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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 can communicate," the father said. "I think he has the gift of evangelism, but I'm not the one to get him to start. Could you do something?" In November 1983 White finally coaxed Franklin out in front of a crowd of 1,000 in Saskatoon. It was a disaster. "You can't be tentative and feeble and be an evangelist," explains White matter-of-factly. "He gave the invitation. And there was nothing. I mean, nothing." Not one of the 1,000 came down. A mortified Franklin told White, "Don't you ever ask me to do that again. I'm not Billy Graham!"
But White did not give up. "I believed in him," he says quietly. "There was great work to do out there, and he was pivotally placed." Franklin, "under duress," tried again in 1989 in Juneau, Alaska. He preached one of his father's favorite sermons, the story of the blind man Bartimaeus, whose sight Jesus restored. The revival's first night was successful, White says, but the second was something more: "They packed the place, drunks and divorces and prostitutes. He gave the invitation, and they poured down. It was a miracle, and he knew it."
From then on Franklin dedicated one-tenth of his time to preaching. He preached in auditoriums and gyms, in towns like Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and New 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."
Between father and son, there are differences in style. If the father is known for the plainness of his preaching--what made him absolutely impossible to ignore was not his turn of phrase or his way with a parable, but his utter, breathtaking conviction--then the son's style is, if anything, even more unadorned. The older man would pace the stage pantherlike, an outsize Bible often waved aloft in the left hand, his right index finger jabbing forward as if to impale Satan against the horizon. The son stands as though his feet were in cement, his posture as unyielding as his message.