Word: sermonizer
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...Conversion. The pious parents of William Franklin Graham Jr. planted his feet firmly on the path of truth and righteousness. His farmer father once gave him a hiding in church with his broad leather belt for fidgeting during the sermon. The day beer was taken off Prohibition, Billy's father went to town and bought a case. Then, in an awesome atmosphere of ritual sacrifice, he forced Billy and one of his sisters to guzzle bottle after bottle until they were sick. "It was awful," recalls Billy. He has never touched it since...
...preaching practice. Billy began at a Tampa mission for derelicts, drunks and dope addicts. His first church sermon came on Easter evening in 1938, and was a dismal flop. But Billy went on practicing -mostly exhorting the fish and alligators of a nearby swamp to leave their evil ways and be saved. He preached his first real revival at the Baptist Church of East Palatka, Fla. in June 1939. Halfway through the week-long series, word spread that Preacher Graham, nominally a Presbyterian, had never been immersed. One look at the shocked and sour faces before him and Billy...
...most important thing he did at Wheaton was to court his future wife, Ruth McCue Bell, a pretty, vivacious China missionary's daughter (Emily Cavanaugh had in the meantime married her Harvard man). Said he in a recent sermon: "I tell you ... the first time I kissed [my wife], I don't know whether she had any emotion, but I sure did. And when you fall in love with Jesus, you are. going to feel it ... Now if I had married all the girls ... I wanted to marry, the Lord only knows where I would have been tonight...
Before he begins his sermon, he asks the audience to join him in a short prayer. Then he plunges right into his text. During the sermon, he picks up the Bible again and again, swinging it, slamming it. almost literally hurling it at the Devil. Graham has abandoned his early hyperbole in favor of a strictly scriptural message, brought down to earth in everyday language. He has also weeded out the kind of literalness that once led him to deliver drawing-board specifications for heaven, which, he assured his audience (apparently relying on Revelations 21:16), "is 1,600 miles...
...faithful to the salat al-jami, the obligatory Friday service. The devout shutter their shops, rush through a thorough washing, and hurry into the mosque. Clad in dignity and finery, the imam ascends the pulpit, murmurs "salaam alei-kum," recites a text from the Koran, and begins a sermon which rarely lasts more than 20 minutes. So it has been for centuries...