Graham Billy - A prophet with honor: the Billy Graham story

Contents

Also by William Martin

These Were Gods People, 1966

Christians in Conflict, 1972

My Prostate and Me, 1994

With God on Our Side, 2005

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ZONDERVAN

A Prophet with Honor

Copyright 1991, 2018 by William C. Martin

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

ISBN 978-0-310-35330-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-310-35392-8 (international trade paper edition)

ISBN 978-0-310-35333-1 (audio)

ISBN 978-0-310-35332-4 (ebook)

Epub Edition January 2018 9780310353324

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Cover design: Matthew P. Van Kirk

Cover image: Bettmann / Corbis

Back cover images: Russ Busby

Interior design: Michelle Espinoza

First printing January 2018 / Printed in the United States of America

To Patricia

Life is unpredictable. As explained in the preface to the original edition of this book, an unexpected invitation from Billy Graham in 1985 led to five years of near total immersion in the life of the famed evangelist and the people who held up his arms during more than five decades of public ministry. And then, with the completion of the research and publication of the book, immersion dwindled to a sprinkling. I continued to receive Decision and monthly letters and press releases and exchanged the occasional letter or telephone call with Billy Graham. I wrote articles for magazines and newspapers and talked to dozens (perhaps hundreds) of reporters whenever Billy Graham was scheduled to hold a crusade in their cities or suffered an illness and as he passed the torch, in stages, to his son Franklin. But personal contact with people who had filled my life was largely absentand missed. Then, to my delight, Zondervannow, like my original publisher William Morrow, under the HarperCollins tentasked me to bring the 1991 edition up to date. For the most part, I happily relied on many of the same people who had been so helpful to me in preparing the first edition. Particularly helpful were John Akers, David Bruce, Russ Busby, Roger Flessing, Rick Marshall, Tex Reardon, Larry Ross, Maury Scobee, Norman Sanders, Tedd Smith, Stephanie Wills, and various staff members at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the DeMoss Group, which handles much of the public relations activities of BGEA and Samaritans Purse. I also cherished the opportunity to have a good visit with each of the Graham progeny: GiGi, Anne, Franklin, Ruth (formerly Bunny) and Ned. Their valuable contributions to the new chapters will be quite clear to readers. I also deeply appreciate the wise professional counsel and encouragement I received from Zondervan, particularly from Stan Gundry and Jim Ruark, who shepherded this edition to completion.

As with the first edition, I have tried to tell the story of Billy Graham as accurately as I am able. I do not doubt that additional information about Mr. Graham will surface from time to time after the publication of this book. I suspect, with good reason, that some of the Graham offspring will publish memoirs that will add to our understanding of their father and mother. If I am granted sufficient additional years, I may participate in some widening and deepening of the story. But whatever the future, I feel enormous gratitude for the opportunity I have been given and satisfaction that the work already published has been well received. I trust that this expanded version will also make a contribution to understanding the life and work of a truly remarkable man and the movement he led for much of the twentieth century.

WILLIAM MARTIN

March 2018

I can scarcely remember a time when revivals and revivalists did not fascinate me. As a small boy in Devine, Texas, in the late 1940s, I relished having the visiting evangelist over to our house for dinner during the annual gospel meeting. When the Baptists held a revival down the street, I often dropped in for a sermon or two, and numerous times I stood at the edge of a Pentecostal tent wondering what might be going on inside the minds and bodies of folk being whipped into a holy-rolling frenzy by the sweating, shouting, shirt-sleeved man striding back and forth on the flimsy little stage.

I didnt hold any revivals myself until I was fourteen, but they were authentic for their time and placeheld in the open air, illuminated by yellow bulbs, with the crowd seated on wooden-slatted church pews and singing from tattered softback songbooks. Not all of my outings were a success. One dismal, week-long revival seldom brought more than a dozen people out to sit in the oppressive August heat, and it was hard to be confident I had the full attention even of that faithful remnant, since the bare, unfrosted floodlight directly over my head not only drew hundreds of night bugs but, with the intense glow of its high wattage, fairly baked my crew-cut scalp and forced my auditors to look off to one side to avoid permanent damage to their stricken eyes.

Still, I was a pretty good speaker, and my sermons were of sufficient quality to have merited previous publicationone of my favorites featured a stinging attack on the Bolsheviksand when kindly church ladies said, Id sure love to hear you preach twenty years from now, I never doubted they would have the chance. As it happens, I dont preach much anymorehavent for over twenty yearsbut I am still intrigued by those who do and are really good at it. Thus, when the opportunity came to chronicle and assess the life and ministry of the worlds best-known and, arguably, most successful preacher, I saw it immediately as the remarkable pleasure and privilege it has turned out to be. Some explanation of how this happened and what followed seems in order.

Throughout the 1970s, after joining the sociology department at Rice University in Houston, I wrote a series of magazine articles about popular religion, my primary academic specialty. Several of these appeared in Texas Monthly. In 1978 William Broyles, Jr., then editor of that excellent magazine, asked me to consider writing a profile of Billy Graham, whose Texas connections were numerous and strong. I already knew a fair amount about Graham and had even spent several days interviewing members of his staff and meeting briefly with him during a crusade in Jackson, Mississippi, so the assignment was a relatively easy one. The article, which appeared in the March 1978 issue of Texas Monthly, was generally favorable toward the evangelist, but it was by no means a puff piece, and because I had liked and been treated graciously by every member of Grahams staff whom I met, I had some apprehensions about how it would be received. When the time comes to write, I have no conscious hesitation about trying to say exactly what I believe and feel about people and organizations I have studied, but I do not enjoy hurting peoples feelings, and because I consider it of paramount importance to be fair in what I write, I like to be perceived as fair. On occasion, I have written things that ruptured or forever precluded the possibility of friendship. I will doubtless do so again. I can live with that, but it brings me scant satisfaction. I do not write as a means of venting repressed anger. When Graham and his chief lieutenant, T. W. Wilson, both wrote notes expressing appreciation for the article, and particularly for its fairness, I was pleased. Still, I knew enough about the evangelists legendary graciousness toward the press not to imagine that the article had actually made any lasting impression on him. And I expected that my study of Billy Graham had ended.