Franklin Graham joined High Point University President Nido Qubein in the Power List interview, a partnership for discussions with influential leaders. The interview was edited
for clarity.
Franklin Graham, 73, is the president and CEO of the Boone-based Samaritan’s Purse global relief group and Charlotte-based Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The Asheville native was ordained in 1982, three years after he succeeded founder Bob Pierce as Samaritan Purse’s leader. The group has more than 2,300 employees, 250,000 volunteers and annual revenue topping $1 billion. He has led Christian evangelistic events across the world since 1989. The association had revenue of $174 million last year, and net assets of about $566 million.
You have been a committed person of faith, helping people all over the world. I want to dig into some of that with you. But first, how does it feel to be the son of a very internationally famous individual, Billy Graham?
That’s always been a very difficult question to answer because I have nothing to compare it to. He’s just the only dad I have. And he was a very loving person. He and my mother were at a happy home. I never saw my parents argue one time.
But you had a famous, very powerful dad, and then you followed him in wonderful ways. You’ve made sure that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association continues. Some people sometimes struggle with following in their footsteps. You seem to have done amazing things in your own way.
I never tried to be Billy Graham. I never planned to preach. When I was about 18, I was in the Middle East, working at a little hospital in Jordan near the Syrian border. I just felt that I wanted to help people and that’s what I felt God calling me to do. That was my focus.
Over the years, Samaritan’s Purse grew and the organization got bigger. So when my father didn’t want to run the day to day of his organization, [he asked] “Would you be willing to take the day to day leadership?” I said, if that’s what you want me to do, I would be glad to help you.
He said, “What will you do with Samaritan’s Purse?” I said, I’m not going to do anything. When he said you can’t run both of them. I said, why not? He said, “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
It’s not that I would run every aspect of the organization. And he didn’t do that at the Billy Graham Association.
You have good people. They just have to be given direction. This is where we’re going to go this year. This is what we’re going to do today or this week. This is our focus. Then you let your team do it. I said that’s the way I’ll run it. He said, “OK, we’ll try it.” It has worked just fine.
But it took the pressure off of him.
Yes. I understand that because I will be 73 this year. My youngest son will take over the Samaritan’s Purse. My oldest son will take over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
I’ve got wonderful children that understand ministry, but also understand business. You’re not there to make money, but you want to spend money wisely.
Give us a quick overview of the distinction between Samaritan’s Purse and the
evangelistic association.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is evangelism. And my father believed in taking the stadiums of the world, and taking TV, radio and the internet to use whatever opportunity to tell people about God’s son, Jesus Christ, who preached, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life. And no man comes to the father but by me.”
My father anchored his ministry in John 3:16, “that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” It was the focus of his ministry.
At Samaritan’s Purse, we do the same thing, but we take the ditches and we take the gutters, and we take the wars, and we take the famines of the world. We help people, but we do it in Jesus’ name. I want people to know that God loves them, that he hasn’t forgotten them.
Many times when a person goes through that, like what we saw with Helene in North Carolina, people think that God is mad at them. If I lose my house, or I lose my son or daughter, is God mad at me? Is he judging me?
No, God loves us, the Bible tells us. But we go through these storms in life. Samaritan’s Purse takes these storms and we try to find ways to help people in the middle of these storms and do it in the name of Jesus Christ. So the two organizations are different.
How do you distinguish one from the other?
Two different management teams and different budgets. I wear two hats, but I have two wonderful teams that are committed to this Gospel message.
With these difficult times, how do you get in a war torn-part of the world? For example, you mentioned Syria. How do you penetrate a part of the world that is so dangerous?
Very carefully. We set up a hospital in Sudan, and this would be north of Khartoum and south of Port Sudan. We worked with the Sudanese government, and they allowed us to come in. It’s a maternity hospital.
We keep here in North Carolina about five hospitals in our warehouse in North Wilkesboro. If we need to set it up for, like we did for the maternity hospital, we set it up for that here, and then put it on our plane in Greensboro. That includes equipment and supplies.
Then we trucked them up to this area where they wanted us to set it up. And, it was Christmas Day. When we opened Sudan, it was in the middle of a civil war. Right now in Syria, the fighting is still unstable, but Damascus, it’s gotten to what I would say is calm.
Sometimes you get turned away. But we always pray before we go, always, just our teams and myself. “God, if this is what you want us to do, open the door for us. If this is not something that you want us to do, then close the door.” And, God always opens doors
for us.
How do you select where you do your work?
Well, we’ve worked in Sudan for 30 years. And that’s been another war zone, where one of our hospitals got bombed by President Bashir. So I went to Khartoum to talk to them about it. “Mr. President, you bombed my hospital.” He turned to one of his aides and asked if they had bombed it. “Yes, Mr. President,” and he kind of laughed. They thought it was funny, I just said, “Well, Mr. President, you missed.”
And then we begin to have a conversation. Sometimes you just have to go and talk to these people. As a result of that conversation, he opened up an opportunity for us to put a maternity hospital in Khartoum.
You’ve had many opportunities to talk to U.S. presidents and other leaders around the world. Is there someone who stands out as a person who has done something or influenced you in some way that is memorable?
George H.W. Bush was an incredible person. A very engaging person. When I was with him and my father at his son’s inauguration as governor of Texas, we were all on one floor at the Omni Hotel, and my father and I had our rooms up there on the same floor with the family.
It was a little unusual to go down the hallway and see President Bush running down the hall in his pajamas to get ice from the machine.
At dinner, we sat together, and he said, “Franklin, let me share with you who my family is.”
And he pointed to each person and told me about them. There was a niece, and he told me her name and a little bit about her. She was very much involved with the Dalai Lama and, he said, if she corners you, she’s going to bring this up.
I said, “Thank you. I appreciate that, Mr. President.”
You cannot be in the presence of Donald Trump and not be impressed. The man is brilliant.
Now he would use salty language in his messages, so I wrote him a note. “Mr. President, people love your rallies, and you do an incredible job communicating. But you don’t need to use that salty language.”
He mentioned that in one of his rallies. “Franklin Graham told me I maybe don’t need to use that language.” And he has mentioned that a number of times.
That’s genius of you to take the initiative to write that note.
If somebody doesn’t tell you, you don’t know. To be honest, too many people in powerful positions have yes people around them. Yes people tell them things that they want to hear, to try to pump up their egos or whatever.
If you want to be a friend of someone, you have to be honest. Not beat them up, but be lovingly honest.
Samaritan’s Purse has certainly done enormous work in western North Carolina. You were born in Asheville and you live in Boone. So that section of North Carolina is dear to you. What is your take on what happened in Tropical Storm Helene?
We’ve never seen anything like this in my lifetime. Just a little mountain stream turned into raging rivers. People that lived along these small streams, their houses were maybe a few hundred feet from the stream. All that got destroyed, their homes were washed away.
The wells were compromised. Septic systems were gone. It was on either side of the streams. Bridges are gone. Culverts are gone. Houses are off the foundations. Barns are gone. Pins for their livestock are gone.
In the rural areas, we’ve never seen damage like this.
We started using a helicopter to go to fire stations and churches to see how we can help them, because people rallied there and went there for help. Joe Gibbs loaned his helicopter. Rick Hendrick said that he would be glad to help with his helicopter.
My son was in the military for 16 years in special operations. He called some of the people he knew at Fort Liberty, and they sent some of their big heavy lift helicopters.
We took generators and tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. The helicopters would come back to the Boone airport, and we’d load them up again. We’ve been told it was probably the largest civilian airlift in the history of our country.
But for this flood, we weren’t ready for it. We needed generators. Nobody had fuel. And you had so many people that were sick, they were on oxygen and so forth, and they needed electricity. We didn’t want to make the decision of who to give the generators to. The local officials let the pastors and fire chiefs do that.
As you look forward to the many years that lie ahead of you, what would you like to do?
I don’t think I’ve ever had a list of things that I want to do or not do. I just wake up in the morning and I ask that God direct me according to his plan. It’s not my plan, but his plan. So if you look at Samaritan’s Purse, it’s not something that I have done. God has brought the people. He’s built the finances. He’s given us the resources.
I’ve always believed in infrastructure. If an organization is going to be successful, you have to have infrastructure. Like having a warehouse, having the right things stored there ready to go. Because when there is a crisis, everybody else is going out trying to buy the same things that you need. But if you already have them, then you are able to get out in front and help people immediately.
In Greensboro, we have our heavy lift department. That’s where we keep our DC-8 aircraft. We have a 757. We’re in the process of buying a 767. ■
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