A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Not surprisingly, Franklin’s use of this occasion to preach what amounted to an Evangelical sermon drew fire from several quarters. Rabbi Fred Greenspahn, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of Denver and the only non-Christian on the program, said it showed a “pretty ignorant narrow-minded streak of Christianity.” He told Graham afterward that he had found his remarks “hurtful because they weren’t inclusive of other religions.” According to Greenspahn, “He looked at me and ignored me. . . . It seemed to me at that service if you weren’t ‘saved,’ you weren’t acceptable.” Another rabbi said that he had felt “disenfranchised” because the service was “clearly Evangelical,” adding that a service of that sort should be religiously inclusive. This one, he said, “didn’t pass the smell test. It shut out a lot of people.” Not all the criticism came from non-Christians. The Rev. Michael Carrier, a Presbyterian pastor and president of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, said, “I felt like he was trying to terrorize us into heaven instead loving us into heaven. . . . [This service] was supposed to be for all the people of Colorado and the nation to find solace, not an Evangelical Christian service.” Franklin himself apparently had no second thoughts. Interviewed about the event a few days later, he said he had felt an “awesome responsibility” at the Columbine service “to give people a rope to hold on to. I had about five or six minutes. The families of the 13 were there looking and the whole world was watching on TV. I just wanted to tell people that there is a God, that he loves us, and that he gave his only son 2,000 years ago.”

  Franklin stirred a similar response in January 2001, when he led the invocation at the presidential inauguration of George W. Bush and delivered the sermon at a service the next morning in the National Cathedral. He concluded his inaugural prayer by saying, “May this be the beginning of a new dawn for America as we humble ourselves before you and acknowledge you alone as our Lord, our Savior, and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” At the worship service the following morning, he spoke of “Christ, whom the Bible speaks of as the source of all wisdom,” and proclaimed that “it’s not enough just to be moral; it’s not enough just to believe in God. The Bible says in John 3 that you must be born again.” He asserted his belief that God is calling America to repentance and faith and that “to repent is to acknowledge our need of the Great Physician in our lives . . . and to accept his prescription for healing of our souls found in his son, Jesus Christ, and by faith receiving him into our heart and trusting him as our savior and follow him as our Lord. . . . Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the father but by me. . . . May we as a nation again place our hope and trust in the almighty God and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Redeemer, and our Friend. May God bless you, and may God bless America.”

  These statements drew critical comments from Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians, and also from Christians who felt that the inauguration—the preeminent ritual of American civil religion—should be an occasion to bring the nation together, not symbolically exclude people of different faiths or of no faith at all. When asked about what he had said and the reactions to it, Graham made it clear that his distinctly Christian statements were not the product of thoughtlessness or habit. At a rehearsal the day before the inauguration, he recalled, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, an African-American pastor from Houston who was scheduled to give the benediction, had asked him if he planned to pray in the name of Jesus. “I said, ‘Absolutely. Yes sir. This isn’t a platform I have sought. I think God has put me here, and I think it would be wrong not to pray in the name of the Lord Jesus.’ And he said, ‘Good. I’ll do it too.’” And he did. Caldwell drew even more fire than Graham when he closed his benediction with the words, “We respectfully submit this humble prayer in the name that’s above all other names, Jesus the Christ. Let all who agree say ‘Amen.’”

  Picking up a Bible during this interview, Graham continued, “The President put his hand on the Bible. Is he excluding Muslims because he doesn’t have the Qur’an? Or how about the Hindu Book of the Dead? How long does the list have to be? Did he exclude all of these and other Americans because he had his hand on the Holy Bible? The President is a Methodist—a born-again Methodist—a Christian who wants to have a Christian prayer to open the inauguration and a Christian benediction to close it. It is his inauguration. He is a Christian. Because the United States voted for a Methodist, did we exclude the Jews because [vice presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Joseph] Lieberman didn’t get elected? Come on! Why fault me because, as a Christian, I invoke the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God?” My Father in heaven prepared me for that moment, and I wasn’t about to sell out his Son Jesus Christ because of what people might say. I’m a minister of the gospel. If you don’t want me mentioning the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, don’t invite me. That’s just the way I feel.”

  Billy Graham made pointedly Christian statements and led Trinitarian prayers in public for decades without stirring much notice, but Billy Graham was an icon, and he achieved iconic status when America was a far less diverse nation than at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Franklin’s form of insistent Evangelicalism has kept him from assuming his father’s mantle as Chaplain to the Nation. Though seen as a major spokesman for Evangelical Christianity, Franklin recognizes that at such occasions as the Columbine memorial service and the inauguration, he served as a stand-in for his incapacitated father, and he professed not to care about assuming the role of the People’s Pastor. “That is not something I want to do,” he said. “If the President asked, I would go to something, but I don’t see myself being the kind of figure my father was. This is not a role I want. I have enough roles right now. Managing Samaritan’s Purse and BGEA is enough.” Franklin did, however, make a quick round trip to Philadelphia during Amsterdam 2000 just to give the closing prayer on opening night of the Republican National Convention. (The official convention website, incidentally, posted the text of his prayer but did not include the closing line, “We ask this tonight in the precious name of thy Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.”)

  Russ Busby expressed what seemed to be the emerging assessment of Franklin’s fitness for the challenging position he inherited. “God prepares new people for new times,” he said, “and I think he has prepared Franklin. After being around him for many years and traveling with him and being in all of his meetings in the last three or four years, I have seen God working in his life. No one can replace Mr. Graham. Franklin is different from his father, so a few things will be different. That’s what causes all of us to get a little apprehensive. But Franklin has a heart for God, and it shows. And the more you are around him and hear his message and talk to people and see him out with Samaritan’s Purse—really down with the people, wanting to help, so that ultimately he can present God’s love to them through Jesus Christ—you can see that he is real.”

  Franklin’s standing with long-term BGEA supporters has doubtless been enhanced by his increasing success as an evangelist, in the United States and internationally. Although his festivals in the U.S. have not matched those of his father’s crusades, they have typically attracted tens of thousands in cities such as Mobile, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Norfolk. Far larger crowds have flocked to his meetings in other countries, with aggregate attendance of 71,000 in Montevideo, Uruguay; 76,000 in Timisoara, Romania; 93,000 in Moldova in 2005; 112,000 in Villahermosa, Mexico; 186,000 in Ecuador in 2006; 183,000 in Taipei; and 317,600 in Manila. And in 2008, Franklin obtained permission to visit Pyongyang, North Korea, where he met with both religious and political leaders and preached in one of the city’s two Protestant churches. Such results reassure those who may have feared that Franklin’s commitment to Samaritan’s Purse might cause him to neglect the public evangelism that was the heart of his father’s ministry. And those taking an even longer view are surely heartened by the knowledge that Frankli
n’s oldest son, Will—a pastor in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—has laid claim to the family mantle. In 2006, Will held his first large “Celebration” in the U.S. in Gastonia, N.C. (He had previously held a similar mission in Barrie, Ontario, in 2004.) He preached to overflow crowds and saw more than 300 people respond to the invitation. Fittingly, as a sign of patriarchal blessing, his choir leader for the event was Cliff Barrows. Will seasoned quickly, leading successful evangelistic outreaches in several states and in South America, Australia, and India. By 2013, he was a full-fledged BGEA Associate Evangelist and Executive Director of the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove.

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  “Having Faithful Children”

  *Franklin Graham’s emergence as a respected evangelist and Christian leader surprised many who had watched him grow up. Middle sister Anne Morrow also seemed an unlikely candidate for public ministry, not because she ever displayed a wild streak, but because she professed to be terrified of speaking to any sort of audience and, more importantly, because she had been groomed to be a Southern Christian Woman in the Southern Baptist Church.

  After marrying Danny Lotz when she was eighteen, with the expectation of following her mother’s example as a full-time wife and mother, Anne went through years of infertility and miscarriages before finally giving birth to three children, a son and two daughters. Instead of feeling fulfilled, she felt “immersed in small talk and small toys and small clothes and small, sticky fingerprints. . . . I felt trapped. . . . My whole life was small.” She struggled through bouts of depression and guilt over feelings of inadequacy. Trying to fathom how her own mother had maintained such a relentlessly positive disposition while spending much of her life as essentially a single mother of five, Anne recalled the many times she had gone into Ruth’s room and found her with an open Bible on her lap or kneeling in prayer by the side of her bed. “My mother raised five of us, and I never saw her lose her temper. And I knew she drew that kind of strength from her time in Scripture and her time in prayer, and I wasn’t doing that.”

  Finally, in 1976, to meet her need for intellectual stimulation and spiritual nourishment, Anne organized a Bible class for women, using guidelines furnished by an international organization called Bible Study Fellowship. She didn’t realize when she filled out an application for the program that she was expected to become the teacher. Hundreds of women signed up, probably assuming that Billy Graham’s daughter was bound to be an experienced instructor. “They didn’t know I couldn’t teach,” she said. “I’d never taught Sunday school or anything in my life. It was totally contrary to my personality. Surely God wouldn’t call me outside of my personality—yet he did! He called me to do something I didn’t have a clue that I had a gift for.”

  Anne admits that her parents had mixed feelings about her undertaking such a demanding role. “It wasn’t so much my daddy,” she said, “as my mother. Her call in life was to stay at home and raise us, to free up Daddy to do what he has done, and I think in her mind she transferred that to a Christian woman’s role—a Christian wife stays at home and raises the children and serves the husband, so he can be free to serve the Lord in whatever capacity. That was her mind-set, even though she had a mother who was very strong, who ran the nurses clinic in China and did a lot outside the home. I think Mother felt I had to devote all my time to raising my children, cleaning and cooking and that kind of thing, because that’s what she had done.” That changed within the first year, after Billy and Ruth showed up at the class unannounced as a birthday surprise for Anne. “I didn’t know they were coming until I stood up in class that day and looked out and there they were. I don’t like surprises like that, but as a result, Mother was able to see me in a normal week, to see that my children were happy and well behaved, my house was clean, and I had a wonderful meal on the table. She and Daddy were thrilled at the class itself as they saw 500 women with their Bibles opened, taking notes, and they saw the seriousness of the commitment. They just sensed God’s presence in that place. And just like that, their attitude totally changed and they knew this was of God. I can’t tell you how supportive they were after that.”

  The classes were nondenominational and included women from approximately 120 churches, but they met at the Hayes Barton Baptist Church, Anne’s home church. After nine years of sustained success, church leaders asked her to take her classes elsewhere. While acknowledging that “there were other things going on, swirling around underneath, as is usually the case,” she felt the primary reason for the church’s action was her strong view of biblical inerrancy. Since the late 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention has been embroiled in controversy between a hard-line conservative faction that insists that the Bible is divinely inspired, even to the precise words in the original manuscripts (which no longer exist), and entirely free of error, and a more moderate faction that allows for somewhat greater latitude in interpretation. “I do believe with all my heart that the Scriptures are true,” Anne explained. The Hayes Barton church, she said, was “aligned with that side of the convention that takes a more liberal view. I think because they knew how I felt, they believed I would be aligned with the more conservative side of the convention, and they didn’t want that identification.”

  Scarcely missing a beat, Anne moved her class—and her church membership—to Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh and continued to teach the class there until 1988. At that point, her reputation as a speaker had generated so many invitations that she felt she could no longer continue the task of teaching the class and “discipling” the sixty-five assistant teachers who led the discussion groups. “It was like pastoring a church,” she said. She also knew the class could continue without her. The Providence class continues at full strength—Bible Study Fellowship insists on a limit of 500 women—and has spawned several more classes of similar size in Raleigh.

  Freed from the class, Anne founded AnGeL ministries, using her initials as pillars and filling in with her view of angels. “Angels in the Bible,” she explained, “were messengers of God, and they went where God sent them and gave the message He put on their heart. I felt that describes what I do.” The prime message on Anne Lotz’s heart is the need for revival in the churches, even in the South, even in a city where thousands of women engage in regular Bible study.

  “Many people still go to church in the South,” Anne acknowledged, “unlike Seattle and some of these other places, but I feel like a lot of it is cultural. On Sunday, you go to church. That’s where you meet your friends, dress up, and maybe have a special lunch afterwards. A lot of your social life is rooted in the church. It is just part of the way we live in the South. Yet many people sitting in church, going through all the ceremonies and traditions and rituals, don’t have a personal relationship with God. I get frustrated even with professing Christians. They add Jesus to their lives, but when it comes to a choice and they would have to give up something—whether it is vacation time, time with their families, a social event, or a club membership, or even a friendship—they don’t choose to put Christ first. He’s not that important to them. And that’s why we’re not passing our faith on to the next generation, because if you treat Jesus as if He’s not important enough to make a sacrifice for, your kids—I don’t care what you teach them—pick up on that and it’s not only as if He’s not important; it’s as if He doesn’t even exist.

  “I think our culture across the board is deteriorating morally and spiritually. We can point our finger at the politicians and the media, but I would point my finger at church. If we had kept our focus and were transmitting real faith in Christ, if He were preeminent in every person’s life who professes to be a Christian, so that we live only for Him and He dictates what we think, what we see, where we go, what we do, I don’t think our country would be in the shape it is in. In [II Chronicles 7:14], God promised Solomon that when things are not going right in your country, ‘If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray a
nd seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sins and will heal their land.’ So the believer’s faith and relationship with God directly impacts the land. But even if it makes no impact on America, I feel like the church needs to be what God has called us to be. I believe God has called me to do whatever I can to help professing Christians refocus on the person of Jesus Christ and His preeminence in their lives.”

  As her reputation grew, Anne had many opportunities to speak at churches, retreats, and conferences, but grew frustrated that her call for revival was often lost amid the clutter of announcements and business sessions. “There were times when I thought revival could have broken out,” she recalled, “but it wasn’t on the program.” AnGeL Ministries gave her a greater opportunity to control both the content and the context of her presentations. To reduce distractions, she developed a format of two-day revival meetings, primarily but not exclusively for women, usually scheduled for a Friday evening and an all-day session on Saturday. (Still influenced by her mother’s example, she makes a point of being at home on Sunday, to attend church and cook Sunday dinner.) She is often joined by other noted Evangelical women teachers such as Kay Arthur and Jill Briscoe, but the centerpiece of her programs are three hour-long messages on the theme “Just Give Me Jesus.” Reminiscent of her father’s crusades, the revivals are followed by an eight-week Bible study taught in local churches. Also reminiscent of her father, she said she expects to see real revival as a product of her meetings. “It will be characterized by repentance of sin growing out of a deep conviction of sin . . . , by a recommitment to Jesus as Lord and Savior . . . , by a recommitment to the word of God, [and] to obeying God’s word. When revival comes, it’s not just for a weekend. It’s a lifetime commitment.”