John Corts agreed that no single individual seemed ready to receive Graham’s mantle but thought it possible BGEA could continue to serve as an important enabler of world evangelistic efforts. “We’ve been struggling with this,” he said, “without a real design. We don’t have a formalized plan for the future, but a lot of us are thinking about it. Long term, the challenge is to take the resources that have been developed to support Billy Graham and use them in a way that will make them a resource for the Church of Jesus Christ for many years to come. Perhaps we could support a consortium of evangelists who need the kind of help we can give: promotion, accounting, spiritual counseling, literature, follow-up, mobilization of prayer and church support. We could become a support base, perhaps, for a number of ministries. We’re not quite sure that’s possible. If it’s not, then someday we may just have a funeral service. The honest answer is, nobody knows.”
As 1990 ended, there had been no funeral service, nor any indication one was being planned, but Graham had quietly set about to dismantle a substantial part of the ministry’s far-flung operations. Between 1986 and 1990, BGEA offices in London, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taiwan, Paris, and Munich had shut down, usually after turning over their tasks to other organizations. Russ Busby still operated a small photographic studio in Burbank, but virtually all other BGEA operations now proceeded from Minneapolis and Montreat. Whatever course BGEA took at Graham’s demise would be simpler to navigate with fewer ships in the armada.
As he moved inexorably toward the end of his life, Graham seemed to agree with those who felt that the most promising way to preserve and extend his ministry lay not so much in finding a single successor to carry on his work as in multiplying the resources for equipping and encouraging tens of thousands of evangelists. At the 1986 Amsterdam conference, Nilson Fanini observed that it would be impossible to imagine another evangelist of Graham’s stature. “There will be just one Billy Graham in church history,” he said. “You would need a thousand evangelists to do his job. And I believe that is what the Holy Spirit is going to have: a thousand Billy Grahams in Africa, a thousand Billy Grahams in Asia, a thousand Billy Grahams in South America.” The dozens of mini-Amsterdams organized around the world since 1986, most with assistance from BGEA, made Fanini’s prediction seem plausible.
The best bet for transmitting the inspiration and experience of the Graham team, however, was believed to be a new institution, the Billy Graham Training Center, just outside Asheville on Porter’s Cove, the parcel of land whose purchase by the WECEF raised so many eyebrows in 1978. Long before authorizing purchase of the Cove, Graham had toyed with the idea of establishing a center where Bible conferences of the sort D. L. Moody once sponsored could be held and where ministers and laymen could come to study the Bible in a retreat-type setting and to receive intensive instruction in the theory and practice of evangelism. In 1968 he went so far as to send George Wilson to talk to representatives of the Cunard Line about the possibility of buying the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner for that purpose. A stunning piece of land near the southern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Cove seemed ideally suited for such a center. Graham insistsed it would be neither a monument to him nor an embarrassment to fellow Christians. “It won’t be like PTL. It will be unpublicized, quiet, a place where people can come and study the Bible. It won’t be a showplace. It probably won’t even have a sign.” True to that promise, the buildings erected during the first phase of construction were modest structures, clearly fashioned for function rather than fame. Ruth Graham helped architects design a chapel, arguing for and getting a higher steeple than originally planned, and she decided where her and her husband’s graves would be. “We’ve already got the graveyard built,” Billy said brightly; “I’ve gone down and lain there.”
Some saw the Cove, rather than the Minneapolis office, as the place where the memory of Billy Graham’s ministry would be most faithfully preserved and his vision most imaginatively embodied. It could easily become the central location for continuing the work of the School of Evangelism that accompanied the crusades—a pilot effort in 1990 drew eight hundred pastors from forty states and fifty-six denominations. Since Graham never played any significant role in the school, younger men could conduct sessions throughout the year, both at the Cove and at other locations around the country. But some of the old warhorses were not quite ready to retire. “I see the latter part of our ministry as one of doing some basic teaching in the areas of evangelism,” Cliff Barrows said, his eyes gleaming at the possibilities. “I think we could have a communications center where Bill, when he is no longer able to travel, could still, by satellite, speak and minister about evangelism and discipleship and training and counseling and follow-up and Christian life and character—the whole business. Basically the same things Amsterdam ’86 was committed to. We could talk to Christian leadership around the world. With portable satellite dishes and technology just leaping ahead, you can conceivably get a little dish into every hamlet in the world. Technologically, it’s already available, and the price is coming down all the time. Through communications technology, the association can still have a great encouraging ministry. Bill can still make a tremendous impact on the world.”
Graham acknowledged that he could not maintain the pace he once did—“I’m slowing down. I can feel it. My mind tells me I ought to get out there and go, but I just can’t do it”—but insisted that “I’ll preach until there is no breath left in my body. I was called by God, and until God tells me to retire, I cannot. I may preach to smaller groups. I may go back to the streets where I began. But whatever strength I have, whatever time God lets me have, is going to be dedicated to doing the work of an evangelist, as long as I live.”
Street preaching in front of saloons, however, was not a likely finale to Billy Graham’s career. For more than fifty years as an evangelist, he fought the good fight and kept the faith. Now, surely on either God’s or nature’s gun lap, he was ready to finish the course and seemed determined to let the world know he planned to cross the line with an impressively strong kick. In 1988 he embarked on a missionary journey that not only added a new and important country to his own life list but also fulfilled a long-simmering dream of Ruth’s: to return to China, where she had been born and where her family had spent a quarter century, to encourage the spread of the gospel among a people who had never been far out of her mind. In 1980 she and her three siblings returned to the site of the mission compound where they had been reared, and people she met on that trip helped arrange the invitation that made it possible for her husband to accompany her on a return visit. Reminiscent of the circumstances of Graham’s visits to Eastern Europe, the invitation was a cooperative effort between the China Christian Council, a government-approved (and unofficially controlled) body that includes most of the nation’s regular Protestant churches (as distinguished from thousands of “house churches” not affiliated with Western denominations), and a state agency known as the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Like the Soviet bloc visits, the China trip was anything but a haphazard, spur-of-the-moment venture. A few months before leaving, Graham explained offhandedly that “Ruth has formed a committee of China experts,” then tossed off the names of a few of her committee members: “Richard Nixon has been helping; George Bush—people of that sort. We had a study group of luminaries pulled from the State Department here all day yesterday to give us suggestions. A China expert from Johns Hopkins is helping a great deal, and a man from Time magazine. We’ve gotten tremendous help from Zhang Wenjin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States; he’s a member of the Politburo now, and head of the Friendship Association that’s invited us. He’s the one that Chou Enlai sent to negotiate with Kissinger to get Nixon to come to China.” Another who played a key role was an American-born resident of China, Sidney Rittenberg. Fresh out of the University of North Carolina and filled with idealistic notions of communism, Rittenberg had gone to China in 1946 to help build
the Utopian society he expected the Communist revolutionaries to create. His idealism suffered a sharp comeuppance when, suspected first of being a spy and then of being an enemy of the Cultural Revolution, he spent sixteen years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. In more recent years Rittenberg had been deeply involved in the modernization process in China, particularly with regard to greater use of computers, and had served as an interpreter and consultant to American media and commercial enterprises seeking to do business with China. “He charges [American businesses] seven thousand dollars a day for consultations,” Graham reported, “but he didn’t charge us a cent. He thought it would be a tremendous thing for relations between the U.S. and China for us to visit. He was the one who really started the ball rolling for us in China. He and his wife were visiting in [California] in 1979, and he saw one of our programs on television and said, ‘Let’s get that man to China.’ And he started doing what Dr. Haraszti was doing in Eastern Europe.”
The message the Grahams took to China was much the same as what Billy and Alexander Haraszti had delivered in Eastern Europe. “First,” Ruth said, “we want to explain what Christians believe and help [government leaders] understand that Christians make their best citizens—the most reliable, the hardest working, the most honest. They don’t get drunk and they don’t run around or gamble away everything they make. They are good family people.” A second aim would be to assure Chinese Christians that their efforts and successes were known and prayed about throughout the world and to help make them feel they are a vital part of international Christianity. And thirdly, “Bill will emphasize peace,” Ruth said. “Peace with God. They will be celebrating an International Year of Peace while we are there. It is interesting to read articles from the Beijing government. They all talk about peace. They want peace. But they don’t realize that they cut themselves off from the real source of peace.”
This ambitious three-pronged mission—originally scheduled for the fall of 1987 but aborted when Graham tripped over his briefcase in a Tokyo hotel room and broke several ribs—finally got under way in April 1988. The five-city, seventeen-day trip got off to a rousing start in Beijing, where Graham was feted at a welcoming banquet hosted by Ambassador Zhang in the Great Hall of the People. The ambassador welcomed Ruth as a “daughter of China” and introduced her husband as “a man of peace.” Subsequently, U.S. ambassador Winston Lord and his wife, Betty Bao Lord, hosted a luncheon for Graham and a collection of religious and political leaders. The diplomatic coup of the trip came when the Grahams were received by Premier Li Peng, who spent nearly an hour in conversation with the evangelist, discussing such topics as the role of religion in China’s future. Graham, as always, bore witness to his own faith, and Li, while stressing that he was and expected to remain an atheist, acknowledged that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion had not always been faith fully observed, and conceded that China needed “moral power” and “spiritual forces” to undergird its efforts at modernization. The previously unannounced visit was featured on Chinese television and made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country—-the only other foreign dignitary the premier had received was Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and generated widespread public interest in the rest of Graham’s visit.
Other notable sessions included lectures at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and at Beijing University (both of which have sprung from institutions founded by American missionaries), a preaching appearance before an overflow crowd of approximately 1,500 at the Beijing Christian Church, and an address to a large gathering of foreign diplomats and business people at Beijing’s International Club. Having been advised by Ambassador Zhang that if he did not ask to visit major historical sites, “People will notice,” Graham visited a section of the Great Wall. When someone explained to a lively group of third graders that their fellow tourist was a famous American, they entertained him with several patriotic songs, and he did his best to respond in kind. When one of his guides taught the children to sing “Jesus Loves Me” in both Chinese and English, the evangelist gamely joined in, making it clear both that his tone deafness is cross-cultural and his memory for lyrics less than flawless. If any of the children could understand his words, they heard the smiling tall man sitting cross-legged in their midst proclaim the un-Evangelical news that “He is weak, but we are strong.” Still, an Australian couple who were taken aback when they recognized him correctly guessed his intentions. “What do you think he’s doing here,” the husband asked. His wife gave the only answer that made sense: “Probably what he does everywhere.”
Other cities on the agenda included Huayin (where Ruth had spent her childhood), Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In each, he spoke to large gatherings of Christians and met with key political and civic leaders to discuss the necessity and social advantages of removing all restrictions on religious belief and practice. He found the clearest example of a growing tolerance toward religion in Nanjing, where he visited a thriving new religious press. During the Cultural Revolution, most copies of the Bible had been destroyed; if believers had access to a copy at all, it was likely to be one that some dedicated saint had laboriously copied by hand. Now, in the first year of its operation, Amity Press was in the process of printing 600,000 copies of the Bible, with plans to print and distribute a million copies a year after that. Graham also spoke to students at Nanjing Seminary, where he gave the ministers-in-training his familiar exhortation to preach the gospel with authority; to preach it simply, boldly, and urgently; and to preach it again and again. After an extended question-and-answer session, a representative of the student body gave Graham a banner to remind the evangelist to pray for him and his fellow seminarians. Then, with touching timidity, he said, “All of our students hope someday to be like you.”
China had never received so prestigious a religious leader before, and Chinese media gave the visit impressive attention. Various events on Graham’s itinerary, particularly his visit with the premier, drew wide radio, television, and newspaper coverage, both at the national and local levels. The influential World Economic Herald, published in Shanghai, carried an interview with the evangelist on its front pages, and Ruth Graham was interviewed by writers for the Beijing Review and Chinese Women magazines. While no one would dare suggest that any substantial proportion of China’s billion-plus population was about to convert to Christianity, Sidney Rittenberg did venture that Graham had represented Christianity to Chinese leaders as “a powerful moral force to support the Chinese people in their mighty, backbreaking efforts to escape from poverty, both moral and material,” and that he had impressed them with his suggestions on “how they might better shape and administer their policy on religious freedom. In this manner, Mr. Graham is opening the big door for the advance of Christianity in China. In doing so, he will promote the opening of all the little doors.”
Shortly after the China visit, Graham returned to Russia to celebrate one thousand years of Christianity’s presence in that country. As a guest of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was treated as a major dignitary. “The millennium celebration was fantastic,” he reported. “Television and newspapers were filled with it all day long. That’s the first time the present generation of Soviet people realized their roots were in Christianity. This made a real impact on them. I suppose I was the main foreign speaker. They put me right up there behind Mrs. Gorbachev, and I had an opportunity to talk with her twice during breaks. They received me everywhere—the Central Committee, the Politburo, everywhere. They gave a luncheon for me the last day I was there, and Georgi Arbatov came and gave a speech. He talked about what I had contributed to better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. I was amazed he was even there, and even more amazed he was a speaker. I thought the way they treated us was a little bit historic.”
When he returned to the United States after that visit, Graham found himself faced with another political campaign and the quadrennial challenge to be a neutral observer. “I almost got into i
t this time,” he said, “because I went to Atlanta to the Democratic convention and led a prayer there. I had a good talk with Governor Dukakis out at the [Georgia] governor’s home. All the [Democratic] governors were there, and I was the only outsider. I was there to lead in prayer, and they put me right beside Governor Dukakis. The chairman of the Democratic party was there, but the conversation was almost totally between Governor Dukakis and me.” At the convention itself, Graham led another prayer, in which he invoked both Scripture and the memory of John F. Kennedy. He noted that in contrast to some conventions he had attended, the mood seemed “quiet and reverent. It was sort of a religious spirit. While I was praying and when I finished, you could hear a pin drop. Usually, they’re just walking and talking, but they were just as quiet as could be. And when I finished, there were ‘amens’ from all over the place. I think it had something to do with the fact that there were so many blacks there. And I noticed that the whites began to dress up, because the blacks were dressed up just like they were going to church, and this had a great impact on some of those white delegates. I felt that, from a religious point of view, the black people made a very positive impact. It was very interesting. My talk—my prayer—came at the prime time of the evening, but no one carried it except CNN and C-SPAN. And one other network, maybe for a minute, I heard later.”
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