Women dismissed as “prostitutes” and “adulteresses” were often models of righteousness and faith. Women fill the pages of the Bible. Some of them enter the narrative as mothers and wives, others as refugees, judges, and queens. Yet one burden many of them share is our interpretive tendency to blame them for sexual offense no matter …
A lot of prominent 20th century Christian thinkers used to be skeptics. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis’s personal secretary, once commented to the great Christian writer about a clever inscription engraved on an atheist’s tombstone: “Here lies an atheist. All dressed up with no place to go.” Not bemused, Lewis quipped: “That atheist probably wishes …
Billy Graham admired the moral leadership and evangelistic passion he saw in Catholics like John Paul II. Opening his Southern crusades to blacks and cooperating with Roman Catholics, both measures vigorously criticized by many of his supporters, required courage of the kind conventionally lauded as liberal or progressive. It is true that challenging racial segregation …
An example of Billy Graham’s fiery preaching in the 1950s. This article originally appeared in the February 2, 1959, issue of Christianity Today. Billy Graham's ministry to the big cities, widened in its outreach by radio and television, is one of the outstanding contributions to the resurgence of evangelical Christianity in our generation. His radio …
While some other evangelicals stumbled in national news, Graham’s Modesto Manifesto kept him from falling. On countless occasions during his career, usually at a press conference preceding a major crusade, Billy Graham declared that he sensed religious revival was breaking out and about to sweep over the land. In 1948, he happened to be right. …
Churches were divided. Leadership was concentrated in the denominations. Believers eschewed cultural influence. Liberal modernism was on the move. Then God made Billy Graham. The first time Ruth Bell saw her future husband, he was dashing down the dormitory steps two at a time. Now there's a young man who knows where he's going! she …
Why a fiery evangelist changed his emphasis. Billy Graham debuted on a national stage during his Los Angeles Crusade in fall 1949. Just 30 years old, Graham met his audience with a fiery call for repentance from sin, boldly announcing on the opening night that "this city of wickedness and sin" had a choice between …
A boyhood in rural North Carolina shaped the evangelist his entire life. If you go to Charlotte, North Carolina, you will find that the farmland where Billy Graham grew up has been transformed. The rolling fields of the early-20th-century agricultural South have morphed into the strip malls, office buildings, and subdivisions of the New South. …
Focus. Integrity. And a God-directed heart. Billy Graham had a life-long influence on me as a person and as a pastor. It began in my childhood with my grandmother. My grandmother told me, "I pray for two people every day. I pray for Billy Graham, and I pray for you." She always wanted me to …
Billy Graham restored a sense of goodness about the Good News. The fundamentalist church of my youth viewed the upstart evangelist Billy Graham with deep suspicion. He invited members of the National Council of Churches—and Roman Catholics!—to sit on his crusade platforms. He seemed soft on communism, especially in his comments about the church behind …