As Americans mourned the death of the Rev. Billy Graham on Wednesday, most remembered him as a pastor with the ability to lead thousands to Jesus, take presidents under his wing and console a nation after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But it was in the suburbs of Chicago where he learned how to amplify his voice as a preacher.
It didn’t take long for Graham and the congregation of Western Springs Baptist Church, his first pulpit after graduation from Wheaton College, to conclude he was better suited to preach in stadiums than sanctuaries.
“This is where he got a taste of glory, a taste of fame and the gratification that comes from speaking to huge crowds,” said Grant Wacker, author of “America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation,” a biography of the national icon. “And he got the response he was looking for.”
Wheaton’s president, the Rev. Philip Ryken, said commemorating Graham’s significant contributions to Christian ministry for the many generations born after his heyday would remain a long-term commitment of the flagship evangelical institution.
“I think Billy Graham will be regarded as one of the greatest Christian leaders of the 20th century,” Ryken said, “and that legacy will last a very long time.”
Graham, a native of North Carolina, was already an ordained Southern Baptist pastor and graduate of Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College of Florida) when he sought a liberal arts education and bachelor’s degree at west suburban Wheaton College in 1940.
After hearing the 21-year-old Graham preach in Florida, two members of the Wheaton College board, including the brother of its incoming president, hired Graham as their caddy on a golf course and offered to pay his first year of tuition if he attended the college.
He studied anthropology, which some say expanded his horizons beyond the biblical theology training he already had received.
“It did make him aware in new ways of how societies work, how cultural values are shaped, things he could draw upon, especially as he traveled the world,” said Edith Blumhofer, a professor of history at Wheaton College.
But even more important than the college curriculum were the people he met and walked alongside for decades to come, she said, including his future wife, Ruth Bell, a fellow student and daughter of Presbyterian missionaries.
It wasn’t until 1941, that Graham, then a 23-year-old college sophomore, took his place before a congregation. The Wheaton College president at the time, V. Raymond Edman, recommended that Graham replace him in the pulpit of Wheaton’s United Gospel Tabernacle.
The west suburban campus ended up becoming the laboratory where Graham learned to galvanize students, regardless of Christian tradition or denomination, to work for a common cause. He applied the same ecumenical ethos to his later ministry.
“It was where he acquired managerial skills for inspiring and leading organizations and expressing his ministry, not only by preaching but through other people,” said Robert Shuster, who oversees the Billy Graham Center Archives housed at Wheaton.
In 1943, after Graham and Bell graduated from Wheaton and married, he took a job as pastor of Western Springs Baptist Church. But both Graham and the congregation quickly figured out that the pastor didn’t belong in a stationary pulpit.
“He was not preaching what a pastor would normally preach to a church audience,” said one of Graham’s former classmates, the late Glyn Evans, in an interview with Shuster for the archive several years ago.
“Most pastors preach sermons that are uplifting and designed to enable the Christians to grow deeper in their Christian faith,” Evans said. “But when Billy preached, it was as if he was preaching to a group of sinners that didn’t know the way, that were looking for the way. And he was there to tell them the way.”
It was during his time at Western Springs that Graham walked into Moody Radio’s flagship station in Chicago to meet the gospel singer George Beverly Shea, who was involved with the show “Hymns From the Chapel.” He invited Shea to help him launch his own Sunday late-night radio show titled “Songs in the Night.”
The show “lasted for 20 years and ended up being heard by people all over the country,” said the Rev. Dean Monkemeier, senior pastor of Western Springs Baptist, now called The Village Church.
“How God used Billy Graham was remarkable. We’ve lost someone of that generation, and I don’t think we have anyone like that anymore,” Monkemeier added.
Shea went on to serve as the soloist of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association for more than 60 years.
In addition to radio, Graham became a master of media on multiple platforms. In 1951, he started making movies through World Wide Pictures, a motion picture division of his ministry.
In 1956, he founded Christianity Today magazine, now based in Carol Stream, to provide an evangelical voice that didn’t lambaste fundamentalism. And in 1957, he launched a nationwide television broadcast on ABC. He later used satellite broadcasts to deliver his messages around the world.
Graham served his alma mater as a trustee from 1963 to 1990. In 1980, the Billy Graham Center opened on Wheaton’s campus. Ryken, a high school student then, recalls how Graham preached to a crowd on campus the day of the dedication.
“I was there that day, sitting on a picnic blanket and listening to Dr. Graham preach the gospel he loved to proclaim — the good news of forgiveness for sin and the free gift of eternal life through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Ryken said. “Like countless others who heard Billy Graham preach, I recommitted my life to Christ.”
On Wednesday morning, Maila Kue, a graduate student from Detroit, watched a crew set up photos of Graham in the Wheaton College museum that bears his name. (A special exhibit on his life is set to open Friday.) Earlier that day, she had met someone who had accepted Jesus as his savior at one of Graham’s crusades.
“That was surreal for me,” said Kue, 26. “This is not just something in a book. This is someone whose life was changed by Billy Graham.”