Heeding His Father’s Calling

Franklin Graham does not look like a rebel. As he strides across the stage to deliver a guest sermon at the Harvest Christian Fellowship church in Riverside, the 44-year-old Graham calls to mind his father, Billy, America’s most admired evangelist.

The son has inherited his father’s shock of well-disciplined hair, though Franklin’s is dark while his father’s has turned silver. And while the younger Graham may stand a straighter 6-plus-feet tall, and his prominent jaw may be more sharply defined than that of his 78-year-old dad, to look at Franklin is to understand why Billy got offers from Hollywood when he was young.

“From my father I learned to keep a single focus,” Graham says. “Cecil B. DeMille wanted him to do movies. President Richard Nixon offered him an ambassadorship when he was in office, but my father said no. Not to get sidetracked, that’s something I want to imitate.”

From the look of things, he is managing quite well. But there were years when Franklin appeared to be anything but on track. He got kicked out of LeTourneau College in Texas for breaking the dormitory curfew, and he is still remembered in his hometown of Montreat, N.C., for the tree he once mowed down with a machine gun. And that’s not even half the story.

“Driving motorcycles, flying planes, drinking beer, shooting guns,” he rattles off the litany. Bikes and a plane are still part of his life, but friends now say he is as clean cut as they come.

“When I think of the mistakes I made, the people I hurt, I’d like to change that,” he says. “But my past might help me a little. It gives me credibility. Maybe somebody in the gutter can relate to it.”

What he sees as disgraceful behavior others might dismiss as the hazards of youth, not to mention the pressures of being Billy Graham’s son.

His parents marvel good-naturedly at his transformation in their coauthored afterword to Franklin’s autobiography, “Rebel With a Cause” (Thomas Nelson, 1995).

“When folks say, ‘You must be proud of Franklin,’ we realize that it is not a matter of pride, but of gratitude to God for his faithfulness,” they wrote.

“With God, nobody’s hopeless.”

Their son is a far more stern judge of his past. Anyone would have to admit, it did not always seem to be preparing him for what will be his future.

Starting this year, say Graham family friends, Franklin will be highly visible in what may be the most demanding role of his life as successor to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn., which is based in Minneapolis. Handpicked by his father, who has Parkinson’s disease, he will eventually don the CEO’s title in an empire with a $91-million operating budget that includes missionary work, a relief program, and the preaching crusades that have appeared on radio and television over the years to make Billy Graham a household name. Three sisters and a brother were passed over for the job, as were members of Graham’s organization who might have felt at least as qualified. Those close to the story insist that any ruffled feathers have smoothed.

“The whole team is getting older,” says Jerry Miller, a 68-year-old vice president of the Graham association, to explain that Billy Graham’s longest associates are retirement age themselves. As that team aged, Franklin, who joined his father’s board at 27, grew from a rebellious kid to a mature religious leader, right before their eyes.

“If you asked me 10 years ago if Franklin would lead one day, I’d have said no,” Miller admits. “But it was as if someone turned on a light switch in Franklin. He has evolved. I would tell anyone who thinks otherwise to observe him on a crusade, listen to him preach, feel how he loves God. They’ll change their opinion about him.”

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At the very least, Franklin has developed a style of his own.

His choice of attire for an evening at the Harvest Christian Fellowship church tells as much as anything about the differences between father and son. Black jeans and cowboy boots, sport shirt and tweed jacket set him apart from the suit-and-tie preachers of his father’s generation. Nor does the music that usually surrounds him onstage, a Christian country band, recall his father’s era.

What is pure Graham, however, is the plain-speaking manner and the ease with which Franklin invites sinners to repent, but kindly, as if he was inviting them home to supper.

“He’s finally gotten comfortable in his own skin,” says Greg Laurie, pastor of the Riverside church and a longtime friend. Graham credits Laurie with showing him how to preach his own way.

“Franklin came here to Southern California and saw that a preacher’s dress can be contemporary and casual. He saw the sort of music we play, and he recognized that a young man can relax and act his own age. He can get up and preach in bluejeans if he wants to. And Franklin’s done that,” Laurie says.

As Laurie tells it, Graham always wanted to be a preacher but shied away for obvious reasons: “He didn’t want to be compared to his father.”

Franklin explains it another way: “God called my father to the stadiums of the world, and God called me to the ditches.”

He has the stories to prove it. In 1974, Graham joined Samaritan’s Purse, an emergency relief program founded by Bob Pierce, a family friend who earlier founded World Vision, a similar operation based in Monrovia. Soon, Samaritan’s Purse added a new division called World Medical Mission to bring doctors as well as relief workers into war zones.

Pierce died of leukemia and Graham took over the operation, now based in Boone, N.C., in 1979. “Franklin was kind of wet behind the ears when he took over,” says Skip Heitzig, the pastor of Calvary Chapel in Albuquerque, who is on the board of Samaritan’s Purse.

In some ways, perhaps, but not in others. By then, Graham had graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in business. He had married Jane Austin Cunningham, and three of their four children had been born. Three years after he took over the relief operation, he was ordained at Grace Community Church, a nondenominational Christian Church in Tempe, Ariz. His dirt-biking, motorcycling, gun-collecting days were not behind him, but had been relegated to the tame categories of hobby and sport. He still rides the Colorado 500 cycle race most years.

His job offered more than enough danger and drama.

“It was a perfect fit,” says Dr. Richard Furman, a surgeon and neighbor of Graham in Boone, N.C., where he and his family now live on a farm. Furman has traveled to a number of countries with Graham and his medical mission over the past 20 years. “What kind of a religious person would be interested in going to Bosnia to face the gunfire, or Rwanda where people are getting killed? There aren’t many who have that kind of religious call.”

Furman’s first mission with Graham included two or three other doctors, he says. Now, some 150 physicians travel with the mission each year. Samaritan’s Purse workers cover the same territory but focus on comfort and consolation. Graham dips in and out in his own six-seater plane.

Board members credit Graham’s entrepreneurial skills for the program’s steady growth. By 1995, he had built Samaritan’s Purse to a $32-million operation. One recent project, Operation Shoe Box, supplied holiday gifts to nearly 1 million people in war zones around the world. The success of it led to a feature spot for Graham as the “ABC Nightly News” person of the week. He delivered many of the boxes himself, including one packed by First Lady Hillary Clinton.

“Franklin lives on the edge,” says his friend Dennis Agajanian, a guitar player who has traveled with Graham from his earliest days with Samaritan’s Purse. “One time Franklin was preaching in Cambodia and three mortar [shells] hit nearby. Once in Beirut, bombs were going off and he kept on preaching.”

And once, in Alaska, Agajanian promised to make a gift of his prize rifle if Graham would agree to preach. In those days, it took such extremes for Franklin to step into the pulpit.

For the longest time, he did not see himself as a preacher. Even now, friends say he has the heart of a missionary.

“When we’re in Bosnia, he’ll go visit kids in the hospital,” Agajanian says. “He’ll pinch their cheeks and have me sing for them, and I never see him shed a tear. He’s a rebel who is tender.”

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The morning after his sermon at Laurie’s Riverside church, Graham sipped cold soda and received a steady stream of visitors. They kept him chair-bound for several hours before he delivered a luncheon speech to the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Anaheim.

It is obvious that the heir apparent is well on his way to assuming his new role. Furman and others predict that the transition will be gradual but steady.

Everything about him suggests that Franklin Graham was born to follow in his father’s footsteps. His steady gaze and listening heart, his Southern gentleman’s manner (“My mama would slap my face if I did not call you ‘ma’am’ ”) seem custom-made for his calling to the ministry.

No one seems to doubt he will do some things differently.

“There were times when Billy Graham was gone from home for six or eight weeks at once,” Miller says. “He’d come home and his kids didn’t know who he was.”

Franklin Graham is home for a few days at least most weeks, and he never travels for more than two weeks at a time. “Having his own plane, he can fly home without waiting for the airlines,” Miller says. He takes his children hunting and fishing when he is at home. And he never talks about his work.

“I might say something that would make my wife worry next time I’m away,” he says.

Years before he was named to succeed his father, he was traveling with the Graham crusade, preaching more and more often, attending board meetings and accompanying his father to some engagements. His most recent power sighting was at last month’s presidential inauguration. At the same time he has remained at the head of Samaritan’s Purse.

“If my father needs my help, I’ll drop what I’m doing to help him,” Graham says. “It’s a son’s duty to his father. I hope my own boys are watching.”

Some observers predict that Graham will merge his operation with his father’s. He is less precise about his plans.

“I don’t think things will change in the future,” he says. “I was born into this, it has been my life.”