Resources for Teachers and Students on Billy Graham

Prepare: Billy Graham is a Christian evangelist, best known for his large-scale "crusades" conducted in sports stadiums such as the Rose Bowl. He presides over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, an international organization with annual revenues of over $100 million. His official biography can be viewed on the website.

Read: Billy Graham's Architects of Peace essay, excerpted from the book, Day by Day with Billy Graham, focuses on an alternative definition of peace.

Explore: The Billy Graham Center of Wheaton College exists to "stimulate global evangelism." According to an article written by Lon Allison, the center's director, the way to global peace is through individual transformation, since war is the normal nature of things. To discover a distinctly evangelical approach to peace, visit the center's website.

Write: In his Architects of Peace essay, Billy Graham states that peace "is a spiritual reality in a human heart which has come into vital contact with the infinite God." Is this true? Are people with strong religious convictions more likely to value peace than persons who experience no "vital contact" with God? Should peace mean different things to the adherents of different religious traditions? Write a three-to-five page theological reflection on Graham's definition of peace. If possible, create a dialectic between Graham's definition and one that you find within another religious tradition.

Extend: Many US presidents have sought the counsel of Billy Graham, and he has met with every president since Harry Truman. At a taped meeting with Richard Nixon in 1972, however, Graham expressed concerns that have been interpreted as being anti-Semitic. He has apologized for those remarks on at least two occasions, as is reported in the BBC News archives.

Additional Resource: One of Billy Graham's many projects was the founding of a magazine called "Christianity Today," a highly respected journal within the Christian community. The magazine maintains a free on-line ezine.

Biography of Billy Grahm