministry has been all-consuming. And we have understood, by and large. We’ve done a good job. We have coped. We have not rejected them or Christ. We’re all involved in some form of ministry. That’s remarkable. We have done well at living up to people’s expectations, but it is a burden. We were not a perfect family and I’m tired of people saying it. I don’t want to be indiscreet, but God inhabits honesty, and I’m not good at image-management.”
As a child, Ruth said, “I felt adopted. A TV crew came to our house when I was about nine or ten to do a program about The World of Billy Graham. I remember that the director called me ‘Sad Eyes.’” As for the Grahams’ practice of sending their children to boarding school, Ruth acknowledged that part of their motivation might have been to obtain a better education than was available locally and added, only half in jest, that her mother felt that “if the royal family sent their children away to school, it was probably a good idea. And, of course, she had been sent away as a girl.” But these, she thought, were minor factors. “Daddy was burdened, Mother was overwhelmed. It was easier to send us away. When GiGi wanted to come home, they wouldn’t let her. And then they sent her off to Europe and [helped arrange for her to marry Stephan Tchividjian] as a teenager. That was really weird.”
Like Anne, Ruth remembers being groomed for the life of wife, homemaker, and mother. “There was never an idea of a career for us,” she said. “I wanted to go to nursing school—Wheaton had a five-year program—but Daddy said no. No reason, no explanation, just ‘No.’ It wasn’t confrontational and he wasn’t angry, but when he decided, that was the end of it.” She added, “He has forgotten that. Mother has not.” With a career ruled out, Ruth followed the path laid out for her: She married Ted Dienert, son of Fred, who handled Billy Graham’s media ministry, and Millie, who organized the prayer campaign for the crusades. “I married Ted,” she said, “because I wanted to feel special to someone. I didn’t feel that way in my family. I was too immature. I chose not to see a lot. Ted was not interested in me. He was interested in Ted, in the image. It was all part of a picture. And Fred wanted it.”
Ruth fell easily into the expected routine, rearing three children, maintaining an active personal spiritual life, and organizing women’s retreats. Later she worked part-time as an acquisitions editor for HarperCollins. Then, in the mid–1980s, after nearly twenty years of marriage, she learned that Ted had been having an affair for more than five years. Writing about this traumatic discovery, she said, “At first I resorted to my familiar pattern of denial—covering over my hurt with spiritual platitudes. I prayed. I fasted. I forgave. I claimed Bible promises. I did all I’d been taught to do. I also hid my problems from everyone, humiliated that others—especially my family—would find out.”
Her family did find out, of course, and her father strongly urged Ruth not to divorce Ted, telling her it would hurt millions of Evangelical Christians who looked to his ministry and their family for inspiration. After one crucial conversation, Ruth recalled that “Daddy put his arms around Ted and said, ‘Nothing will change.’ I saw how important the ministry was to him—and how little the family was. Things had to look right, and divorce didn’t fit.” By that time, however, she had already determined that “there was nothing to go back to” in her marriage, and she went through with the divorce. Although she spent little time counseling with her parents during the breakup, she acknowledged that both her parents were “always very loving” toward her once they realized the marriage was over. “Inside,” she said, “there was that core of love and grace and gentleness. I’m not sure Daddy could understand the hurt I felt, but he could understand broken trust. That’s where we could communicate. He has been betrayed, hurt, and gone ahead.”
Ruth sought professional counseling to help her through her marital trials, overcoming an old bias among some Christians that resorting to a psychologist or psychiatrist was a sign of “spiritual problems.” She also acknowledged, at least to herself, that her simple faith that “if you serve God, he will take care of you” was too simple. Immersing herself in the Old Testament, she came to realize that God was not depending on her to protect his reputation. Israel disappointed God repeatedly, yet “his plans kept moving right along. . . . I’ve learned that he isn’t threatened by my anger or doubts. . . . Many Christian leaders are weighed down by this idea of ‘be perfect—or else!’ So when I finally laid this burden down, I was free. . . . In fact, when I ask questions and express doubt, it’s a sign of faith because I’m assuming God is listening and that he’s the source of the answers. As long as I’m in dialogue with God, I’m expressing faith and nurturing hope.”
Ruth also soon learned that countless Christian families have been torn apart or severely injured by similar stresses and that, contrary to her and her father’s fears, her divorce was “barely a blip on the radar screen.” Indeed, she has used her own experiences as a way of communicating the truth that even the most famous Christians are not exempt from the problems that trouble most members of the human race. “We all,” she said, “still have to work through the mess and muck of life.”
At age forty Ruth determined to “reinvent myself.” A significant symbolic step was to insist that she no longer be referred to as “Bunny,” a name she felt kept her from being taken seriously. Franklin has pointedly ignored her wishes in this matter, and other members of the family have acknowledged difficulty in making the switch, often electing to call her “Bunny Ruth.” None, however, fails to note how serious she is about making the change. She also went back to college and, in the spring of 2001, graduated with honors from Mary Baldwin College—the only one of the Graham daughters to finish college. Though she has left Bunny behind, she has never considered renouncing her status as a Graham. At Mary Baldwin, she wrote her senior thesis on the topic “Cross-cultural Communication of the Concept of Sin,” analyzing the spiritual depth, cultural sensitivity, and rhetorical artfulness Billy Graham manifested in addressing audiences in such disparate locales as China, the USSR, South Africa, and Alabama. He was, she offered, “a very special man. It was wonderful, as a daughter, to step outside and see the balance he had to maintain, with the whole world watching.” Commenting further on her father’s qualities, she said, “He was always a learner, never a know-it-all. He has never been dogmatic. He was able to sit down with theologians with a genuine curiosity and have real dialogue. He had an ego, but he was not egotistical. He was always amazed at what he had achieved—‘How did I get here?’”
Ruth has participated in both of her brothers’ ministries and has established her own Ruth Graham Ministries, aimed particularly at addressing the woundedness of women whom she feels have too often been neglected by the church or met with unsatisfactory pat answers. “You can’t just slap a Bible verse over a wound and expect it to heal,” she has poignantly noted. She continues to write for Christian publications, speak at Evangelical gatherings, and hold “Ruth Graham & Friends” conferences, where she is joined by other articulate women who share their stories of coping with the pains of such troubles as infidelity, spousal abuse, divorce, illness, and addiction. Her 2004 book, In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart—Hope for the Hurting, laid bare the stories of her divorce from Ted Deinert, an unhappy and brief second marriage, a third marriage that ended in divorce, and the pain of dealing with a daughter’s eating disorder and two out-of-wedlock pregnancies. She shared the spiritual resources that enabled her to emerge from these crises and offered a series of wise and sensitive “Tips for Those Who Care” for people in pain. As in that book, her speeches also use illustrations from her own life to say that “God doesn’t love Billy Graham or his family any more than he loves you.” In two subsequent books, A Legacy of Faith: Things I Learned from My Father and A Legacy of Love: Things I Learned from My Mother, Ruth wrote of both the difficulties and blessings of being part of an often idealized but still quite human family. Yet even while insisting that her parents and family were not perfect, she spoke of them with great tenderness, “I know what their core is. That has never wavered. I respect that. I admire it. I aspire to it.”