American evangelist William Franklin Graham Jr. (1918-2018), arguably the most-heard preacher in history. A North Carolina farmboy converted at age 16 under revivalist Mordecai Ham, Graham was trained at Wheaton College and began itinerant preaching in the late 1940s. His 1949 Los Angeles tent crusade — extended from three weeks to eight by overflow crowds, famously boosted by a directive from William Randolph Hearst to "puff Graham" — launched him into national and then global prominence. Over 60+ years of ministry, Graham preached in person to an estimated 215 million people in 185 countries; through television and film, the reach was multiples of that.
Graham's legacy is complex and towering. Four contributions. (1) Mass evangelism recovered. After the older revivalist tradition of Finney, Moody, and Sunday had faded, Graham returned large-scale gospel preaching to cultural prominence in the mid-20th century. The invitation at the end of each crusade, "Come forward tonight, just as you are," was preceded by decades of careful follow-up systems that funneled converts into local churches. (2) Founding of post-war evangelicalism. With Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Ockenga, and others, Graham helped shape the post-WWII evangelical coalition — founding Christianity Today magazine (1956), lending support to Fuller Seminary, and modeling an engaged orthodoxy that distinguished itself from both Fundamentalism and Liberalism. (3) Integration and global ministry. Graham integrated his crusades beginning in the 1950s, at a time when this was costly. His ministry became genuinely multiethnic, reaching behind the Iron Curtain (preaching in communist Eastern Europe from the 1970s), and mentoring evangelists across the Global South. (4) Pastoral counsel to presidents. Graham ministered to every U.S. president from Truman to Obama. Some critics (and, later, Graham himself in retrospect) felt he was at times too close to political power — his counsel to Nixon particularly. But his gospel-centered public preaching never wavered: sin, cross, repentance, faith, the new birth. The invitation always ended with Jesus.