Word: grahams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...daredevil traits that Franklin thought he had developed to spite him and had turned them to his own good ends. Not only that, but he had arranged for Franklin to achieve the elusive goal of every great man's son: to find his own place in the world. Billy Graham was the world's best preacher, but he had never piloted a six-seater in search of savable souls nor had an evangelically sound reason for carrying a .38 in an ankle holster. If this had been Franklin Graham's only and final job, he could have happily left...
...moment when the preacher asks the audience to "come forward" and accept Jesus. It is the event's punch line, its consummation: if a preacher is a salesman, it is the clinching handshake; if he is a fisherman, it is the taking in of the net. Billy Graham's nets were always filled to breaking. In 1983 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Franklin Graham's net was empty...
Franklin now claims the urge to preach first came upon him in 1985, watching his father speaking before thousands in Romania, years before the Iron Curtain's rending. John Wesley White remembers differently. White is an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (B.G.E.A.), the corporate entity that includes Billy and all who help him spread the Word; associate evangelists preach crusades in towns too small for Billy. Franklin, newly born again, had given testimony at several of White's revivals, and Billy reportedly took notice. White remembers a conversation one day in the early 1980s: "You know, Franklin...
...Philadelphia, Ohio. After his 36th crusade, in May 1994 in Charleston, West Virginia, his father, having watched him for the first time, hugged him and told him he was proud of him. In September Franklin preached in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the audience was his older sister, Anne Graham Lotz, herself an inspirational speaker and long considered the child who had inherited the greatest share of Billy's gift. Afterward, Lotz told Business North Carolina magazine, she embraced her brother, looked him in the eye, and said, "Franklin, the mantle is passed...
Last Nov. 7, on Billy's birthday, the 32-member B.G.E.A. board announced that it had voted, unanimously, to name William Franklin Graham III vice chair, with direct succession as chair and chief executive officer "should his father ever become incapacitated." The disposition that had seemed assured at the moment of Franklin's birth in 1952 had finally come to pass...