Reverend Billy Graham, the influential
Southern preacher who became a spiritual advisor to several US presidents and
millions of Americans via their television sets, has died, his family said
Wednesday. He was 99 years old.
The one-time backwoods minister who
eventually became the world’s foremost Christian evangelist, spread a message
of spiritual redemption at tent and stadium revival meetings, in a career that
spanned decades.
“Billy Graham is the
closest thing to a national pope that we shall ever see,” journalist Garry
Wills once wrote in The Washington Post.
Graham
was a pioneer of “televangelism” to convert souls to Christianity as television
got off the ground in the 1950s.
Born
on November 7, 1918, he was raised as one of four children on a dairy farm in
Charlotte, North Carolina.
Graham
had a spiritual awakening in 1934 that changed the course of his life. He
subsequently attended the Florida Bible Institute, now Trinity College of
Florida, and was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1939.
In
1950, he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) in
Minneapolis, Minnesota and launched a weekly “Hour of Decision” radio program.
Graham
and his wife Ruth Bell Graham — the daughter of a missionary surgeon who grew up
in China — had five children.
These
include Anne Graham Lotz, a Christian author and speaker, and two sons, who
like their famous father became ministers.
One
son, William Franklin Graham III is now the head of the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association.
His
wife Ruth, although married for nearly 64 years to the world’s most famous
Baptist preacher, remained a lifelong Presbyterian. She died in June 2007 at
the age of 87.
Unlike
other high-profile evangelists, Graham managed to escape sex and money scandals
by keeping a meticulous watch over his staff and finances.
“My
greatest fear is that I’ll do something that will bring disrepute on the Gospel
of Christ before I go,” Graham said in a 1991 interview.
He suffered from a
host of ailments late in life, including Parkinson’s disease and prostate
cancer. In 1995, weakened by illness and old age, he turned over operation of
his ministry to his eldest son
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