Accepting the Graham mantle

No doubt about it. Billy Graham—evangelist, preacher, media personality, adviser to presidents—transformed the landscape of contemporary Christianity.

I saw him often on television, but sadly never got to meet him or join an audience to hear him preach. However, my wife graduated from Wheaton College, Illinois (Graham’s alma mater), and I have enjoyed walking by the Billy Graham Center on the south side of the beautiful College Avenue campus.

The Center was opened in 1981 and has become the main location for many of Wheaton’s bible and theology classes, as well as the graduate school's main headquarters. As Eliza Griswold observed in the The New Yorker, Graham was not a progressive, but he fought against cultural strictures and made room for a broad swath of political and religious views (February 22, 2018).

For me, no one offered more meaningful insight into Graham's legacy than a hastily assembled tribute from one of Christianity Today’s editors at large, Philip Yancey, whose own books have sold more than 14 million copies worldwide (including What’s So Amazing About Grace?):

“Graham,” he wrote, “provided an important stage in maturity for those committed to planting settlements of the kingdom of God in a field full of tares. Now that he has gone, a giant question mark looms over us: Can we take up his mantle and move forward in the same spirit?"

Succinct and challenging words from Yancey, I’d say, and probably what Graham would have asked of us. 

The magazine Graham founded and shepherded, Christianity Today, notes that as the years passed, his list of doctrinal deal-breakers got shorter. He kept practicing his simple, nonsectarian call to faith yet without much fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, and always to the gentle strains of "Just As I Am," which had become his signature anthem and the title of his 1997 autobiography.

The hymn was written in 1835 by a Briton, Charlotte Elliott, who had convinced herself that physical disabilities had left her nothing to offer God at midlife. Apparently, Elliott was struck by the words of a minister who asked whether she had truly given her heart to Christ. The question at first bothered Elliott, but after some days she explained that she wanted to serve God but didn't know how to go about it. The minister replied, "Just come to him as you are."

The hymn was first published in 1841 and then blended with its now familiar tune in 1849 by American William Bradbury. It soon soared in popularity in 19th-century evangelical revivals in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Every day I’m grateful to be discovering that there are many areas and ways in which we can respond to Yancey’s call to spread Graham’s message without for a moment neglecting our own convictions or church connections, or overlooking the contribution that young people can make.

Yancey pointed out during an interview with me at a Vision New England conference in Boston some years ago that young people are still forming their approach to life and its problems, and the power, especially of grace, strikes a chord with them, so they say, “That's the spirit I want.”

“I love the vibrancy of young people,” added Yancey. “I suspect we all want to affect them early so that they learn to channel that natural passion in a gracious way.”

He also shared with me some thoughts on the role of prayer in whatever form our outreach takes.

"Prayer for me—not just in relation to my writing but to my life in general—is a process of handing worries, anxieties, angers, over to God. Putting them in His hands, and freeing myself to be much more the kind of spokesman that I think He wants me to be.”

To which, I guess, Billy Graham would have responded with a hearty “Amen!”