Billy Graham: The Boy Who Hid in the Choir

In the autumn of 1934, on the edge of Charlotte, North Carolina, large crowds sat on rough benches inside a huge temporary building made of raw timber. At the front, a preacher with a fierce voice was pointing his finger into the audience as he named sins.

Somewhere among the benches sat a tall, skinny farm boy who did not want to be there, or at least did not want to be pointed at. He was fifteen, about to turn sixteen. His name was Billy Frank Graham.

Billy later admitted that he had become convinced the preacher was talking about him. So he came up with a plan. He and a friend, Grady Wilson, volunteered to join the choir, which sat on the platform behind the preacher. Neither of them, Billy said, could sing much. But from behind the preacher’s back, at least, the finger could not find him.

The plan did not work. Within a few weeks, the boy hiding in the choir would walk down to the front of that building in front of everyone. It was the moment he always pointed back to as the start of his Christian life. Decades later, he would stand in stadiums on every inhabited continent and invite other people to walk forward just as he had.

But first: the cows.

Milk Before Dawn

William Franklin Graham Jr. was born on 7 November 1918, a few days before the end of the First World War, on his family’s dairy farm just outside Charlotte, a growing city in the American South. He was the eldest of four children. His father, Frank, and his mother, Morrow, ran a dairy herd, and the work never stopped. Billy got up very early to help milk the cows before school, and again in the evening. He knew the smell of the barn, the weight of the milk cans, the cold of winter mornings in the dark.

The Grahams were church people. They belonged to a small, strict denomination, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, where the services were serious and the singing was mostly psalms. Billy’s mother had him learn the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a long set of questions and answers about the Christian faith. He went to church every week. He knew the words. If you had asked him, he would have said he was a Christian.

What he cared about, though, was baseball. He was tall and long-armed, and he dreamed of becoming a professional player. In his memoirs he recalled, as one of the great thrills of his boyhood, shaking the hand of Babe Ruth, the most famous baseball player in America, when Ruth came through Charlotte. He liked cars and girls and adventure stories. He was, by his own account, an ordinary, energetic, sometimes mischievous boy and a fairly average student.

The world around the farm was going through hard times. In 1929, when Billy was ten, the American stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. Banks failed across the country, and Frank Graham lost savings he had put in the bank. The dairy kept going, but money was tight, and many families around Charlotte had it much worse. For a teenager in the early 1930s, life was not easy and the future was not obvious.

None of this made Billy think much about God. Religion was the background of his life, like the farm and the family, not something he had ever had to choose for himself.

A Prayer in the Pasture

In May 1934, a group of Christian businessmen from Charlotte asked Frank Graham if they could use a grove on his farm for a day of prayer. They were worried about their city. It seemed to them that the churches were half asleep and that many people had drifted away from God. So they spent a day in the Grahams’ pasture, praying for Charlotte.

According to the story Billy later told, one of those men prayed that God would raise up someone from Charlotte to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. Billy, fifteen, was around the farm that day. He did not know about the prayer at the time. As he remembered it, he saw the men gathered there and wondered, without much interest, what they were doing.

The same men invited a travelling evangelist to hold a series of meetings in Charlotte that autumn. His name was Mordecai Ham.

The Preacher Billy Did Not Want to Hear

Mordecai Ham was a well-known revival preacher from Kentucky, then in his late fifties. He was blunt, dramatic and controversial. He preached hard against drinking, gambling, immorality and hypocrisy, and he did not soften anything. Some of the city’s churches supported him; others did not want anything to do with him.

It also needs saying, honestly, that Ham held and spread ugly prejudices, including conspiracy theories about Jewish people. He was a flawed messenger. Billy Graham’s story is one of many in which God used someone whose faults were real.

The meetings went on for weeks in a large temporary tabernacle. At first Billy refused to go. He had heard that Ham was a fanatic, and he was not interested. Then a man who worked on the Graham farm, Albert McMakin, offered to drive him and a truckload of other young people into town. Billy went.

What he heard surprised him. He had thought of sin as something other people did: drinkers, criminals, people who did not go to church. Ham preached that every person was a sinner before a holy God, including good, church-going ones, and that sin was not mainly about outward behaviour but about a heart turned away from God. Being raised in a Christian home, Billy began to realise, did not make you a Christian.

For the first time, Billy began to feel that the message was personal. That was when he joined the choir to stay out of the line of fire. But he kept going back.

Just As I Am

One night, probably in early November 1934, at the end of Ham’s sermon, the choir began to sing the invitation hymns. Among them were “Just As I Am” and “Almost Persuaded.” People were invited to come to the front as a sign that they were turning to Christ.

Billy went.

He was sixteen, or within days of it; his birthday fell in the same weeks, and accounts do not settle the exact date. Grady Wilson, his choir-hiding friend, went forward the same night. At the front, an older Christian man who knew the family talked with Billy, read the Bible with him, and prayed with him.

What did he actually believe that night? In his autobiography, Just As I Am, Graham described it carefully, and he did not exaggerate. He said he did not have any great emotional experience. There were no tears, no visions. What happened was a decision. He understood that he was a sinner, that Jesus Christ had died on the cross for his sins and risen again, and that he needed to receive Christ personally and commit his life to him, not just keep attending church. He recognised that everything he had been taught as a child was true, but that he had never made it his own. That night, he did.

Years later, the words chosen for his gravestone would include a reference to the verse that sums up what he believed from that night on:

“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.’” (John 14:6)

That night, Billy said, was a beginning, not an ending. In many ways he was still the same boy: he still struggled, still got distracted, still did not know what to do with his life. But something real had happened. He began to read the Bible for himself and to pray. He started to care what God wanted, not only what he wanted.

He had no plan to become a preacher. He thought he might still be a baseball player, or perhaps a farmer like his father.

The Long Road to the 18th Green

The next few years were not a straight line.

In the summer of 1936, after finishing high school, Billy and the Wilson brothers spent months travelling around the Carolinas selling Fuller brushes door to door. He turned out to be a very good salesman. He said later that he sold the brushes because he believed in them; it was a small lesson in the power of conviction.

That autumn he enrolled at Bob Jones College, a very strict Christian college then in Tennessee. It did not suit him. The rules were rigid, he fell ill and felt miserable, and he left after about a semester. It felt like a failure.

In early 1937 he moved to the Florida Bible Institute at Temple Terrace, near Tampa. The school occupied a former hotel and club beside a golf course, with palm trees and the Hillsborough River running nearby. For a farm boy from North Carolina, it was another world. The teachers were warm, and well-known preachers often came to speak. Billy waited tables, caddied on the golf course, and listened.

He also began, nervously, to preach. His first real sermon was given at a small Baptist church in northern Florida around Easter 1937. He had prepared four sermons, and, by his own later account, he got through all four of them in about eight minutes. He practised in odd places: he later remembered preaching out loud to the birds, the alligators and the cypress stumps along the river, working on his delivery with no one to laugh at him.

He also had his heart broken. A girl at the institute whom he hoped to marry ended their relationship and chose another student, one who seemed to have a clearer future. Billy was crushed. He felt he had nothing much to offer anyone.

Through all this, a question kept pressing on him. Was God calling him to preach? He felt it, and he resisted it. He did not think he was clever enough or holy enough, and he was afraid of what it would cost.

The question came to a head one night in 1938. He went walking alone, as he often did, around the golf course in the dark. At the edge of the 18th green, he knelt down, and, as he described it later, he told God that if He wanted him to preach, he would do it. There was no voice from heaven, no flash of light. It was, again, a decision: a young man of nineteen handing over his future, not knowing what it would hold.

He had been a Christian for more than three years. But this was the night, he always said, when he surrendered his life to Christ’s service. In 1939 he was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister.

What Came After

From 1940 to 1943 he studied at Wheaton College, near Chicago, graduating with a degree in anthropology. There he met Ruth Bell, the daughter of American medical missionaries in China, who had grown up there and had once hoped to be a missionary herself in Tibet. Billy was smitten almost at once. Ruth took longer to decide. They married on 13 August 1943 in Montreat, North Carolina, and were married for sixty-three years, until her death in 2007. They had five children.

After the war he worked with Youth for Christ, preaching to young people in North America and across Europe. Then, in 1949, a tent campaign in Los Angeles planned for three weeks stretched to eight, the newspapers took notice, and almost overnight he became famous across the United States.

What followed is hard to take in. Over more than fifty years, Graham held around four hundred crusades, as his meetings were called, in more than 185 countries and territories. His organisation estimates that he preached in person to about 215 million people. He preached for twelve weeks in London in 1954 and for sixteen weeks in New York City in 1957, where Martin Luther King Jr. joined him on the platform to pray. He travelled across Africa in 1960, preaching in countries that were just gaining independence. In 1973 he refused to hold meetings in apartheid South Africa unless they were open to all races, and his meetings in Durban and Johannesburg were among the largest racially mixed public gatherings the country had seen. The same year, in Seoul, South Korea, more than a million people gathered on a single day to hear him. He preached in Japan, the Philippines, India, Hong Kong and across Asia; in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and across Latin America; behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; and even in North Korea. In 1995, from Puerto Rico, his preaching was carried by satellite to audiences across the world.

He was not a perfect man, and he would have been the first to say so. He became too close to American presidents, especially Richard Nixon, and later admitted that he had sometimes crossed the line into politics. Tapes released in 2002 revealed antisemitic remarks he had made in a private conversation with Nixon in 1972; he apologised publicly and without excuses. The gospel he preached was never that good people go to heaven. It was that sinners can be forgiven, and he turned out to need that forgiveness like everyone else.

At the end of every crusade, the choir sang “Just As I Am,” and he invited people to come forward, as he had in a timber tabernacle in Charlotte at sixteen. He died at home in Montreat on 21 February 2018, aged ninety-nine. He was buried in Charlotte, not far from the farm where he had milked the cows, beside Ruth. The words on his grave call him, simply, a “Preacher of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

In Their Own Words

“I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address.”

— Billy Graham, on his own death, a saying he repeated in later life (quoted by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 2018)

Think It Through

1. Billy grew up in church and knew the catechism, yet he said he only became a Christian at sixteen. What is the difference between knowing about Jesus and trusting him for yourself?
2. Billy’s conversion and his call to preach were two separate decisions, more than three years apart. Why might it matter to see them as different things?
3. Both nights, at the front of the tabernacle and on the 18th green, he said he felt no great emotion. How much should feelings matter when you make a decision about God?
4. Mordecai Ham, the preacher God used to reach Billy, had serious faults, and so did Billy. What does that tell you about where the power of the gospel really comes from?

Read More on Ochorus

Billy Graham’s own books are too recent to be in the library, but his author page carries a full biography, from the dairy farm to the stadiums of the world. Graham often borrowed his “changed my address” line from an earlier evangelist, D. L. Moody, whose books The Way to God, Prevailing Prayer and Thoughts for the Quiet Hour you can read here.