Billy Graham practised sermons on alligators before preaching to 210 million people
As a Florida Bible student, Billy Graham paddled to a river island and preached to birds, alligators and cypress stumps. Decades later his ministry counted live audiences of at least 210 million across more than 185 countries and territories, possibly more people in person than any preacher in Christian history.
Born in 1918 on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham was a Tarzan-loving boy whose father later credited his jungle yells with the preaching voice. When Prohibition ended in 1933 his father made him and his sister drink beer until they were sick, and neither touched alcohol again. A farmhand talked him into hearing the evangelist Mordecai Ham in 1934, and the sixteen-year-old was converted. He found Bob Jones College too legalistic, moved to the Florida Bible Institute, was ordained a Southern Baptist in 1939 and took an anthropology degree from Wheaton College in 1943.
Rejected by the army at first for being underweight, then struck down by mumps, he became the first full-time evangelist for Youth for Christ and spoke in 47 states in a year. In 1948 his team drew up the Modesto Manifesto, rules against financial and sexual scandal that included never being alone with a woman other than his wife. That same year, at 29, he became the youngest college president in the country.
His first crusade, in Grand Rapids in 1947, drew 6,000. The 1949 Los Angeles tent meetings ran eight weeks instead of three and made him a national name. He turned down a million-dollar NBC deal in 1953, held a 16-week nightly run at Madison Square Garden in 1957, and by his final New York crusade in 2005 had led 417 of them. He insisted on integrated audiences from 1953, invited Martin Luther King Jr. to share a New York revival, and in Durban in 1973 told a mixed crowd of 100,000 that apartheid was a sin.
Presidents sought him out; Lyndon Johnson counted him among his closest friends. The historian Grant Wacker called him the Great Legitimator, whose presence lent status to presidents and wars alike. Graham appeared on Gallup's most-admired list a record 61 times and died in February 2018.
Source: Billy Graham
