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The first time I saw Billy Graham was in Arkansas when I was about 11. He came right into the middle of our state's racial trouble to lead a crusade and to spread a message of God's love and grace. When the citizens' council tried to force him to segregate his meeting, he said, "If I have to do that, I'm not coming."

I asked a Sunday-school teacher in my church to drive me 50 miles to Little Rock so I could hear Dr. Graham preach. For a good while thereafter, I tried to send a little bit of my allowance to his crusades because of the impression he made on me then.

I was elated when Billy came to Little Rock for another crusade a few years ago when I was Governor. We had the chance to spend a good deal of time together, and I have treasured his friendship as well as his prayers and counsel ever since.

I am grateful for the way his ministry and friendship have touched my life and, even more, for the unparalleled impact his Christian witness has had throughout the world.

I am honored to be able to share this tribute with you and your readers on this special occasion.

"Billy Graham," said Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, one-time minister of health in India's Parliament, "is one of those rare jewels who tread this earth periodically and, by their lives and teaching, draw millions of others closer to God."

I've known Billy for many decades, and exempting family, he is the best friend I've ever had. As a result, people frequently ask me what Billy Graham is like when he is not on center stage. I think the Indian minister of health put it well:

look at his life and teaching.

Billy Graham has been on the scene for one-fortieth of Christian history, and he will go down in history as the best-known, most traveled, most influential, and in many ways most representative evangelical Protestant of these past five decades.

Certainly I am not alone in suggesting that when he first came on the scene—a bit brash, unripe, over-apocalyptic, judgmental in some of the wrong ways, and evoking old revivalist chords—almost everyone in our business dismissed him as a mutation, a celebrity who would have his hour and then be gone.

Instead, he has stayed and helped revolutionize the evangelical element in world Christianity. And no one has been more ready than he to say that he did not do it alone. In fact, his outreaching, ecumenical, and cooperative spirit made him capable of neutralizing most criticism and achieving credibility among Catholics and mainstream Protestants.

Had he not shared in the awakening of many kinds of evangelicalism, I fear that North American Protestantism might have gone the way of tired, late-establishment Anglo-European Protestantism, with its empty monumental cathedrals and its often listless parish churches. (In fact, where Europe is "alive," Christianly speaking, many would credit him for helping it remain so, or helping it to come alive.)

That he is slowing is no secret. That we signal a hope that he will not stop, or have to stop for seasons and seasons to come, is a mark of fervency in a desperate time.

I have never known a greater man among men. Yet his simplicity, his common touch, his childlike compassion for his fellowman is the source of his greatness.

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November 13 1995, Vol. 39, No. 13