Friday, June 1, 2007; Page A05
CHARLOTTE, May 31 -- Three former U.S. presidents came together Thursday to praise evangelist Billy Graham and help dedicate a library in his honor, a $27 million complex that traces the preacher's rise from farm boy to the most widely heard minister in the world.
On a stage in view of a 40-foot glass cross that serves as the museum's front door, the frail preacher said that he was embarrassed by the attention and that there was "too much Billy Graham" in the exhibits....read entire story here....http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/31/AR2007053102161.html
wish to read more about Graham. You can check the cover story in The Timehttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979573,00.html
God's Billy Pulpit
Monday, Nov. 15, 1993 By NANCY GIBBS AND RICHARD N. OSTLING/MONTREAT
What is it in this man, in his urgent voice and eager eyes, in the message and the messenger, that overwhelms even those who are predisposed to distrust him? Long ago, Billy Graham gave up the shiny suits and technicolor ties of the brash young evangelist; the silver mane is thinner now, the step may falter a bit, he no longer prowls the stage like a lynx. In his preaching as well, the temperatures of hellfire have been reduced, the volume turned down. Graham knows he needs to save his strength: he is fighting Parkinson's disease, a progressive nervous disorder that has already made it impossible for him to drive or write by hand. But while he has learned to number his days, Graham intends to make the most of them: "The New Testament says nothing of Apostles who retired and took it easy."
......There may have been cleverer preachers and wiser ones, those whose messages seemed safe, logic sound.....
.....
Billy Graham turned 75 this week, an occasion for some reckoning of a life and career full of blessings and contradictions. Everyone has a preferred ; description. George Bush called him "America's pastor." Harry Truman called him a "counterfeit" and publicity seeker. Pat Boone considers him "the greatest person since Jesus." Fundamentalist leader Bob Jones III says Graham "has done more harm to the cause of Christ than any other living man." Biographer William Martin calls him "an icon not just of American Christianity but of America itself."
Weathering both applause and derision, Graham has through the years become America's perennial deus ex machina, perpetually in motion, sweeping in to lift up spirits befuddled by modernity. When Presidents need to pray, it is Graham whom they call; he ministered to Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, spent the night with the Bushes on the eve of the Gulf War. Richard Nixon offered him the ambassadorship to Israel at a meeting with Golda Meir. "I said the Mideast would blow up if I went over there," Graham recalls. "Golda then reached under the table and squeezed my hand. She was greatly relieved." When Billy arrived for a crusade in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1989, Hillary Rodham Clinton invited him to lunch. "I don't eat with beautiful women alone," Billy told her, so they met in a hotel dining room and talked for a couple of hours.
....And Graham is the master marketer of that faith......"I feel like I've been wrestling with the devil, who has been doing everything in his power to keep those people from getting a clear message of the Gospel." At the moment he gives the invitation, he explains, "some sort of physical energy goes out of me and I feel terribly weak. I'm depleted." After a crusade he returns to relax with his wife Ruth in the rambling log home that she designed years ago as their sanctuary. It sits up in the Blue Ridge Mountains above Montreat, North Carolina, a retreat from the demands that press upon him continually....
....Four decades later, it's not over yet. William Franklin Graham Jr. grew up on a North Carolina dairy farm, the son of pious parents who believed in spankings and Bible readings and persistent instruction in clean living. In 1933, on the day Prohibition was repealed, his father made Billy and his sister Catherine drink beer until they vomited, an early exercise in aversion therapy that lasted a lifetime.....
..."I didn't have any tears, I didn't have any emotion, I didn't hear any thunder, there was no lightning," he says. "But right there, I made my decision for Christ. It was as simple as that, and as conclusive."....
...Heaven, he used to explain, measured 1,600 sq. mi.: "We are going to sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we'll drive down the golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible." Decades later, the vision has matured. "I think heaven is going to be a place beyond anything we can imagine, or anyone in Hollywood or . on Broadway can imagine," he says now. "There is a passage in Revelation that says we will serve God in heaven. We're not going to have somebody fan us or sit around on a beach somewhere."....
(in Illinois)There he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of missionaries to China who herself wanted to go and evangelize in Tibet. Graham talked her out of it, arguing that she knew God wanted them to marry, so "I'll lead and you do the following."...
...The YFC (Youth for Christ)rallies included blaring bands, quiz shows, horse acts, emcees with bow ties that lit up. As for Graham, so loud and fast was his delivery that journalists called him "God's Machine Gun." "Christian vaudeville," sniffed skeptics....
...One day in 1948, Graham gathered his tiny retinue in a Modesto, California, hotel room to inoculate them against temptation. To prevent sexual rumors, each agreed never again to be alone with a woman other than his wife. The "Modesto Manifesto" also pledged honest statistical reports and open finances. The money setup was further cleansed in 1950 after the Atlanta Constitution ran a photo of Graham next to a picture of ushers with sackfuls of cash.....
..Graham always appreciated the importance both of appearances and of self- promotion....
.. Even as Graham's preaching grew more confident, his concern about his intellectual preparation lingered. But when his friend and fellow YFC revivalist Charles Templeton urged him to come to Princeton Theological Seminary and lay a deeper academic foundation for his preaching, Graham balked. When they met on their travels, they fell into deep debates, with Templeton now armed with philosophy, anthropology and a willingness to read the Bible as metaphor. Graham found he couldn't muster the logical responses.
As Martin tells it, this led to a spiritual and intellectual turning point. "Chuck, look, I haven't a good enough mind to settle these questions," Graham finally declared. "The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides." Graham concluded that "I don't have the time, the inclination or the set of mind to pursue them. I found that if I say 'The Bible says' and 'God says,' I get results. I have decided I'm not going to wrestle with these questions any longer."..
...Templeton charged him with committing intellectual suicide. But Graham came to believe doubt was a dangerous distraction from his calling. He decided the Bible was the one true Word in its entirety and never wavered. Looking back today, Graham says, "I had one great failure, and that was intellectual. I should have gone on to school. But I would talk to people about that, and they'd say, Oh no, go on with what you're doing, and let others do that. I do regret I didn't do enough reading, enough study, both formal and informal."....
...In the 1950s Graham's warnings about a diabolically inspired Soviet empire helped inspire his frightened audience to seek solace and protection in faith. By the 1980s he was joining the peace movement. Graham was pilloried in 1982 for speaking to a staged "peace" conference in the Soviet Union and resolutely downplaying religious repression....
..He opposes abortion except in cases involving rape, incest or danger to the mother's life, but he is critical of Operation Rescue....
.."I don't think you can save souls without working for justice," says Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. "I hear Billy Graham as interested in saving souls of the poor but not interested in changing the conditions that create the poverty."...
..His ministry rests on the notion that if individuals are brought to God and their lives transformed, they in turn will go out and transform society. That priority, and even more his zeal for social orderliness, often kept Graham on the sidelines, particularly during the civil rights movement. Though he insisted on racially integrated seating at his revival meetings, Graham says Martin Luther King Jr. himself advised in a lengthy talk that "if you go to the streets, your people will desert you, and you won't have the opportunity to have these integrated crusades." But then and ever since, he has been criticized for his role. "He should have been more deeply involved earlier on," argues Dean Joseph Hough Jr. of Vanderbilt University's Divinity School. "Had he been, he could have had quite an impact."...
..."I was distraught and offended when he spent the night in the White House before Bush launched Desert Storm," says Alan Neely, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. "I saw that as Graham giving his sanction for what was about to take place. I don't think that's the role of the Christian minister."...
..He has a list in his computer of 43,000 evangelists around the world, whom he visits when he travels or invites to training meetings. If he can inspire one preacher, who goes home and converts his family and neighbors, who in turn breathe new life into a gasping church, which shines new light on a lost city . . . who knows how far it may go?..
Wish
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