c. 1998 Religion News Service
DALLAS _ The heir apparent to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association grinned and tugged on his baseball cap as his older sister lamented her difficulties recalling her hectic speaking schedule.
“I’m trying to remember where the last place was I spoke,“ said Anne Graham Lotz. “You know, I’m taking those herbs that are supposed to help with your memory.” “You’ve already turned 50, right?” said her younger sibling, William Franklin Graham III, his eyes twinkling. “Ought to try a Diet Coke. That’s what I do.” His 50-year-old sister ignored him, recounting a cross-country itinerary that includes training events for adult lay leaders and speeches for young Christians. Like her brother, Lotz is a respected Christian author, teacher and public speaker with her own outreach project, AnGel Ministries. Like his sister, Graham wins praise for preaching the gospel in a way that reaches his own generation.
All those activities keep them on the go. With both promoting new books, that’s even more the case. Recently, brother and sister came together in Dallas, where they were interviewed.
Lotz’s new book, “God’s Story: Finding Meaning For Your Life In Genesis” (Word), helps average believers approach the Bible’s first book as “God’s eyewitness account of Creation.” Written with a poetic, personal style, her book reveals a searching soul with an intense, passionate faith.
“The flashing-red-light warning for you and me is to beware getting so caught up in the way everyone around us is living that we get swept away by the current of wickedness and waste our own lives in a meaningless existence,” she wrote. “In the midst of spiritual dwarfs, we must strive to be giants.” It takes prayer and self-discipline to keep that goal in sight, according to Lotz and Graham. She talked about the importance of daily private devotions; he stressed conveying God’s word in preaching and outreach.
“I think preaching is something God honors and something he blesses,” Graham said. “We’re using his word. It’s not my word. I think people are tired of the overweight preacher in a three-piece suit with slick hair and rings on his fingers and kind of talking down to them. I don’t want to do that.” At 45, Graham operates his own emergency relief agency, Samaritan’s Purse. Headquartered in Boone, N.C., it has an annual budget of nearly $50 million and provides assistance in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and other areas of the world.
Graham writes about others’ faith and his own in his new book,”Living Beyond the Limits”(Thomas Nelson). His faith has taken him into danger-filled, war-torn regions.
Aviation metaphors run through the book.”I love to fly airplanes,” he confessed, “especially the Mitsubishi MU2. The MU2 is known in the aviation industry as `the rice rocket.’ It will get me where I need to go really quick. In the Christian life, just like in a plane, you need a good take-off _ salvation in Jesus Christ. But just as important, you want to be able to fly safely, navigate around the storms, and eventually land at the ultimate destination without crashing.” Among Graham family and friends, Franklin’s youthful exploits are famous. The fourth of Billy and Ruth Bell Graham’s five children, he loved fast cars, his beat-up pick-up and pranks that drove his family nuts. The devilish youngster so taxed his mother that once, in exasperation, she shut him in the trunk of the family’s car en route to a fast-food restaurant after he wouldn’t quit pinching his sisters.”I think Franklin would agree, my mother raised five of us pretty much without daddy,” Lotz recalled. “I had somebody actually say to me that they knew daddy had preached all over the world but they never thought about that he had to leave home to do it. So we were in one sense raised by a single parent.” Today, all five Graham offspring are grown with children of their own. All are Christians involved in outreach.
Gigi Graham Tchividjian, the oldest, who lives in Florida, is an author and speaker. Ruth McIntyre, the third daughter who wrote a Bible storybook for children, is a teacher and speaker. She lives in Virginia and works for Samaritan’s Purse. Ned Graham, the youngest, lives in Washington state and heads East Gates Ministries International, which has distributed 2 million copies of the Bible in China.
Lotz said her own determination to keep seeking God even when he seemed faraway springs from her mother’s stalwart faith and her father’s devoted evangelizing.
“As a girl, I loved the Lord and I loved his word,”she said.”When I drifted from him, I looked back and I could see my mother raising the five of us without a husband present in the home everyday. And I never saw her lose her temper, just completely come unglued. And after being with Franklin all day, you could have had the tendency to lose your temper!” In his 20s, her younger brother said, he turned to Jesus after meeting energetic people “living exhilarating lives without the shallowness that plagued my own.” He began serving on the board of his father’s ministry in 1979.
Three years ago, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which organizes the crusades led by him and his father, elected the younger Graham as its first vice-chairman. That puts him in line to succeed his father as the association’s chairman and CEO. He is expected to take the reins of an evangelical empire with an operating budget of $91 million.
Gradually, the elder Graham, 79, who has Parkinson’s disease, is passing responsibilities to his son. Billy Graham still does several crusades annually, with an upcoming one (Oct. 22-25) in Tampa, Fla. Franklin Graham leads six to 10 crusades each year, speaking in 1998 in Louisiana, Virginia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Australia and Peru.
While he still insists no one will ever fill Billy Graham’s shoes, Franklin Graham’s strength as a preacher is growing. In evangelical and celebrity circles, he cuts an increasingly higher profile.
“I have a little different type style,” he said. “I give the invitation (altar call in his father’s day) at the beginning and the end of the meeting, hoping people will understand what I’m really trying to do. We use music a lot, but then, so did my father. He came out of the big band era.” Graham, married with four children, travels like his dad did, but is rarely gone more than two weeks at a time. He tries to keep his work and family separated.
Her brother’s outreach in countries such as Bosnia amazes Lotz, who noted that he “goes to places nobody else goes to around the world.” Her brother praises his sister’s work, complimenting her dedication and wide following.
Lotz, soft-voiced and naturally shy, said it took her years to learn to speak before crowds. Married to a dentist in Raleigh, N.C., she has three grown children. Her move into public life began with Bible Study Fellowship, a Scripture class she began teaching in 1976. Her first weekly class attracted hundreds of women. She never missed teaching a class for 12 years. Bible Study Fellowship, the program in which she participated, is a worldwide project based in San Antonio.
As their parents age and their contemporaries return to church, both Graham and Lotz are carving niches suited to their gifts. Each has star qualities. Graham’s thick shock of hair and piercing eyes are reminiscent of his dad’s good looks. Lotz, whose style is gentle and authoritative at the same time, has the contagious smile and tanned, long-legged beauty of her mother.
Typical of the individualistic Graham children, they agree on many issues. But they explore, teach and preach about them in different ways.
Graham possesses the fiery preaching style of his father’s early years, stressing that turning to Jesus is the only way to achieve salvation. In sermons, he is critical of errant lifestyles, including homosexuality and declining family values. But his outlook on women in ministry is open-minded.
So is his sister’s. She attends a Southern Baptist congregation in Raleigh; he goes to the Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Boone.
Lotz is comfortable preaching, but believes God has “forbidden” her to be ordained and has called her to a different kind of ministry.”I have really some wonderful friends. One of the women who was a mentor to me was an ordained woman in a congregation in California. If other women feel God is leading them to that, I respect what God is leading them to. I don’t think the Scripture is black and white on that.” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS. STORY MAY END END.)
Graham says he has no objections to women in ministry.
“I do think there are problems that come up in a church that probably a man needs to handle. There’s a lot of politics that goes on in churches. Sometimes you just need somebody who can be half-mean, who can be real tough,” Graham said, noting that doesn’t mean women are too gentle-spirited to preach or pastor.
Growing up a Graham wasn’t always easy, but being the offspring of the world’s most famous, most traveled evangelist made it interesting. Growing up in the western North Carolina mountain town of Montreat, they endured some of the trials peculiar to the offspring of the famous. Franklin rebelled; Anne married young, had three kids and felt distanced from the certain faith of her childhood.
Both credit the common sense, sound judgment and good parenting of their mother, Ruth Bell Graham, for imparting to them the faith and values they hold so dear.”I knew she drew her strength from spending time in God’s word,” Lotz said. “She had a big flat-top desk with 14 different translations of the Bible laid out. If she had any time during the day, she was back there reading her Bible. At night, I would slip down to her room and find her on her knees in prayer.” Often she asked for help with her kids, the siblings say. Watching Lotz and Franklin Graham spar verbally as adults, it’s easy to imagine that rearing the five Graham youngsters took the skills of a drill sergeant and the patience of a saint.
IR END HOLMES
