ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512010068
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GUSTAV NIEBUHR THE NEW YORK TIMES
FOR years, a lively conversation could be provoked in some Protestant circles with a question about one man's mortality: After Billy Graham, who?
Anyone who asked knew that the 20th century's most famous evangelist was still preaching well past retirement age. But sooner or later he would have to surrender the stage.
On Nov. 7, his 77th birthday, Graham finally moved to quell the speculation. His organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, named his eldest son, Franklin, to the new post of first vice chairman, designating him as his father's successor should the evangelist choose to step down as chairman and chief executive.
The decision promises continuity for an organization that took in more than $88 million last year, money it used for publishing, broadcasting and staging ``crusades,'' the mass evangelistic rallies that are Graham's trademark.
Franklin Graham, 43, a member of the association's board since 1979, said in a telephone interview from Boston, where he had a speaking engagement, that he ``would make very little to no change'' in the organization. ``I want to focus on evangelism,'' he added. ``That's what this organization does.''
Still, the elevation of the younger Graham - who favors jeans and cowboy boots and likes to relax by taking spins on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle - is emblematic of a broad but gradual change under way among the nation's 40 million evangelical Protestants.
A new generation of leaders is on the rise, a group whose public appeal is often marked by a deliberately informal personal style and an inclination to innovate to win new audiences for an old message.
Evangelicals, said Mark Noll, a professor of history at Wheaton College, gained a heightened level of cultural influence in American life on the shoulders of leaders who reached adulthood in the 1940s, Billy Graham foremost among them. ``Right now, that generation is just about passing,'' he said.
Photographs of Billy Graham from that period show a strikingly self-confident preacher, a man given to dramatic, declaratory gestures, holding his Bible aloft and jabbing an index finger at his audience.
Graham knew his calling early on, becoming a full-time evangelist within five years of his graduation from Florida Bible Institute in 1940. He tasted secular recognition in 1949, courtesy of highly favorable coverage in William Randolph Hearst's newspapers.
In those days, as now, he wore well-tailored suits and soon was mixing easily with presidents, none of which hurt him with his middle-class contemporaries, a generation that valued hard work, liked a good appearance and respected political institutions.
Franklin Graham, by contrast, has built a reputation as a reformed rebel. He tells interviewers about an adolescence marked by smoking, drinking and disdain for school, a period of personal turbulence ended when he became a born-again Christian at age 22.
Some academic observers say his story could resonate well with a generation that grew up in the post-1950s era, with social upheaval, political crises and economic uncertainty.
Through a spokesman, Billy Graham declined a request for an interview. ``It's a contingency plan for corporate succession,'' the spokesman, Larry Ross, said. He added that Billy Graham has no plans to retire, because ``nowhere in the Bible does he see any of God's servants retiring.''
Franklin Graham sounded a similar note. ``I think Daddy at his age still wants to continue to preach, but he realizes that he cannot go on forever and he just wants to make plans for the future.'' That he would succeed his father administratively was something they had discussed in the past, ``but not in any detail,'' he said.
Franklin Graham's rise within the Billy Graham Association was not a foregone conclusion. Last June, when his father collapsed as a result of a bleeding colon during an appearance in Toronto, officials hosting the event called in a Canadian evangelist, although Graham had told an aide that he wanted his son to preach in his place.
Dr. William Martin, a professor of sociology at Rice University, said the incident may have persuaded Billy Graham to settle the succession question. ``As long as this was unsettled, there was a greater chance that parties would form and strengthen themselves,'' said Martin, author of ``A Prophet With Honor'' (William Morrow, 1991), a biography of Billy Graham.
Martin said he thought Franklin Graham already had significant support among the association's directors, because he was seen as a theological conservative who would keep the organization true to his father's design.
In addition, Martin said, Franklin Graham helped his own cause in recent years by becoming a part-time evangelist, after long resisting doing so.
For much of his adult life, Franklin Graham has put his energies into Christian charitable work overseas, as president of Samaritan's Purse and World Medical Mission, which deliver medical supplies and personnel to such places as Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda.
The two organizations have a combined budget of $22 million this year, mostly from contributions, and employ 128 people in Boone, N.C., a small city in the Appalachian Mountains.
Graham lives there, too, up an unmarked gravel road, in a large, but plain house that he shares with his wife, Jane Austin Graham, and three of their four children. The oldest child, William Franklin Graham IV, is a junior at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.
Only in recent years, at the urging of one of his father's associates, has Graham begun to preach publicly like his father. He chose the obscurity of Juneau, Alaska, for his debut in 1989. Currently, he preaches, without pay, at events sponsored by the Billy Graham Association.
``I know when to wear a coat and tie,'' he said. But he added, ``I think our country has changed in the last 20 years. We are a lot more informal as a nation. I want to fit the audience I'm speaking to.''
Last month, he published his autobiography, titled ``Rebel With a Cause: Finally Comfortable Being Graham'' (Thomas Nelson), whose cover shows Graham, sitting on a porch rail, wearing a black leather jacket.
It is a picture, said Dr. Leonard I. Sweet, dean of Drew University Theological Seminary, bound to appeal to an under-45 crowd for whom a certain informality can connote integrity.
In addition, he said, the image of the one-time rebel may have a special appeal with people in their 20s, who have ``been marketed to death,'' and distrust anything they deem inauthentic.
Franklin Graham ``de-converted from Christianity for awhile,'' said Sweet. In terms of his public appeal, he said, ``when he came back in, it was a lot stronger than he ever would have if he had just stayed in it.''
Among some prominent evangelicals Graham's age, however, the image is not entirely unique.
One of his friends, the Rev. Greg Laurie, a Riverside, Calif., pastor, has developed his own mass evangelism events and gained a growing reputation in the process. In an interview last year, sun-burned from a ride on his own motorcycle, Laurie described a rather aimless adolescence made straight by his becoming born again two decades ago.
In a half-filled stadium later that day, he peppered his theologically conservative message with references to music and movie stars (asides that he said earlier he had carefully culled from ``People'' magazine and various television shows to find common ground with his listeners).
Others in this younger generation of evangelicals, cognizant of changing popular tastes, have introduced pop rhythms into religious music to appeal to people raised on rock, and have launched various spiritual support groups to impart a sense of community to middle-class suburbanites eager for just that.
Thus, praise choruses, sacred lyrics set to rock tunes, can now be heard in any number of congregations, among them Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, whose worship services, attracting about 14,000 people a week, have brought its pastor, the Rev. Bill Hybels, national recognition.
Praise music, along with gospel and classic hymns, also plays a prominent role in the stadium-filling gatherings of the Promise Keepers, a religious men's movement that combines inspiration and male bonding, begun by Bill McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach.
But while academic authorities credit people like Hybels and McCartney with influence in contemporary American religion, they nonetheless say that no one now appears likely to achieve the fame and impact of Billy Graham. Not even his son.
In part, that results from far more choices that both religious and secular people have for their leisure time. In the 1950s, Martin said, ``when Billy Graham came to town, it was the biggest thing that anyone could imagine.''
But these days, he said, the very people at the core of Graham's constituency have many religious alternatives to mass evangelism events. They can go to megachurches like Willow Creek; the men can attend a Promise Keepers rally; parents can tune into James Dobson's Focus on the Family radio programs, which blend religion and child psychology; and the politically inclined can join the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson's conservative organization.
``It's important to remember that Billy Graham is not an office that must be filled when someone leaves it,'' Martin said.
Franklin Graham said he knows that. Once he succeeds his father as the Billy Graham Association's chairman and chief executive, he said, he will run the preaching events as a team effort, bringing in men his age to share the work.
``I am not Billy Graham,'' he said. ``I cannot step into his shoes. No one could do it. But can we continue preaching the Gospel? Sure, we can. Can we keep preaching crusades? Sure, we can. People will keep coming to hear.''
LENGTH: Long : 163 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. This picture of Franklin Graham and his father, Billyby CNBGraham, hangs on the wall in Franklin Graham's office. 2. File/1994.
Franklin Graham. color. KEYWORDS: PROFILE