Evangelist Billy Graham leaves the White House
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Billy Graham is remarkably cheerful laboring in the Lord's vineyard, but he is not at peace. Like an exhausted man fighting to keep awake, he must constantly remind himself that in all the feverish adulation amid which he walks, pride is the Devil's best weapon against him. He fights and prays for humility. The team helps. "If the Lord will keep him anointed,'' says Grady Wilson. "I'll keep him humble.'' He needles Billy mercilessly, and practical jokes are standard operating procedure. One team member, noting that the usually hatless Graham had bought himself a new hat in Dallas, filled it with shaving cream and rocked with laughter when Billy put it on. Billy gives as good as he gets. On the ship to London, he emptied Grady's seasickness capsules and filled them with mustard.
When Billy Graham goes home, it is to an eight-room rustic house in Montreat, N.C., where he and his wife Ruth live in unpretentious comfort (Billy tithes his $15,000 a year from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association). The Grahams do their best to keep their four children—Virginia, 9; Anne, 6; Ruth, 3; and William Franklin III, 2—from "hamming it up" for the tourists, who sometimes come in busloads to stare at the house. Virginia is currently trying to learn the Sermon on the Mount by heart, has been promised a bike and $25 if she gets it down pat by Christmas. "I don't think she's going to make it," laughs her father.
Graham often conducts his morning "meditation" in bed, avoids the telephone, and dictates his newspaper columns, radio scripts and sermons half a dozen at a sitting. The spirit of the home is set by pert, pretty Ruth Bell Graham, who still knows the Bible better than her husband and whose quiet good taste has led a friend to call her "half the explanation for Billy Graham." "Not a day goes by," says Ruth, "when I don't ask the Lord for wisdom: how to bring up the children, how to make this suit, how to do this and that. It isn't really mystical . . . It's practical."
The Hungry Heart. Where does Billy Graham go from here? The stock criticism of evangelism is that its conversions are superficial and temporary, that it presents less than the whole Gospel. Graham confronts that with his unprecedented concern for seeing that each of his "baby Christians" turns into a spiritual grownup. The full measure of his success is still to be taken, but in Britain, for instance, pastors everywhere report church attendance and membership up since his dramatic campaign.