Saturday, July 25, 1998

Franklin Graham is content to limit his job description to preaching

By Vikas Bajaj

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - Franklin Graham doesn't want to be some old guy in a three-piece suit.

The description, made in jest, is Graham's image of a "religious leader," a position from which the son of Billy Graham likes to distance himself.

"I don't want to be a leader," the younger evangelist said during an interview last week. He was Dallas for a convention of the Christian booksellers' association.

"I am not trying to lead anybody. I am just a preacher of the gospel, and that's all I want to be."

This, coming from a minister who packs sports arenas around the world, preaching the gospel and seeing thousands converted to Christianity each year. This, from a preacher poised to inherit one of the largest organizations devoted to spreading the Christian message - the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

The Rev. O.S. Hawkins, former pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, says Graham will be a fitting leader both for the organization his father built from the ground up and for Christian believers generally; he'll have a broad audience.

"I think Franklin's relationship is with the world," said Hawkins, president and chief executive officer of the Annuity Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Graham remains resistant.

He's "just a kid who likes to ride motorcycles and fly airplanes," he said with a smirk. But there's also a hint of seriousness - and uneasiness, perhaps, with the high-profile role he's likely to play.

Some experts tend to agree with Graham and believe that the leadership his father exemplifies will elude the son.

Graham isn't just being modest, said Jeffrey Hadden, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and an observer of evangelicalism.

"He is heir apparent to daddy's empire. The problem is, charisma is not an inherited trait," he said.

"I think it's a little early to say if the young Graham will catch on and excite people."

Graham's 79-year-old father has announced that his son will eventually take over his $88 million organization. Graham, 46, already directs a $47 million Christian relief organization - Samaritan's Purse - that provides aid to people in poverty and war zones.

Graham acknowledges that those things make him a leader in many people's minds.

"I can't stop someone (from thinking that), but I have never been able to consider myself a religious leader."

He's quick, though, to ascribe the title to his father.

"Daddy has never considered himself (a religious leader), but he certainly is," Graham said. "He has never sought that, never wanted it, never tried to run for anything.

"He is a leader because he has stood for something all of his life. And because he has stood for it, people respond to it."

Decades from now, after Graham has done the same, might the label fit him then? "I don't know, and I don't care."

Those feelings may have something to do with what he calls his "rebellious" nature. Until he was 22, Graham took a greater interest in alcohol, tobacco, fast cars and motorcycles than in God.

He's devoted to ministry now, but he still characterizes himself as a rebel. His autobiography is even titled Rebel With a Cause.

"I don't always accept the status quo," Graham said. "I am not always ready to accept things just because everybody does it a certain way."

Maybe it's the rebel in him that shuns any label that sounds staid.

"I want to be faithful," he said, "but I am not trying to be a leader."

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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