All in the Family
As Billy Graham steps down, will his kids shape the future of American evangelicalism?
Glass wall. Anne, meanwhile, fought a different battle. When she felt God calling her, at the age of 40, to a national Bible-teaching ministry (she prefers "teacher" over "preacher"), she bumped into strong and sometimes rude resistance from some in her Southern Baptist denomination who contend that the Bible--particularly the writings of St. Paul--bars women from the pulpit and other positions of authority in the church. At one gathering of ministers, she recalls, men in the audience turned their backs on her when she got up to speak. "It was like a glass wall went up, and I could just feel the hostility," she says. After the incident, she went home and studied the Bible and prayed. "I felt God was telling me, `You're not accountable to your audience; you're accountable to me. Keep your focus on me.' . . . So it's their problem if they don't want a woman in the pulpit. I'm not going to give an account to the Southern Baptist hierarchy for my ministry." Even so, she says, she tries to keep her message geared mainly to women, the vast majority of her audiences at the gatherings she calls "Just-Give-Me-Jesus revivals," aimed, she says, at drawing Christian believers into a "deeper walk with the Lord." It is a ministry different from those of her father and brother, she says, who attempt to make converts of nonbelievers.
Both Franklin and Anne say they support each other's ministries but plan to keep their organizations separate and apart from their father's even after he is gone. In the meantime, while his own ministry winds down, Graham's organization is stepping up its efforts to ensure that his mission continues to flourish. "We are living in an age of great spiritual hunger," Graham said during a recent groundbreaking for a new headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., "and I believe that this place is going to be a center for proclaiming the gospel throughout the world." Under his son's leadership, Graham said, "we are developing a much larger and deeper vision for the future. . . . That could mean some of our best years are ahead of us." Already, during the past decade, his organization has held conferences in over 180 countries to recruit and equip evangelists to replicate his ministry. Such efforts are expected to multiply.
Not that Graham assumes he will see this come to pass. On that night in Dallas, he spoke of the death of a friend--and of his own mortality. "You can read the last chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes," he said. "It'll tell you exactly how you'll feel when you get old. . . . I have the same feelings described by the writer of that chapter. There's a loneliness, in a way. There's a certainty that in this life not many more days lie ahead--or months. But I'm not--I'd like to have nothing more except to go to heaven," he said, looking to an opening in the stadium roof. "I'm looking forward to it. I think there'll be a hole up there somewhere, and we'll go right out."
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