November 13 1995

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
-Colossians 4:6 (NIV)

For as long as I can remember, Billy Graham has been part of our family. Not in a literal sense, of course, since my father grew up in Minnesota while Billy Graham was raised in the South. Yet, God chose to weave their lives together—calling both to the work of evangelism, giving both the privilege of introducing tens of thousands of men and women to Jesus Christ, and planting in both an enduring friendship. Drawn together during the 1940s through the ministry of Youth for Christ, Billy Graham, Merv Rosell, and a small cadre of gifted young evangelists—sharing not only sermons and songleaders but also long seasons of prayer and a growing sense of awe at what God was doing through them—became the surprising leaders of what the editor of United Evangelical Action would by 1952 be calling "one of the greatest outpourings of the Spirit in the nation's history."

Those powerful midcentury revivals, marked by the large evangelistic crusades that swept through scores of American cities during the late 1940s and early 1950s, not only swelled the ranks of a resurgent evangelical movement, but they also helped to make Billy Graham the best known and most respected leader of our century. With Billy Graham's new prominence, however, came increasing criticism. Old friends as well as new enemies began to voice concerns about everything from his theology to his style of preaching.

Well-known figures, of course, are always vulnerable to criticism—and special scrutiny, it would seem, has frequently been reserved for religious leaders. From Whitefield and Finney to Moody and Sunday, American ...