Anne explained that the title of her revivals, “Just Give Me Jesus,” arose from “a desperate cry of my own heart.” Interviewed for television by Larry King in May 2000, she ticked off the tribulations she had experienced in recent years—hurricanes, floods, snowstorms that had devastated their property in eastern Carolina; the destruction of her husband’s dental offices by fire; the diagnosis and successful treatment of her son’s cancer; the marriage of all three of her children within an eight-month period; and her parents’ deteriorating health. “I don’t want to be entertained,” she said. “I don’t want visuals or musicals. I don’t want a vacation. I don’t want to quit. I don’t want sympathy. The cry of my heart is, ‘Just give me Jesus.’” She has also written a book with that title, structuring it around the Gospel of John. Several other books, some with companion CDs and videos, have sold widely and garnered awards from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. In most of these she moves through the text systematically, expounding on its meaning and applying it to the lives of her audience. In 1998 the International Bible Society honored her, along with her father, with the Golden Word Award for “her special ability to encourage people to search the Scriptures for themselves.”
Interestingly, Anne prefers to call herself a “Biblical Expositor” rather than a preacher, but adds that when she speaks to Southern Baptist pastors, she describes herself as a waitress simply trying to serve the Bread of Life. Yet, when she enters a pulpit or stands on a simple stage, bare except for a thick, rather short wooden cross, precise labels don’t really matter. Anne Lotz can preach.
Like many preachers, especially from the South, Billy Graham usually began his sermons by telling a joke or two, recycling the same jokes for half a century. Anne occasionally allows herself a small ironic chuckle after describing some foolish human behavior, but she is not in the entertainment business, even as a warm-up technique. In a typical session, after a few introductory remarks she consciously focuses attention by saying, “Listen to me!” and launches into a brief set-piece in praise of Jesus. An example:
His office is manifold and His promise is sure.
His life is matchless and His goodness is limitless.
His mercy is enough and His grace is sufficient.
His reign is righteous, His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.
He is indestructible, He is incomprehensible, He is inescapable;
He is invincible, He is irresistible, He is irrefutable, He is indescribable.
I can’t get Him out of my mind and I can’t get Him out of my heart.
I can’t outlive Him and I can’t live without Him.
The Pharisees couldn’t stand Him but they found they couldn’t stop Him.
Satan tried to tempt Him, but found he couldn’t trip Him.
Pilate cross-examined Him but found no fault in Him.
The Romans crucified Him but couldn’t take His life.
Death couldn’t handle Him and the grave couldn’t hold Him.
Just give me Jesus!
(Applause)
Then, during the presentations that last nearly an hour each, she might tell a single story of the non-humorous sermon-illustration genre or refer to some difficult period or episode in her own life, but mostly she draws again and again from biblical texts to note the fallen nature of all humans, the failures of Christians, the inevitability of suffering, and the need for repentance and recommitment. Despite a strong emphasis on the complete sufficiency of God’s grace, made available through Christ’s sacrifice, she does not portray the redeemed life as an easy one. In a pointed reference to the optimistic and materialistic “Name-it-and-claim-it-God-wants-you-to-be-rich” message so popular in some conservative Christian quarters, particularly among Pentecostals, she told a Kansas City audience, “Don’t listen to that health and wealth and prosperity gospel, because it’s a lie. Let me tell you something: Jesus didn’t promise us health and wealth and prosperity. He promised us a cross. And after the cross comes the resurrection and the glory. But you’ve got to deny yourself and take up the cross and follow him.”
Anne speaks in a direct, intense, driving style that, though lacking much variety in tone or pace and practically free of self-conscious dramatic technique, is nonetheless quite arresting. She is a serious woman with a serious message, and she imparts that seriousness to her listeners. Renowned preaching expert Stephen Olford, who directed a school for evangelists in Memphis and had also been something of a mentor to Anne before his death in 2004, said of her rhetorical style, “In a day of superficiality, in a day when so much preaching is tickling people’s ears—she eschews all that. She has something to say. It’s solid. It’s biblical. It’s a no-nonsense presentation. That’s what makes her attractive. . . . She has a tremendous gift of communication, and a dignity and presence which is most impressive.” Other notable observers have agreed. Billy Graham was often quoted as calling her “the best preacher in the family,” and Time magazine agreed that she had “inherited the greatest share of Billy’s gift.” With no trace of sibling rivalry, brother Franklin has described her as “an anointed, powerful speaker” who is “the best in the country, or anywhere in the world for that matter, at what she does.”
Addressing the inevitable comparisons to her father and brother, Anne observed that “we’re on the same team, but our gifts are different. . . . Franklin and Daddy are like the obstetrician; they bring the baby into the world. We at AnGeL Ministries are like the pediatrician; we help the baby grow up.” Although she offers an invitation at her revivals, Anne aims her message mainly at people who already profess to be Christians, for she sees her mission as a continuation of the work of evangelists, who seek to bring people to Christ for the first time. She sees her role as supporting people after they are converted and and restoring them to active faith and commitment when they have drifted away. On occasion, however, she is quite willing to assume the role of evangelist. Invited to speak at the Millennium World Summit for Religious and Spiritual Leaders at the General Assembly of the United Nations, she made no effort to note the commonalities among world religions, but preached a brief sermon on John 3:16, observing afterward that “I did my best in seven and a half minutes to present the gospel as clearly as I knew how.”
Many conservative Christians are far less concerned with the distinctions between an evangelist, an expositor, and a preacher than between that most basic of human distinctions: male and female. Even among those who have wholeheartedly supported her father’s ministry and agree completely with the aim and content of Anne’s revival message, opposition to a woman in the pulpit is widespread. Anne encountered a striking manifestation of this attitude in the late 1980s when she addressed a pastors’ conference. Although she has referred to this frequently, she declines to identify the organization, except to say that it was not a Southern Baptist event, but regional and nondenominational. “I was the only woman on the program for the convention. I was always afraid to stand in the pulpit before a large group, but it never crossed my mind to be afraid because there were men in the audience. I guess that’s how naive I was. I was astounded when I stood up and looked out and saw that some of them had just turned their chairs around and put their backs to me. I don’t know how many did that, but there were enough that it caught my attention. Today, I can still see them in my mind’s eye. I finished the message, but it terrified me. I had an experience right after that in a much smaller group, in a totally different region of the country, with another group of pastors. They didn’t say anything or do anything, but when I stood up, it was like a glass wall, and my voice got softer and softer until they turned up the microphone full force, and they still had trouble hearing. I was just shutting down. I could just feel the hostility. But I’m glad I had those experiences, because I needed to get on my face before God and find out what He was saying to me. My concern was that—because these were pastors and men of God, men who knew the Scriptures—in my zeal to serve the Lord I was serving Him outside of w
hat He had expressly commanded in His word. I didn’t want to be in ministry that contradicted what God had said. And as I knelt before God and prayed that through—it wasn’t quick; it was a process—I feel like He clarified it for me in such a way that my confidence is unshaken.”
The key, Anne said, was the story of Mary Magdalene. “After the resurrection of Christ, He appeared first to the women, and Mary Magdalene was among them. He told her and these other women, ‘I want you to go back to Jerusalem and tell My disciples—eleven men—what you have experienced today, that you have seen Me and have had an experience with the risen Christ. And I want you to tell them to meet Me up in Galilee.’ So He was telling those women to do two things: (1) to share their personal testimony as to who Jesus was in their lives, and (2) to give out His words to the disciples. I felt like God was letting me know that He has commissioned women and that commission has never changed, that we are commissioned just like anybody else to be ready ‘in season and out of season’ to share a word of personal testimony as to who Jesus is and what He means to us—our experience of the risen Christ. When people have a problem with women in ministry, they need to take it up with Jesus, because He is the one who put it there.” That sharing, she continued, can be with one’s children or neighbors, but it can also include “a more formal presentation from the pulpit.”
As for the pivotal verse in the dispute over women preachers, I Timothy 2:12—“I permit not a woman to teach or have authority over a man”—Anne is convinced that the emphasis is on “authority,” not teaching. Unlike some women, including Southern Baptist women, she feels it would be improper for her to be a senior pastor, with authority over men in a church. “That has nothing to do with just presenting the word from the pulpit when I am invited,” she insists. “The authority that I speak with has nothing to do with my position. I’m not a scholar. I don’t know Greek and Hebrew. It is the authority of God’s Word. It is the authority of the Holy Spirit Himself as He speaks through us to our hearts. It has nothing to do with my having authority over my audience. I know He has called me, and I know He has told me that the audience is not my concern, that He will put into that audience whom He wants to put there, whether they are men or women or young or old or Americans or Africans or Russians. The audience is His responsibility. My responsibility is to be faithful to the message He has put on my heart.”
Anne expressed rueful amusement at the ways some church leaders have tried to deal with the issue. “I’ve spoken in church sanctuaries where I’m not allowed in the pulpit. They will put a podium down on the platform or on the floor. That doesn’t bother me—in fact, I’ve gotten to where I prefer nothing at all, but just stand in front of the audience without any barrier—but I don’t see any scriptural basis for that.” Referring to the television program 60 Minutes, which had aired a segment about her a few weeks earlier that had mentioned the chair-turning incident, she said, “When the world looks at something like that, . . . they immediately spot the hypocrisy and inconsistency, and then they just throw out the baby with the bath water. And they miss the message of the church that is true, the gospel that should be preeminent in our teaching and our presentation and the way we live. They miss that because they see this prejudice and hypocrisy and they just don’t get it. And I don’t get it either. I don’t want to be in anybody’s pulpit or podium. I just want lives changed. They have no problem if I am sitting on a plane and sharing the gospel with a man next to me. Why do they have a problem with my sharing the gospel in an arena when men are in the audience? Where does the Bible say I can do it with one, but I can’t do with 10,000? They have no answer for me on that.”
Resistance has clearly diminished. In the summer of 2000 Anne became the first woman ever to address a plenary session at the 125-year-old Keswick Bible Conference in England, where she not only spoke but also shared the program for an entire week with John Stott, one of England’s most prominent clerics and theologians. The male leaders at Keswick, she said, “couldn’t have been more supportive or affirming. It was almost as if they were my big brothers and wanted to encourage me and support me and promote me. It was precious. I’ve felt that at Amsterdam and a lot of places I have been. And it has been the sweetest thing to have my mother and daddy and both of my brothers and both of my sisters totally supportive, without blinking. That has been really special.”
The Keswick appearance led to an invitation to do a leadership retreat for Operation Mobilization, an Evangelical mission organization based in the Netherlands. “I think [resistance] has softened,” Anne said. “Eastern Europe might still have a problem with this, and any Arab country, but I have been all through South America and Central America, where men are so macho, and have been so warmly received. I don’t want women to assert themselves and lord it over others in the church out of a prideful attitude. But I wouldn’t want a man to do that, either. Some denominations out there are struggling with this, and I just pray that it will balance out and the leadership would look at it in the light of what God’s Word actually says and not just in the way they were raised to believe or [from] some kind of cultural prejudice.”
Anne acknowledged that position statements by her own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, had exacerbated tensions over this issue. In 1998 the SBC had drawn widespread attention by its instruction to women “to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” Then, at its annual convention in Orlando, Florida, in June 2000, another clause was added to the “Baptist Faith and Message,” stipulating that “while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Of this, Anne said, “I think a lot of pastors took that statement—even though that’s not what it says—as a reason to deny women any position in ministry, unless it’s in the nursery or with a woman’s group. I think that stirred up some hostility that wasn’t there before, or maybe it was just sort of dormant. The line was much fuzzier, but now it’s drawn, and the way many people are drawing it, I don’t think it’s biblical.” She attributes such actions as a reaction to the feminist movement. “I think there are women in ministry,” she observed, “who, like the feminists, are trying to assert themselves and take a role in the church that is not really Spirit-led but [stems from] pride. That, coupled with the atmosphere in our country about women—women’s rights, women’s positions, that sort of thing—[the pastors] feel the world may be creeping into the church. But when there is an issue like that, we can’t react on the basis of how we feel. We have to take it back to Scripture, and some of their positions have no basis in Scripture at all. I think it is just coming out of their own prejudice.”
At its 2001 convention, the SBC took an additional step, declaring women ineligible for future ordination, though it did not insist that Southern Baptist women who had already been ordained renounce their status. Anne has expressed some uncertainty over whether women should be eligible for ordination, but considers it irrelevant in her own case. “To me, to be ordained means that you can marry, bury, and baptize. That is not something that I aspire to at all. I have no desire to be pastor of a church. I feel like that would almost limit what God has called me to do. I believe God has forbidden me to be ordained. But,” she has conceded, “if another godly woman searches the Scriptures and believes God wants her to be ordained and to be a pastor, that is between her and God. I respect her view.”
As her parents neared the end of their remarkable lives, Anne reflected on the influence they had exerted on her. “I was raised primarily by my mother,” she told one interviewer, but added, “Although [my father] was gone for months at a time, he was adored. I believe he’s been a biblical father in that by living his life he has passed on the reality of his faith and taught us about God. It wasn’t just the things that he said that impacted us, but the way he lived and stayed faithful to his call. To me, that’s the best a father can do. I love, honor, and respect
him.” She speculated that her father’s prolonged absences might even have had a positive spiritual effect on her. “Because he wasn’t there,” she explained, “I developed a relationship with God that I may not have had with a more normal relationship with my father. I may have looked to my earthly father to meet my needs, or depended on him to fill the voids in my life. I didn’t have that, so I looked to God for those things. And God has been my father in the most precious ways, which I wouldn’t trade for anything. I thank God for the family that He gave me.”
Ned (Nelson Edman), the youngest of the five Graham siblings, still runs East Gates Ministries International, which has been deeply involved in the publication and distribution of Bibles in China as well as supporting the construction of churches, training of ministers, and equipping churches to provide Christian education for children in that country’s restrictive atmosphere. Following his father’s example, Ned has sought to work within the confines of Chinese law rather than engage in Bible smuggling or other activities that might antagonize authorities and cause problems for Chinese Christians. Also like his father, he has been criticized by Christian groups that feel he is not being sufficiently critical of a regime that closely regulates religious behavior and uses forced abortions and compulsory sterilization to restrict population growth.
More severe criticism has stemmed from difficulties in Ned’s personal life. During the mid–1990s the stresses inherent in his ministry, tension with a key member of his board, and an increasingly troubled marriage led him first to take refuge in alcohol and then to enter a holistic recovery program that he says not only helped him gain control over alcohol abuse but greatly improved his general health and vitality. After returning to his post at East Gates, he and Carol, his wife of nineteen years, agreed to seek individual and joint counseling to heal their marriage. But in October 1998, as he arrived at the Seattle airport from a trip to China, she had him served with divorce papers accusing him of a variety of misbehaviors. He categorically denies most of them, characterizing them as inventions of an aggressive lawyer who was counting on him and his family to provide a generous settlement to avoid public embarrassment. He did, however, acknowledge that the marriage had long been a hollow shell. The divorce was handled through mediation, and records of the proceedings were sealed. Ned and Carol were awarded joint custody of their two sons.
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