HE DOESN'T HAVE TO TRY VERY HARD TO BE LIKE BILLY GRAHAM

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 16, 1993                   TAG: 9301160087
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: GUSTAV NIEBUHR THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: BOONE, N.C.                                LENGTH: Medium
HE DOESN'T HAVE TO TRY VERY HARD TO BE LIKE BILLY GRAHAM
His last name draws the curious when the Rev. William Franklin Graham III preaches. Up on stage, in arenas in Colorado, Oklahoma or Brazil, his dress tends toward the casual, a polo shirt and jeans. His message, always bedrock evangelical: accept Jesus as savior and be born again.
But his gestures can seem strikingly familiar - pure Billy Graham - when he jabs a forefinger at the crowd, thrusts his Bible forward, or pauses and folds his arms.
For decades, young men on the sawdust circuit have tried to copy the famous Graham, in their hairstyles, their facial expressions, even the way they wear a wristwatch, said the Rev. John Wesley White, a Canadian evangelist and longtime associate of Billy Graham. But this is no imitation, White said, because this man isn't trying. "Franklin is at his best when his genes come out. He is the only authentic, second-generation Billy Graham in the world."
Could the evangelist's 40-year-old son - who has spent his adult life building a career quite apart from his father, and who began public preaching only three years ago - be Billy Graham's successor?
That may not be an idle question.
Last summer, it was revealed that Billy Graham, now 74, has Parkinson's disease. His symptoms - a tremor of the hands, a slight slowing of the gait - have been checked by medication. The evangelist's schedule remains active and he says he has no plans to retire. He will offer prayers at President-elect Bill Clinton's inauguration on Jan. 20.
But speculation about who might take over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which took in $83.7 million in revenue in 1991, goes on.
Some believe the son is a natural for the job. Franklin Graham serves as second vice chairman of the association - the only one of the evangelist's five children on the board. "I don't have a desire to take over," he said. "I do have an interest in what happens to his organization because it carries my name."
If the board asked him to do so in the event of his father's death he would consider it. But, he said, "I cannot do it the same way my father has done it because I am not Billy Graham. It would have to be my own way."
There may be no bigger pair of shoes to fill. In 1954, Graham drew the biggest crowd in London's Trafalgar Square since V-E Day celebrations. Two years ago, he drew his largest North American crowd, an estimated quarter-million, at Manhattan's Central Park. This month, he tops Good Housekeeping magazine's reader poll of the world's 10 most-admired men.
Friends say father and son are close. Franklin speaks of doing "all I can" to help his father. But he has never liked being compared to Billy Graham.
Much of his life, he's been uncomfortably aware that people held high expectations of what a world-famous evangelist's son should be.
For years, he resisted invitations to preach crusades. When he agreed to try it, at the gentle insistence of White, he chose isolated Juneau, Alaska, for his debut. "I think maybe one of the problems was I feared I would screw up and fail and I did not want to fail at something my father had been so successful at."
He continues to preach only because he believes "God wants me to do it."
He runs two Christian relief organizations - Samaritan's Purse and World Medical Mission - that operate in areas riven by civil war and natural disaster. Samaritan's Purse provides food and material assistance, from drilling village wells to shipping boxes of Bibles; World Medical Mission sends doctors on short-term stints in Third World hospitals. The organizations sent blankets to Bosnia, bought mobile homes for Hurricane Andrew's victims and have worked to set up a clinic in Somalia.
They project a combined budget of $13.4 million this year, up from $12.7 million in 1992. Both had a brush with controversy last year, when they were suspended from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), which monitors 715 religious and charitable non-profit organizations.
Based in Herndon, Va., the council was co-founded in 1979 by Billy Graham. Its president, Clarence Reimer, said only that the organizations' boards were not exercising "proper oversight" over operations. He declined to discuss specifics.
In Boone, nestled in the hollows of the lower Appalachians, Graham has chosen a life close to rustic peace and pleasures. Samaritan's Purse and World Medical Mission are housed in a small, wood-framed building in a neighborhood of brick bungalows and unpainted wooden shacks.
Greeting a visitor, Graham wears cowboy boots, jeans, a twill shirt open at the neck. His house, a wooden, two-story structure, sits a mile up a rutted gravel road on 40 acres of hillside. He shares the home with his wife, Jane Austin Graham, and their four children.
Since he turned 40, Graham has come into his own as an evangelist with the talent to succeed his father, in the opinion of White.
Graham is happy running his relief agencies. "I just want to keep doing what I'm doing," he said. "Unless the Lord changes something. He could."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB