Prayer can produce miracles every so often

Vernon W. Patterson offered a prayer during an outdoor gathering of a Christian men’s club in May 1934, hosted on the dairy farm of Frank Graham, near Charlotte, N.C.

Patterson, a paper salesman, prayed that “out of Charlotte the Lord would raise up someone to preach the Gospel to the ends of the Earth.”

Perhaps that’s what led an up-and-coming Baptist evangelist – Mordecai Ham – to be invited by the men’s group to come later in 1934 and conduct a series of revival meetings in Charlotte for the purpose of seeking out and anointing that “holy person.”

Preacher Ham was recommended personally by Billy Sunday, who left professional baseball in 1891 to become a Presbyterian minister and preach the word.

Ham came to the makeshift “tabernacle” with a sawdust floor in Charlotte, where he preached six days a week, morning and night, for 11 weeks.

While Frank Graham and his wife, Morrow Coffey Graham, attended religiously, their eldest son, Billy Frank, age 15, refused to attend. He said that the whole dagnabbit affair “sounded like a religious circus.”

 William Frank Graham Sr.

Billy Frank Graham as a teenager. (Photos compliments of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.)

Yet, Billy Frank and some friends mellowed, and went in the fifth week of the tent revival…just to check things out.

“Dr. Ham was loud,” Billy Frank recalled. “I was spellbound. In some indefinable way, he was getting through to me. I was hearing another voice….”

Billy Frank and his best friend Grady Wilson went back the next night, and then the next.

“For a week, the two boys quailed under the gimlet gaze of Mordecai, who seemed to be searching out their most secret sins,” TIME magazine once wrote. Neither Billy nor Grady could sing a lick, but “they joined the choir, so they could stand behind Mordecai, but there was no hiding place.”

After another week of attending meetings, Billy Frank and Grady both went to the altar.

Ham later said: “I told the boys, after they came forward, to sit in the preachers’ section. Billy Frank sat there for two months. The Lord seemed to be directing everything, and what took place…didn’t seem to have an earthly explanation!”

The Rev. Billy Frank Graham, of course, went on to build an enormous worldwide following, augmenting his personal appearances with state-of-the-art media technology, to touch hundreds of millions of people.

Grady Wilson and T. W. Wilson (Grady’s older brother) also entered the ministry. The brothers and Billy were reunited within the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

In his book, “Just As I Am,” Billy Graham said the Wilson boys “were the Heaven-sent ones who propped me up….”

“From the beginning of our friendship, Grady was my God-given balance wheel,” Billy wrote. “His easy-going nature and sense of humor saved the day many times.”

“I leaned on T. W. in practical ways perhaps more than any other person,” Billy said. Biographer William Martin wrote: “For more than 30 years, no one would spend more time at Billy’s side than T. W.”

When Rev. Graham died in 2018 at age 99, the responsibility for overseeing the Graham family business interests fell to Franklin Graham, now 67, one of five children born to Billy Graham and Ruth McCue Bell Graham.

The Graham family enterprises are committed to the ongoing “preaching of the Gospel to the ends of the Earth.”

They do so in memory of a fellow named Edward Kimball (1823-1901).

In 1855, Kimball taught a Sunday school class for adolescent boys in Boston.

His discipleship started a “spiritual legacy” that snowballed throughout the generations into a gigantic chain of events that still resonates today in houses of worship.