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As speculation about a possible successor intensified in recent years, Billy Graham always told reporters that the decision was not his to make, but up to God and the 32-member board of directors of his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA).

But in 1995, as age and health concerns increasingly have weighed on Graham—and after much prayer, as well as input from his wife, Ruth—he felt compelled to put forth a recommendation: his namesake, 43-year-old William Franklin Graham III.

By a unanimous vote at the BGEA's annual meeting ending November 7, Graham's seventy-seventh birthday, the board agreed. Franklin Graham became first vice chair—a new position with direct succession as chair and chief executive officer "should his father ever become incapacitated."

The action settles who will lead the 45-year-old organization once the founder is gone. In the short term, changes will be minimal. "I'm going to do everything I can to help my father so that the last years of his ministry are his best years," Franklin Graham told CT after the announcement. "I want to stay in the shadows and serve him."

According to several individuals close to the senior Graham, his elder son had the enthusiastic support of some directors, while others did not see him as their first choice. In the end, though, all rallied for the sake of unity—and for the sake of the founder.

MEGA MINISTRY: The BGEA is one of the largest evangelical nonprofits in the nation, after Campus Crusade for Christ, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Focus on the Family. The BGEA generated $88 million last year, raising $72 million in private donations. The BGEA employs 300 people at its Minneapolis headquarters and another 244 elsewhere, including 52 full-time at the Cove, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

While preaching crusades and subsequent nationwide telecasts of those events have been the staple of the BGEA, its other well-known ministries include the Cove, a weekly Hour of Decision radio broadcast, the monthly "Decision" magazine, and feature films from World Wide Pictures.

Franklin Graham has not been sitting around waiting for the call to head BGEA. He leads two evangelistic humanitarian relief organizations, Samaritan's Purse (SP) and World Medical Mission (WMM), both in Boone, North Carolina. He plans to continue heading those organizations, which provide relief to famine and war victims in trouble spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia.

Franklin Graham has been a director of the BGEA since 1979. (Most board members are executives of business and religious institutions.) For the past five years, he has been preaching eight to ten crusades a year in smaller North American cities, under the auspices of BGEA, with John Wesley White and Ralph Bell. He also chairs the committee that brought the $26 million Cove to fruition in 1993 (CT, Oct. 25, 1993, p. 89).

"The last few years I've been giving more and more time to the BGEA," the younger Graham told CT.

SUCCESSOR, NOT REPLACEMENT: Many observers are quick to point out that transferring the title is not the same as transferring the mantle. Naming Franklin Graham as next in line does not transform him into someone America turns to in a crisis, who gains the ear of the President, or who becomes a fixture on Gallup's annual list of most-admired men, all feats his father has accomplished since his son was a toddler.

"Franklin has not been, nor could he be, anointed to be the next Billy Graham," says Graham biographer William Martin, author of "A Prophet with Honor" (William Morrow, 1991). "Billy Graham is not an office which has to be automatically filled when the current occupant leaves it."

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December 11 1995, Vol. 39, No. 14