Leading with Love

The secret to Billy Graham's remarkable ministry to the world.
By Harold Myra and Marshall Shelley


Image courtesy of BGEA/Russ Busby
Whom you would change,
You must first love.
—Martin Luther King Jr.

Our first interview for our book, The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham, was with John Corts, a key employee of Billy's organization for 35 years, ten of them as its president. After a dinner conversation that ranged over the decades, we asked, "John, what would you say is the bottom line distinctive of Billy's leadership?"

John paused a long while. Finally he said, emphatically, "Love. The difference between him and so many other leaders is that whatever the circumstances, Billy always led with love."

As we continued interviewing and researching, John's assertion was confirmed throughout the process. Billy led with love.

Yet some would ask: What's love got to do with it? Aren't the essential requirements of leadership to be results oriented and to personify authenticity and employ a variety of techniques and emphases?

Not in the Billy Graham model. Billy often quoted the Bible's familiar words, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son," as well as Scripture's profound assertion, "God is love." Yet how did he balance this off with the leader's necessity to face brutal facts and take action on them, and to deal with life's rugged realities? After all, the Bible also speaks of God's wrath and judgment, which Billy warned about. Some religious leaders are viewed as emphasizing lots of wrath and little love, lots of anger and little compassion.

Somehow, in the most difficult situations, Billy has communicated a heart full of love for others. People sense it. His internalizing love has deepened through the years as he has listened intently to the Spirit, whose first fruit the Bible says is love. In a Christian Century article, Billy explained what had been happening to him after a decade of international ministry.

I am now aware that the family of God contains people of various ethnological, cultural, class, and denominational differences. … Within the true church there is a mysterious unity that overrides all divisive factors. In groups which in my ignorant piousness I formerly "frowned upon," I have found men so dedicated to Christ and so in love with the truth that I have felt unworthy to be in their presence. I have learned that although Christians do not always agree, they can disagree agreeably, and that what is most needed today is for us to show an unbelieving world that we love one another.
In his meetings, Billy has often asserted, "God is saying to you, 'I love you. I love you. I love you.'" His love has been obvious to others and has radiated to his colleagues and those he leads, as well as to the watching world.

Loving even more
Two years after 9/11 with its destruction of the World Trade Center, Billy was holding meetings in Dallas. Some Americans felt all Muslims were suspect. Billy's colleague, Rick Marshall, told us, "It surprised me to learn that one of the largest U.S. populations of Muslims is in central Texas. We were at Texas Stadium in October, right between Dallas and Fort Worth. Billy did an interview with The Dallas Morning News, and one of the questions the writer put to him was, 'Dr. Graham, do you have a message for the Muslims of Texas?' He answered without hesitation.

"The next day the headline on the front page, bottom section was 'Billy Graham has a message for Muslims: 'God loves them, and I love them.'

"It was a powerful statement. Talk about cutting right to the heart of the gospel! Everyone was talking about it, because it defused so much anger and so much criticism. It brought to the table the hallmark of Billy's ministry."

We asked Rick about Billy's handling of religious and other differences. "To me," he said, "Christians have often been too strident and legalistic. Billy has always been theologically rooted in grace. If it's Muslims or Hindus or anyone else, his focus is to love them and to share with them the love of Christ."

Billy's emphasis of love spans the entire spectrum of cultural divisions. An issue that has wrenchingly divided both culture and the church is the "gay agenda." As with his stance toward other religions, he has clear theological parameters. But his message to gays is not judgmental.

When Hugh Downs interviewed him on the 20/20 television program, the subject turned to homosexuality. Hugh looked at Billy and asked, "If you had a homosexual child, would you love him?"

Billy didn't miss a beat. He answered gently, "Why, I would love that one even more."

The emphasis on love does not brush away the terrible realities of Muslim-Christian conflict or tensions stirred by polar-opposite beliefs about homosexual behavior or other chasms between antipathies. Billy is painfully aware of them. He realizes that people will have their differences and not every dispute can be resolved.

Once he was asked about "the secret of love," in light of his long marriage to Ruth. His response was telling: "Ruth and I are happily incompatible."

Billy doesn't sugarcoat life's painful realities but affirms that despite them, two dramatically different people can live as man and wife. Love doesn't smooth the road, according to the old proverb, but it puts springs in the wagon. Or in the words of the Bible, love "covers a multitude of sins" (1 Pet. 4:8).

His colleagues sense the authenticity of his love, and it bonds them to him. We looked up a just-published Billy Graham sermon and, sure enough, there it was: "The Bible teaches that God is love, and if you don't remember anything else, remember this: God loves you! He loves you so much that He gave His Son to die and to take your judgment on the cross. The cross is your judgment; but He took it for you because He loves you."

The love Billy expresses is cognizant of tragic realities, especially human pride and self-centeredness. For him, the ultimate reality is God's human creation needing redemption through the exquisite suffering of Jesus.

Dropping the big stick
Billy's decision to emphasize love started early. He did not react in kind to the bitter criticisms of those fundamentalists who were outraged by his having Catholics and "liberals" on his platform. He responded with silence and love.

In 1956, Billy founded Christianity Today (a sister publication of Today's Christian). Surveying the personal attacks and divisiveness among conservative Christians, he wrote that the magazine should set as its goal "to lead and love rather than vilify, criticize, and beat. Fundamentalism has failed miserably with the big stick approach; now it is time to take the big love approach."

In answering his critics, Billy said in a very early issue of CT, "The one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy but love." Editor Carl Henry, whom he had hired, said much the same, criticizing not the theology of fundamentalism but its "harsh temperament" and its "spirit of lovelessness and strife."

Billy's friend Francis Schaeffer would later expand on this in his book The Mark of the Christian. In it, Schaeffer asserts that the authentic work of a follower of Jesus is love. He quotes the "last commands" of Jesus to His followers as He was about to leave them: "I will be with you only a little longer. A new commandment I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."

Billy has taken his Lord's command very seriously. To many ears, the fact that Billy would call employees like Decision magazine editor Sherwood Wirt "beloved" sounds strangely foreign. But the word not only comes from the Bible, it was what Billy felt toward his fellow disciples and what he determined to make central in his life.

How far should love extend? Jesus said we must love our enemies, which when put against specifics may seem naïve and even absurd.

To genuinely love a vicious enemy would take supernatural power. The Bible's original Greek uses agape to describe exactly that—supernatural love that transcends human capacities. Martin Luther King Jr., in leading the civil rights movement, advocated "persuasion, not coercion" and the transforming power of love. He said, "Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries: 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.'"

King explained what the Bible's word means when facing rough realities: "Agape is disinterested love … Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes … therefore agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both."

So Billy showed love, even to his most savage critics and to those who had hurt him the most. He was moved by compassion for those who suffer or have no hope, his love extending to Christian, Muslim, Hindu, agnostic, or atheist. That's what agape required of him.

A moral leadership
Billy believed education and legislation were important but inadequate. In light of the world's atrocities, he wrote in The Secret of Happiness, "Government and civil laws are like the cages in a zoo—they can restrain evil, but they cannot change the basic nature of the human heart. Art and education may refine the taste, but they cannot purify the heart. The Holocaust was carried out by educated people, some brilliantly so."

Billy's commitment to love and mercy clashed prodigiously with obvious evil. "I would rather have a world filled with ignorant savages," he said, "than with civilized sophisticates without morality."

When we talked to Billy's longtime special assistant John Akers about Billy's visits to Auschwitz and Treblinka, and his visiting refugees in India and elsewhere, we asked how that fit with his intense focus on his mission. "Simply this—he's a compassionate person," John said. "In regard to the Holocaust, he was very aware of the history of Christians persecuting the Jews. He wanted to identify with their suffering, their moral outrage, and to agree that this must not be allowed to happen again. That's part of his moral leadership."

Redemptive correction
Yet for all Billy's kindness, he felt the normal human emotions. At times, he was confronted with situations requiring more than compassion. C. S. Lewis observed, "Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."

Billy has been portrayed as a nice do-gooder with little awareness or starch in the spine. But agape love can be tough love. For instance, John Akers told us that although Billy could usually disarm hostile situations, sometimes he was forced to be stern. "He was in Communist East Germany to speak to a Lutheran synod," John told us. "The reception was so cold, the conveners so arrogant, that when he got up he said, 'When I came in, I had seldom met such a hostile group, and it shouldn't be that way. We are brothers in Christ, and I love you. But this atmosphere does not reflect that.'"

John remembers that Billy's forthright statements "just wiped them out." They got the message—sometimes "tough love" requires redemptive correction.

Compassionate service
Frank Thielman told us stories of Billy's generosity. "Montreat (North Carolina, where Billy and Ruth Graham have a cabin home) is in the rural southern Appalachian mountains. [Billy and Ruth] unhesitatingly give and help the poor there. They are very generous people."

Billy described his own awakening to the needs of the Appalachian poor. "One Christmas Eve a friend came to my house and said, 'Would you like to go out with me distributing Christmas packages up in the mountains?' I was glad to go. And I was in for one of the greatest surprises of my life!

I thought everybody in our community had all the necessities of life. But I was taken back into some little mountain valleys where people did not have enough to wear, enough to eat, and could not even afford soap to wash their bodies. Appalled and humbled, I asked God to forgive me for neglecting the people in my own community."

Restoring the fallen
Disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker also testifies to the love of Billy Graham and his family. Despite the fact that Bakker's public scandal, which involved sex, hush-money, and defrauded investors in a real estate scheme, had brought suspicion and scorn on all evangelists, the Grahams maintained a friendship with Bakker throughout his imprisonment and afterward.

Bakker recalls with appreciation the time that Ruth Graham "took all of Billy's Bibles in his library that he wasn't using and gave them to me to give to other inmates." When he got out of prison, the Grahams paid for a house for him to live in and provided him a car.

"The first Sunday out," Bakker said, "Ruth Graham called the halfway house I was living in at the Salvation Army and asked permission for me to go to the Montreat Presbyterian Church with her that Sunday morning. When I got there, the pastor welcomed me and sat me with the Graham family. There were like two whole rows of them—I think every Graham aunt and uncle and cousin was there. The organ began playing and the place was full, except for a seat next to me. Then the doors opened and in walked Ruth Graham. She walked down that aisle and sat next to inmate 07407-059. I had only been out of prison 48 hours, but she told the world that morning that Jim Bakker was her friend."

Simply being there
Sometimes love is shown by a thoughtful word, by willingness to help an employee in trouble or by refusal to retaliate when attacked; other times love is shown by simply showing up.

At the time Billy was in his mid-80s and struggling physically, Leighton and Jean Ford's daughter, Debbie—Billy's niece—had successfully endured cancer treatments but then learned the cancer had recurred. Debbie was apprehensive as she entered the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, for a bone scan.

"I was very fearful of cancer being found somewhere else in my body," Debbie told us. As she walked back to her room, she glanced down the empty hallway. There at the end, sitting in a wheelchair and facing her direction, was a frail older man. She realized it was Billy, who happened to be at Mayo for some tests.

"Knowing I was there, he had asked the Mayo staff to locate where I was in the clinic. I ran and threw my arms around him and sobbed with all my heart. He held me tenderly, saying over and over, 'I love you.'

"When I looked up to tell him how frightened I was, I saw that he was also crying. In his own weakened state, he met me at my weakness."

Debbie was deeply touched by this evidence of Billy's love for her. "Certainly he's a great evangelist and a confidant of leaders," said Debbie. "He's also a tender and frail older man.

"Despite the fact that he hurts like I do and has concerns for his body like I do, he's thoughtful and caring and willing to take time for me, just as I am."

Adapted from The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham (Zondervan, 2005). © 2005 Harold Myra and Marshall Shelley. Used by permission. Myra is CEO of Christianity Today International (CTI). Shelley is a vice president of CTI and executive editor of Leadership journal.

Discussion Starters
According to his friends and colleagues, Graham's leadership—and life—is defined by a love for God and others. What kinds of qualities define the leaders in your life? How would people describe your leadership style?


When asked how he would react to a homosexual child, Billy responded that he'd love him even more. What did he mean by this? How does the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) relate to this issue?


When dealing with atheists or members of other religions, Graham avoided divisive issues and focused first on sharing with them the love of Christ. Why is this approach so rare today? How can we apply this principle in our lives?