Billy Graham was an American evangelist who, over six decades, preached the Gospel in person to more people than anyone in history, and became a trusted pastor to presidents and to millions of ordinary people.
William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on 7 November 1918 on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. He committed his life to Christ in 1934 at a revival led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham. He studied at the Florida Bible Institute and at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of missionaries to China; they married in 1943.
Crusades
After work with Youth for Christ, a tent campaign in Los Angeles in 1949 made him nationally known. In 1950 he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and began the radio programme Hour of Decision. His campaigns, called crusades, filled stadiums around the world: London's Harringay Arena in 1954, New York's Madison Square Garden for sixteen weeks in 1957, and many others. By his association's count he preached to live audiences of nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories.
Wider influence
From 1953 he refused to hold segregated meetings, and in 1957 he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at his New York crusade. He helped found the magazine Christianity Today (1956) and convened the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, which joined evangelism and social responsibility. He met and prayed with every American president from Truman onward.
Ruth died in 2007. Graham died at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on 21 February 2018, aged 99, and lay in honour in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol.