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William Franklin "Billy" Graham, Jr. (born November 7, 1918) is an American evangelical Christian evangelist. As of April 25, 2010, when he met with Barack Obama, Graham has spent personal time with twelve United States Presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman, and is number seven on Gallup's list of admired people for the 20th century. He is a Southern Baptist. He rose to celebrity status as his sermons were broadcast on radio and television.

It is said that Graham has preached the Gospel in person to more people than any other person in history. According to his staff, as of 1993 more than 2.5 million people have "stepped forward at his crusades to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior", many to the altar call song "Just As I Am". As of 2008, Graham's lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts, topped 2.2 billion.

Early life

He was born November 7, 1918 to William Franklin Graham I (1888–1962) and Morrow Coffey (1892–1981), on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. Graham was raised in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church by his parents. In 1933, when Prohibition in the United States ended, Graham's father forced Graham and his sister Katherine to drink beer until they vomited, which created an aversion, in both of them, to alcohol and drugs.

According to the Billy Graham Center, Graham was converted in 1934 at age 16 during a series of revival meetings in Charlotte which were led by evangelist Mordecai Ham. However, he was turned down for membership in a local youth group because he was "too worldly". He was persuaded to go see Ham at the urging of one of the employees, Albert McMakin, on the Graham farm.

After graduating from Sharon High School in May 1936, Graham attended Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University), then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, for one semester but found it too legalistic in both coursework and rules. At this time, he was influenced and inspired by Pastor Charley Young from Eastport Bible Church. He was almost expelled, but Bob Jones, Sr. warned him not to throw his life away: "At best, all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.... You have a voice that pulls. God can use that voice of yours. He can use it mightily." In 1937, Graham transferred to the Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College of Florida) on the site of today's Florida College in Temple Terrace, Florida. In his autobiography he writes that he "received [his] calling on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club," which is immediately in front of today's Sutton Hall at Florida College in Temple Terrace. Reverend Billy Graham Memorial Park is today located on the Hillsborough River directly east of the 18th green and across from where Graham often paddled a canoe to a small island in the river, where he would preach to the birds, alligators, and cypress stumps. Graham eventually graduated from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois with a degree in anthropology, in 1943. It was during his time at Wheaton that Graham decided to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God. Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood (Hollywood, California) was instrumental in helping Graham wrestle with the issue, which was settled at Forest Home Christian camp (now called Forest Home Ministries) southeast of the Big Bear area in Southern California. A memorial there marks the site of Graham's decision.

Family

On August 13, 1943, Graham married Wheaton classmate Ruth Bell (1920–2007), whose parents were Presbyterian missionaries in China, where her father, L. Nelson Bell, was a general surgeon. He met Ruth at Wheaton: "I saw her walking down the road towards me and I couldn't help but stare at her as she walked. She looked at me and our eyes met and I felt that she was definitely the woman I wanted to marry." Ruth thought that he "wanted to please God more than any man I'd ever met." They married two months after graduation and later lived in a log cabin designed by Ruth in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Montreat, North Carolina. Ruth died on June 14, 2007, at the age of 87.

They had five children together: Virginia Leftwich (Gigi) Graham Tchividjian (b. 1945); Anne Graham Lotz (b. 1948; runs AnGeL ministries); Ruth Graham (b. 1950; founder and president of Ruth Graham & Friends); Franklin Graham (b. 1952; administers an international relief organization called Samaritan's Purse and will be his father's successor at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association); and Nelson "Ned" Graham (b.1958; a pastor who runs East Gates International, which distributes Christian literature in China). Graham has 19 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren. Grandson Tullian Tchividjian is senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

As a guard against even the appearance of wrongdoing Graham had a policy that he would never be alone with a woman, other than his wife Ruth. This has come to be known as the Billy Graham Rule.

Ministry

Beginning

Graham transferred in January 1937 from Bob Jones College to Florida Bible Institute, and then finally to Wheaton College in 1939. Graham attended Wheaton College from 1939 to 1943, when he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology. While attending college, he became pastor of the United Gospel Tabernacle and also had other preaching engagements.

Graham served briefly as pastor of the Village Church in Western Springs, Illinois, not far from Wheaton, in 1943-44. While there, his friend Torrey Johnson, pastor of the Midwest Bible Church in Chicago, told Graham that his radio program "Songs in the Night" was about to be canceled for lack of funding. Consulting with the members of his church in Western Springs, Graham decided to take over Johnson's program with financial support from his parishioners. Launching the new radio program on January 2, 1944, still called Songs in the Night, Graham recruited the baritone George Beverly Shea as his director of radio ministry. While the radio ministry continued for many years, Graham decided to move on in early 1945, and in 1947, at age 30, he became the youngest person to serve as a sitting college president during his tenure at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Graham served as the president of Northwestern College from 1948 to 1952.

Initially, Graham intended to become a chaplain in the armed forces, but shortly after applying for a commission contracted mumps. After a period of recuperation in Florida, Graham was hired as the first full time evangelist of the new Youth for Christ International (YFCI) which was co-founded by Torrey Johnson and evangelist Charles Templeton. He traveled throughout the United States and Europe as an evangelist for YFCI. Unlike many evangelists then and now, Graham had little formal theological training; when his friend Chuck Templeton urged him to join him in applying to Princeton Theological Seminary, Graham declined to do so.

Hearst intervention

Graham scheduled a series of revival meetings in Los Angeles in 1949, for which he erected circus tents in a parking lot. The Los Angeles revival is considered to be the time when Graham became a national religious figure. Graham's rise to national prominence is partly because of the assistance he received from news mogul William Randolph Hearst, whose interest in Graham was that he respected Graham for being his own person and following what he believed, though the two never met. Most observers believe that Hearst appreciated Graham's patriotism and appeals to youth and thought that Graham would be helpful in promoting Hearst's conservative anti-communist views. Hearst sent a telegram to his newspaper editors reading "Puff Graham" during Billy Graham's late 1949 Los Angeles crusade.  The increased media exposure from Hearst's newspaper chain and national magazines caused the crusade event to run for eight weeks—five weeks longer than planned. Henry Luce put him on the cover of TIME in 1954. At the Los Angeles revival, a fellow evangelist accused Graham of setting religion back 100 years. Graham replied, "I did indeed want to set religion back, not just 100 years but 1,900 years, to the Book of Acts, when first century followers of Christ were accused of turning the Roman Empire upside down."

Crusades

Billy Graham has conducted many evangelistic crusades since 1948. He began this form of ministry in 1947 and continued until recently. He would rent a large venue, such as a stadium, park, or street. He arranged a group of up to 5,000 people to sing in a choir and then preached the gospel and invited people to come forward (a practice begun by Dwight L. Moody). These people, called inquirers, were then given the opportunity to speak one-on-one with a counselor who clarified any questions the inquirer may have had and would pray with that person. The inquirers were often given resources, such as a copy of the Gospel of John or a Bible study booklet. In Moscow in 1992, one-quarter of the 155,000 people in his audience came forward upon his request.

Graham was offered a five-year, $5 million contract from NBC to appear on television opposite Arthur Godfrey, but he turned it down in favor of continuing his touring revivals because of his pre-arranged commitments. Graham had missions in London, which lasted 12 weeks, and a New York City mission in Madison Square Garden, in 1957, which ran nightly for 16 weeks. In 1959, he led his first crusade, which was in London.