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Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.
-Colossians 4:6 (NIV)

For as long as I can remember, Billy Graham has been part of our family. Not in a literal sense, of course, since my father grew up in Minnesota while Billy Graham was raised in the South. Yet, God chose to weave their lives together—calling both to the work of evangelism, giving both the privilege of introducing tens of thousands of men and women to Jesus Christ, and planting in both an enduring friendship. Drawn together during the 1940s through the ministry of Youth for Christ, Billy Graham, Merv Rosell, and a small cadre of gifted young evangelists—sharing not only sermons and songleaders but also long seasons of prayer and a growing sense of awe at what God was doing through them—became the surprising leaders of what the editor of United Evangelical Action would by 1952 be calling "one of the greatest outpourings of the Spirit in the nation's history."

Those powerful midcentury revivals, marked by the large evangelistic crusades that swept through scores of American cities during the late 1940s and early 1950s, not only swelled the ranks of a resurgent evangelical movement, but they also helped to make Billy Graham the best known and most respected leader of our century. With Billy Graham's new prominence, however, came increasing criticism. Old friends as well as new enemies began to voice concerns about everything from his theology to his style of preaching.

Well-known figures, of course, are always vulnerable to criticism—and special scrutiny, it would seem, has frequently been reserved for religious leaders. From Whitefield and Finney to Moody and Sunday, American evangelists have all felt the sting of unfavorable judgments made against them by their contemporaries. Yet few seem either to have understood the importance of criticism or to have developed as constructive a strategy for dealing with it as has Billy Graham.

One of his greatest legacies to those of us who come after him, I am convinced, is the pattern of dealing with criticism that he has practiced with such remarkable consistency across the years. Centered on five key principles, it is a model of Christian charity that evangelical Christians in our day would do well to emulate. I have enumerated below some of the key elements undergirding his approach to ministry and his response to critics.

Richard Baxter, whom J. I. Packer has called "the most outstanding pastor, evangelist and writer on practical and devotional themes that Puritanism produced," opened his seventeenth-century classic, "The Reformed Pastor," with a striking admonition to Christian leaders: "Take heed to yourselves, lest your example contradict your doctrine, and lest you lay such stumbling-blocks before the blind, as may be the occasion of their ruin; lest you unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues; and be the greatest hinderers of success of our own labors." It is "a fearful thing" to be "an unsanctified preacher."

Few preachers, I suspect, have been as determined to heed Baxter's warning as Billy Graham. Early in his ministry, during the 1948 evangelistic meetings in Modesto, California, he called the members of his team together to discuss ways in which they could fortify themselves more fully against "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life" (1 John 2:16). As William Martin describes it in his recent biography, "A Prophet with Honor," the Elmer Gantry image attached to American evangelism, which Sinclair Lewis had "assembled from skeletons and scraps found in the closets of real-life evangelists," was well known by Graham. So he asked his colleagues to identify "all the things that have been a stumbling block and a hindrance to evangelists in years past" so that together they might establish effective means of avoiding them.

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November 13 1995, Vol. 39, No. 13