Billy Graham's funeral on March 2 was, first and foremost, an American event, preceded by a lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington.
However, Rev. Graham, born a dairy farm boy in North Carolina in 1918, died as a citizen of the world as well as of the Kingdom of God.
He preached on every continent except Antarctica. He held 14 "crusades" in Canadian cities including Calgary.
Southern Alberta is tied to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association through the Canadian office in Calgary of the Samaritan's Purse international relief organization.
Many readers of the Mountain View Gazette participate in Operation Christmas Child each year, filling Samaritan's Purse seasonal shoeboxes with gifts of hygiene items such as toothbrushes, toys and school supplies.
These shoeboxes are distributed to children living precarious lives in war, poverty, famine and disease.
Hard-bitten journalists said that Billy Graham had just one sermon that he preached thousands of times.
Those of us reporters who have trekked after campaigning politicians get mightily tired of hearing the stump speech over and over again.
I recall two services at which Rev. Graham preached, one at the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1964 and in Calgary in 1981.
The Calgary sermon was about sin, repentance and forgiveness through the grace and love of God. This was the one sermon, repeated from 1949 to 2014, that made him famous because millions responded by converting to Christianity.
This sermon never became stale no matter how many times he repeated it, and it is estimated that 215 million people around the globe heard it.
The one at Urbana was given to the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship quadrennial missions conference.
This was his "other" sermon, the one about the responsibility of all Christians to share the good news of the gospel in action as well as in words.
It is the political Billy Graham that made the strongest impression on me because politics is at the centre of my writing life.
His first influence in the public arena was in Germany when he met Konrad Adenauer, the first German chancellor, in 1954. Adenauer recognized and promoted Graham's message of redemption and forgiveness because it had a special meaning for Germans coming to terms with the Nazi years.
Graham's credentials as a Cold Warrior opposed to communism also caught Adenauer's eye.
Graham became a non-partisan chaplain to every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama – Republicans as well as Democrats.
He kept at arm's length from right-wing evangelical movements such as the Moral Majority, stating that he did not want to alienate either left or right from listening to the gospel, and that he was not equipped to deal with issues on the Christian right's agenda.
Billy Graham also had the rare humility to admit to his mistakes.
He matured – spiritually, culturally and personally – for 99 years.
And he had become not just America's pastor, but the leading Protestant in the world.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran journalist and author.
