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Top 10 Facts about Rev. Billy Graham

He was born on  November 7, 1918, in the downstairs bedroom of a farmhouse near Charlotte, North Carolina. His full name is William Franklin Graham Jr. His parents were of Scots-Irish descent. He was the eldest child born to Morrow (née Coffey) and William Franklin Graham Sr., a dairy farmer. Graham was raised on a family dairy farm with his two younger sisters, Catherine Morrow and Jean, and a younger brother, Melvin Thomas. The family moved to their newly built red brick home about 75 yards from the white frame house when he was nine years. He was raised by his parents in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. Graham attended the Sharon Grammar School. Graham was 15 when Prohibition ended in December 1933, and his father forced him and his sister, Katherine, to drink beer until they became sick. This created such an aversion that Graham and his sister avoided alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives. However, he was refused membership in a local youth group for being too worldly. Albert McMakin, a worker on the Graham farm persuaded him to go see the evangelist Mordecai Ham. His autobiography shows that at the age of 16, he was converted during a series of revival meetings that Mordecai Ham led in Charlotte in 1934.

He was known for the expansion of the ministry of Jesus Christ across the globe. In addition, he was a frequent visitor at the White House through the invitation of various United States of America Presidents as an advisor or for prayer.

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1. He was Active in Student Ministry

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His ministry of preaching started early. He was a speaker at the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Urbana Student Missions Conference at least nine times in the years 1948, 1957, 1961, 1964, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1984, and 1987. At all times, for instance, at the Urbana conference, he challenged the thousands of attendees to make a commitment to follow Jesus Christ for the rest of their lives. He often quoted a six-word phrase that was reportedly written in the Bible of William Whiting Borden, the son of a wealthy silver magnate who died in Egypt on his way to the mission field: “No reserves, no retreat, no regrets”. He also held evangelistic meetings on a number of college campuses: at the University of Minnesota during InterVarsity’s “Year of Evangelism” in 1950–51, a 4-day mission at Yale University in 1957, and a week-long series of meetings at the University of North Carolina’s Carmichael Auditorium in September 1982.

In 1955, he was invited by Cambridge University students to lead the mission at the university; the mission was arranged by the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, with London pastor-theologian John Stott serving as Graham’s chief assistant. This invitation was greeted with much disapproval in the correspondence columns of The Times.

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2. He was Involved in Various Evangelistic Associations

In 1950, Graham founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) with its headquarters in Minneapolis. The association relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1999, and maintains a number of international offices, such as in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. BGEA ministries have included:

Hour of Decision, a weekly radio program broadcast around the world for 66 years (1950-2016). Mission television specials are broadcast in almost every market in the US and Canada. A syndicated newspaper column, My Answer, carried  by newspapers across the United States and distributed by Tribune Content Agency

In 1956 Decision magazine began with its website as Passageway.org. and the first editor as Carl F.H. Henry. It was created by the BGEA youth discipleship program. World Wide Pictures, which has produced and distributed more than 130 films. All these are the proceeds of Rev. Billy Graham.

3. He Started An Historic Outreach Ministry

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In April 2013, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association started “My Hope With Billy Graham”, the largest outreach in its history. It encouraged church members to spread the gospel in small group meetings, after showing a video message by Graham. “The idea is for Christians to follow the example of the disciple Matthew in the New Testament and spread the gospel in their own homes.” “The Cross” video is the main program in the My Hope America series and was also broadcast the week of Graham’s 95th birthday.

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4. He Advocated for Equal Rights

His early crusades were segregated, but he began adjusting his approach in the 1950s. During a 1953 rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Graham tore down the ropes that organizers had erected in order to segregate the audience into racial sections. In his memoirs, he recounted that he told two ushers to leave the barriers down otherwise he would leave the revival meeting. Actually, he went further and warned a white audience saying 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.” In addition, he told a member of the Ku Klux Klan that integration was necessary, primarily for religious reasons. He also said, there is no scriptural basis for segregation. In addition, he said that the ground at the foot of the cross is level, and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross.

5. He Incorporated Ministers Thomas Kilgore and Gardner C. Taylor

To show that he was not a racist, he integrated two black ministers into his ministry and publicly allowed them to serve as members of his New York Crusade’s executive committee in 1957. The two were Thomas Kilgore and Gardner C. Taylor. This was his strength. It was seen as the center of his faith that prompted his maturing view of race and segregation. 

6. His Relationship with Martin Luther King Jr.

Graham invited Martin Luther King Jr., whom he first met during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, to join him in the pulpit at his 16-week revival in New York City. They had a gathering of 2.3 million people at Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, and Times Square. Graham recalled in his autobiography that during this time, he and King developed a close friendship and that he was eventually one of the few people who referred to King as “Mike”, a nickname which King asked only his closest friends to call him. Following King’s assassination in 1968, Graham mourned that the US had lost “a social leader and a prophet”. Graham was King’s private advisor plus other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Following Graham’s death, former SCLC official and future Atlanta politician Andrew Young (who spoke alongside Coretta Scott King at Graham’s 1994 crusade in Atlanta), acknowledged his friendship with Graham and stated that Graham did in fact travel with King to the 1965 European Baptist Convention. Young also claimed that Graham had often invited King to his crusades in the Northern states. Former Student Nonviolent Coordinating  Committee (SNCC) leader and future United States Congressman John Lewis also credited Graham as a major inspiration for his activism. Lewis described Graham as a saint and someone who taught people how to live and who taught people how to die.

7. He was the Founder of the Lausanne Movement

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He has a friendship with John Stott which led to the creation of the Lausanne Movement which was the road map to his World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966. Together with Christian Today, he convened what was referred to as the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held in history.  It has 2,700 participants from 150 nations gathering for the International Congress on World Evangelization. Women were represented by Millie Diener, who chaired the prayer committee. This took place in Lausanne, Switzerland on 16–25 July 1974, hence the movement carried the name of the city until this date. The movement remains a significant fruit of Graham’s legacy, with a presence in nearly every nation.

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8. He Pastored many United States Presidents

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Graham had a personal audience with many sitting US presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama – 12 consecutive presidents. He became a regular visitor during the tenure of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He purportedly urged him to intervene with federal troops in the case of the Little Rock Nine to gain admission of black students to public schools. House Speaker Sam Rayburn persuaded Congress to allow Graham to conduct the first religious service on the steps of the Capitol building in 1952. Eisenhower asked for Graham while on his deathbed.

He also met and became a close friend of Vice President Richard Nixon, and supported Nixon, a Quaker, in the 1960 presidential election. He convened an August strategy session of evangelical leaders in Montreaux, Switzerland, to plan how best to oppose Nixon’s Roman Catholic opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy. Though a registered Democrat, Graham also maintained firm support of aggression against the foreign threat of Communism and strongly sympathized with Nixon’s views regarding American foreign policy. Therefore, he was more sympathetic to Republican administrations.

He was invited to the White House by President Lyndon B. Johnson on December 16, 1963. He was impressed by the way Graham had praised the work of his great-grandfather, George Washington Baines, who invited Graham to the White House to receive spiritual counseling. After this visit, Johnson frequently called on Graham for more spiritual counseling as well as companionship. 

9. He was sort for Advice and Endorsement

During the 1964 United States presidential election, supporters of Republican nominee Barry Goldwater sent an estimated 2 million telegrams to Graham’s hometown of Montreat, North Carolina, and sought the preacher’s endorsement. Supportive of Johnson’s domestic policies, and hoping to preserve his friendship with the president, Graham resisted pressure to endorse Goldwater and stayed neutral in the election. Following Johnson’s election victory, Graham’s role as the main White House pastor was solidified. At one point, Johnson even considered making Graham a member of his cabinet and grooming him to be his successor, though Graham insisted he had no political ambitions and wished to remain a preacher. Graham’s biographer David Aikman acknowledged that the preacher was closer to Johnson than any other president he had ever known.

He spent the last night of Johnson’s presidency in the White House, and he stayed for the first night of Nixon’s. After Nixon’s victorious 1968 presidential campaign, Graham became an adviser, regularly visiting the White House and leading the president’s private worship services. In a meeting they had with Golda Meir, Nixon offered Graham the ambassadorship to Israel, but he declined the offer.

10. He was Honored and Celebrated in Many Ways.

Graham was frequently honored by surveys, including “Greatest Living American”, and consistently ranked among the most admired persons in the United States and the world. He appeared most frequently on Gallup’s list of most admired people. On the day of his death, Graham had been on Gallup’s Top 10 “Most Admired Man” list 61 times and held the highest rank of any person since the list began in 1948.

In 1967, he was the first Protestant to receive an honorary degree from Belmont Abbey College, a Roman Catholic school. In 1983, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Ronald Reagan.

Graham received the Big Brother of the Year Award for his work on behalf of children. He was cited by the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute for his contributions to race relations. He received the Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion and the Sylvanus Thayer Award for his commitment to “Duty, Honor, Country”. The “Billy Graham Children’s Health Center” in Asheville is named after and funded by Graham.

In 1999, the Gospel Music Association inducted Graham into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame to recognize his contributions to Christian music artists such as Michael W. Smith, dc Talk, Amy Grant, Jars of Clay, and others who performed at the Billy Graham Crusades. Graham was the first non-musician inducted and had also helped to revitalize interest in hymns and create new favorite songs. Singer Michael W. Smith was active in Billy Graham Crusades as well as Samaritan’s Purse. Smith sang “Just As I Am” in a tribute to Graham at the 44th GMA Dove Awards. He also sang it at the memorial service honoring Graham at the United States Capitol rotunda on February 28, 2018. In 2000, former First Lady Nancy Reagan presented the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award to Graham. Graham was a friend of the Reagans for years.

In 2001, Queen Elizabeth II awarded him an honorary knighthood. The honor was presented to him by Sir Christopher Meyer, British Ambassador to the US at the British Embassy in Washington DC on December 6, 2001. A professorial chair is named after him at the Alabama Baptist-affiliated Samford University, the Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth. His alma mater, Wheaton College, has an archive of his papers at the Billy Graham Center. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Ministry. Graham received 20 honorary degrees and refused at least that many more. In San Francisco, California, the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium is sometimes erroneously called the “Billy Graham Civic Auditorium” and incorrectly considered to be named in his honor, but it is actually named after the rock and roll promoter Bill Graham.

On May 31, 2007, the $27 million Billy Graham Library was officially dedicated in Charlotte. Former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton appeared to celebrate with Graham. A highway in Charlotte bears Graham’s name, as does I-240 near Graham’s home in Asheville. As Graham’s final crusade approached in 2005, his friend Pat Boone chose to create a song in honor of Graham, which he co-wrote and produced with David Pack and Billy Dean, who digitally combined studio recordings of various artists into what has been called a “‘We Are the World’-type” production. Titled “Thank You Billy Graham”, the song’s video was introduced by Bono, and included Faith Hill, MxPx, John Ford Coley, John Elefante, Mike Herrera, Michael McDonald, Jeffrey Osborne, LeAnn Rimes, Kenny Rogers, Connie Smith, Michael Tait, and other singers, with brief narration by Larry King. It was directed by Brian Lockwood as a tribute album. In 2013, the album My Hope: Songs Inspired by the Message and Mission of Billy Graham was recorded by Amy Grant, Kari Jobe, Newsboys, Matthew West, TobyMac, and other music artists with new songs to honor Graham during his My Hope America with Billy Graham outreach and the publication of his book The Reason for My Hope: Salvation. Other songs written to honor Graham include “Hero of the Faith” written by Eddie Carswell of NewSong, which became a hit, “Billy, You’re My Hero” by Greg Hitchcock, “Billy Graham” by The Swirling Eddies, “Billy Graham’s Bible” by Joe Nichols, “Billy Frank” by Randy Stonehill, and an original song titled “Just as I Am” by Fernando Ortega. Lastly, the movie Billy: The Early Years officially premiered in theaters on October 10, 2008, less than one month before Graham’s 90th birthday. Graham did not comment on the film, but his children had different views. His son Franklin released a critical statement on August 18, 2008, noting that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had no collaboration with the movie while his eldest daughter, Gigi, praised the film and was hired as a consultant to help promote it.