When he died yesterday at age 99, Billy Graham, as the world knew him, was one of the titanic figures on the world scene, and he had been so ever since at least 1949. He was born November the 7th, 1918. He died on February the 21st, 2018. Just to state the dates indicates something of the significance of his life, and a life that for so many decades was lived out before the watching world. Billy Graham was one of the titanic figures of American evangelicalism.

As a matter of fact, you cannot talk about evangelicalism in its modern form in 20th-century America, now into the 21st century, without reference to the vision and the impact, the influence of Billy Graham. He was born William Franklin Graham, born to a farmer and his wife in North Carolina. He lived a rather traditional childhood in rural America and he also experienced the tumult of adolescence, describing himself in retrospect as rebellious, though it was a rather quiet and uneventful rebellion.

All that changed when in 1934 he went to a revival meeting, invited by a friend and basically dared to go. The evangelist was one of the best known of the early 20th century, Mordecai Ham was his name and he was himself an innovator. He preached the Gospel, and the teenage Billy Graham heard the Gospel and responded. Not only did he respond to the Gospel, he eventually would respond with a call to ministry and furthermore, would become an evangelist. The best-known evangelist not only of his generation but of the history of the Christian Church. Billy Graham was a fascinating figure.

I knew him not only from watching him on television as a child, but I knew him because he spoke at my inauguration as President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The first time I heard him in person was in 1982 when he came to Southern Seminary where he had a relationship, and he spoke in chapel, and he said to the students then, "You must think about the fact that you are not promised tomorrow." He spoke about ministry and he spoke about preaching in light of eternity and God's judgment. As always, he got right to the point, which is the singular gospel of Jesus Christ.

Billy Graham came to adulthood in the aftermath of what was known as the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in the United States. Liberal theology began to become apparent in mainline northern denominations in the last decades of the 19th century. By the time the 20th century came along, there was full-scale theological liberalism throughout most of the established denominations in the north. This led conservatives to respond the theological liberalism with an affirmation of the fundamentals of the faith. Eventually it became a movement known as Fundamentalism, and in the battle for control of those northern Protestant denominations, in almost every single case one after another, it was the Conservatives who lost and the Liberals who won.

As America entered World War II, it appeared, at least to those in control of the liberal Protestant denominations, particularly in the north, that they were in the driver's seat not only in the leadership of their denominations but the leadership of American culture writ large. They thought they had decisively silenced Orthodox Christianity and they had largely expunged Orthodox ministers from the pulpits of their denomination, especially from the most prestigious and elite pulpits. But when Billy Graham arrived on the scene, he and others perceived the need for a distinctively evangelical, distinctively orthodox form of Protestant Christianity that wasn't mired in what was considered to be the combativeness of American fundamentalism, also its estrangement and disengagement from the culture, but rather would have the mold of engagement.

Billy Graham became one of the singularly most important figures in forging what became known as American evangelicalism. In the late 1940s they described themselves as the New Evangelicals and knew they were in a sense, because they affirmed the classic doctrines of Christianity without compromise, but at the same time they were representing the future, not just a return to something like the cultural conservatism of the 19th century. Billy Graham was himself indispensable even when you look at the genealogy or the pedigree of many of the central institutions of evangelical life. He became the founder of the magazine that was known as Christianity Today. He was the founder, of course, of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and after serving as President of Youth for Christ and serving for a brief time as a college president, Billy Graham was launched on a national and then international ministry of full-time vocational evangelism.

What made Billy Graham such an innovator there in the last part of the 1940s was that he understood the power of a mass crusade. Now, crusades were not new to evangelicalism. During the 19th and well into the 20th century, evangelicalism knew the so-called Sawdust Trail. It knew evangelists who came to town, pitched tents and preached sermons, sometimes for day after day and week after week, during a time when in America you could pitch a tent and put up a pulpit, and people would come. Billy Graham understood the opportunity of magnifying and multiplying the idea of the crusade by going into cities, including most importantly in the year 1949, the city of Los Angeles. There he held a meeting also in a massive tent, but it was bigger than just about anything that had ever been known before, and it drew ever larger crowds. It lasted and it lasted.

Eventually it gained the attention not only of Christians and those brought by Christians to the crusade, but also of the famous publisher William Randolph Hearst who at that point, had an out-sized influence in the entire media environment of the United States of America. William Randolph Hearst knew something new when he saw it, and when he saw Billy Graham, he understood that something distinctively new had arrived on the scene. He famously gave the instruction to his editors, "Puff Graham," and by that he meant, "Give this young man media attention." And thus the nation came to know what was taking place in that 1949 Los Angeles Crusade.

That led other cities to ask Doctor Graham to come and to bring his new Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and to hold a mass crusade there. This led to very historic crusades in cities, including New York City. Billy Graham put together an infectious, even fiery, preaching of the gospel with a very gracious personality. Those who look at the history of rhetoric, not only religious or Christian rhetoric but human rhetoric, point to the fact that Billy Graham was able to speak, and to speak understandably, at a remarkable rate of words. He could speak in gusts that exceeded virtually anything that Americans had heard or had received before. By the first decade of the 21st century, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had estimated that Billy Graham had preached in person to more than 250 million people.