Billy Graham, Influential US Evangelist, Dies at 99

Okechukwu Uwaezuoke One of America’s most influential preachers of the 20th Century Billy Graham has died Wednesday aged 99 at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, BBC reported a spokesman for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as saying.

Reverend Graham became one of the most-renowned staunch promoters of Christianity in his 60-year career, which saw him preaching to an estimated hundreds of millions of people.

The one-time backwoods minister began his worldwide mission in large arenas in London during a sermon before 12,000 worshippers in Haringay Arena, London in 1954. Besides reaching millions of Americans through their television sets, he also became a spiritual advisor to several US presidents. He was a friend of US presidents from Truman to Nixon and Obama. Over the course of his career, he was consulted by presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, according to AFP, which also added that he was, for a time, Richard Nixon’s chaplain and golf partner. President George H.W. Bush was also reported by the news agency to have invited him to pray at the White House in 1991 for guidance through the first long day of the Gulf War. Also, President George W. Bush once said that a private meeting with Graham in 1985 helped him quit drinking.

But of all the US leaders -- almost all of whom have described themselves as practicing Christians -- Graham found only Jimmy Carter to match him in dedication to his faith.

“Carter alone among the presidents... taught the Bible throughout his life, wrote books of religious meditations, and needed no help with Scripture or its challenges,” AFP quoted authors Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy as writing in a Graham biography, “The Preacher and the Presidents” published in August 2007.

Graham’s renown in the US first got a terrific shot in the arm when he held a two-month ministry in a giant tent in Los Angeles in 1949,a decade after he was ordained a minister at 21.

In 1950, he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota and launched a weekly“Hour of Decision”radio programme.

Born on November 7, 1918 and raised as one of four children on his family’s dairy farm in Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham became a committed Christian at the age of 16 after hearing a travelling evangelist. He attended the Florida Bible Institute, now Trinity College of Florida, where he was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1939.

As the first to TV as a medium to convey his Christian message on a large scale, Graham’s global mission took him to all corners of the world including North Korea.

Graham also has been credited with helping hasten the end of segregation in his native south by refusing to preach to segregated audiences after 1953.

Married to Ruth Bell Graham , the daughter of a missionary surgeon who grew up in China, they had five children, who include Anne Graham Lotz, a Christian author and speaker, and two sons, who like their famous father became ministers.

His ambivalence about the civil rights movement in the US, soon waned after he became a supporter of the cause in the 1950s with racially integrated congregations.

The man, who was deemed “the closest thing to a national pope that we shall ever see,” by journalist Garry Wills who once wrote in The Washington Post, avoided the scandals which dogged some contemporary televangelists through the decades.

Graham gradually receded from the limelight, preaching at his final revival meeting in New York in 2005 at the age of 86.

The man, who more recently was portrayed in the Netflix drama series “The Crown” as giving counsel to the young Queen Elizabeth II as she confronted the burdens of rule, was known to have paticipated in a record number of presidential inaugurations.

President Donald Trump, in a tweet, called him a special man. “The GREAT Billy Graham is dead. There was nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A very special man,” Trump tweeted.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, tweeted that he was an example to generations of modern Christians while civil rights campaigner Rev Jesse Jackson tweeted: “Blessed with length of years and service, Rev. Graham helped a lot of people against a backdrop of Southern culture.

He’s on the plus side of history. May his soul Rest In Peace.”