Legendary evangelist Billy Graham — whose preaching may have been heard by more people than anyone in Christian history — died on Feb. 21. He was 99.
During 80 years of ministry, Graham’s down-to-earth, homespun sermons filled stadiums across the world, leading to the salvation of untold millions. Graham preached in person to more than 210 million people in 185 countries and in all 50 U.S. states, according to ministry statistics.
Steve Gaines, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “Billy Graham is with Jesus. He was the nearest thing to a true prophet that Christians have had in the past century. He was a man of integrity, simplicity, love and evangelistic fervency…. He was a legendary man of God, and every born again Christian will miss him.”
In his final years, prayer was Graham’s chief ministry, his son Franklin wrote to friends and supporters, adding, “He looks forward to reports of what God is doing around the world. He always responds by saying, ‘Praise the Lord,’ as he points upward.”
One of Graham’s final video messages, released in 2014, included his expression of longing for heaven. “I’ve found during the lot of years in my life when I’ve had sicknesses and been in the hospital and so forth, there’s a peace that just resides there and stays there that I cannot explain,” Graham said. “Everybody can have that same peace if they receive Christ as their Savior. I know I’m going to heaven. I’m looking forward to it with great anticipation because of what Jesus did on that cross.”
Over the years Graham’s message never changed. “Is there another way to heaven, except through Christ?” Graham asked the crowd during a Louisville, Ky., crusade in 2001. “The Bible teaches there’s only one way. Other people will come along and try to tell you there are other ways, but the Bible says there’s only one way, and that way is by the cross. Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by Me.'”
Often called “America’s pastor,” Graham personally knew every U.S. president — Democrat and Republican — from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. A one-on-one meeting with Graham in the summer of 1985 marked a spiritual turning point in George W. Bush’s life. Graham preached the funeral messages of Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
In 1995, Graham delivered a message of comfort at a national prayer service following the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. Six years later, he delivered a similar message following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000.
Born Nov. 7, 1918, near Charlotte, N.C., during the final days of World War I, Graham was saved at age 16 under the preaching of evangelist Mordecai Ham and soon thereafter felt a calling to vocational ministry. He preached his first revival at age 19 at a small Baptist church in Palatka, Fla. But it was a 1949 Los Angeles tent crusade that put Graham — at age 30 — on the map. Scheduled for three weeks, the crusade, sponsored by Youth for Christ, was extended to eight weeks. Ten thousand people attended nightly, with 16,000 the final night. Magazines such as Life, Newsweek and Time covered the event, and the Associated Press ran a story across the wire that told of a “dynamic, handsome young” evangelist whose “old-style religion” had sparked “the greatest religious revival in the history of Southern California.”
In 1957 in New York City, a nightly six-week crusade was extended to 16 weeks, with more than 100,000 at one point packing an overflowing Yankee Stadium. In 1962, Graham preached to 116,000 people at Soldier Field in Chicago. In 1973, he spoke to a crusade-record 1.1 million people in Seoul, South Korea.
He preached in 1977 in Hungary to 30,000 people, and the next year in Poland to standing-room-only crowds in various churches. Invitations to East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania followed. In 1992, Graham preached at a crusade in Moscow with the Russian Red Army choral group singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” On the final night of the crusade, 50,000 packed inside an arena and another 20,000 stood outside watching Graham speak on giant screens.
In his later years of ministry, Graham switched to an abbreviated crusade schedule, preaching at two or three events a year until he was no longer able. His 2005 crusade in New York City drew approximately 90,000 on the final night.
In 1979 Muhammad Ali, upon visiting Graham’s North Carolina home, expressed surprise at the evangelist’s lack of luxurious living. “When I arrived at the airport, Mr. Graham himself was waiting for me,” Ali said. “I expected to be chauffeured in a Rolls Royce or at least a Mercedes,” Ali continued, “but we got in his Oldsmobile and he drove it himself. I couldn’t believe he came to the airport driving his own car. When we approached his home I thought he would live on a thousand-acre farm and we drove up to this house made of logs. No mansion with crystal chandeliers and gold carpets, it was the kind of house a man of God would live in. I look up to him.”
Graham’s stance on race relations also drew praise. Though Graham accepted the custom of segregated seating at his early crusades, in 1952 he took down ropes that had been set up to divide blacks and whites at a crusade in Jackson, Miss. Integrated crusades followed throughout the South, including meetings in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala. In 1973, Graham held a crusade in apartheid-dominated South Africa, demanding that the gathering be integrated. He got his way.
“Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead,” Graham is widely reported to have said. “Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”