Christian History Magazine Features: Guest Editor, David Neff; Author, Grant Wacker and Fellow Historians Who Chronicle the Life of the World’s Best Known Evangelist for Christ  

Christian History Institute (CHI), a quarterly magazine series, published a special edition of Christian History – issue #111, titled: “Billy Graham – Apostle of changed lives and second chances,” originally released in 2014. Christian History magazine continues to publish informative and entertaining history, now alongside its companion website, christianhistorymagazine.org.

In this issue, #111, Christian History magazine’s guest editorial consultant, Grant Wacker, a Duke Divinity School professor and author of America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, leads a team of distinguished historians and writers who tell the epic story of Mr. Graham’s life and career, a unique contribution to the character and spirit of the evangelical church, the nation and the world. The issue’s 10 articles, rare archive photos and intimate writing style documents the life and family of Billy Graham, who has personally shared the salvation message of Jesus Christ with more people than any other individual in history.

Guest editor, David Neff, former editor of Christianity Today, has assembled the talents and expertise of several leading historians and writers, to capture the essence of the life and times of America’s most prominent religious figure, Billy Graham and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ministry (BGEA). Outstanding among many central themes associated with Mr. Graham in the issue, and lasting throughout his career, is his core preaching message focused on belief in Jesus and the believer’s life, lived in faith and holiness.

In addition to Graham’s primary message of salvation in Christ, the issue’s contributors have identified and examined many of Graham’s famous milestones and associations that have helped to shape the Graham legacy. These themes include:

• The 1949 Los Angles tent revival, that garnered the attention of the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, who urged his editor to pay attention to Graham
• Graham’s use of television and radio that positioned him in the living rooms of millions of Americans, where he introduced the values of evangelical Protestantism
• His commitment to world evangelism that took him throughout Europe, the Far East and Africa as an ambassador of Christ
• His interest and gift as a confidant to presidents, prime ministers and statesmen that made him a cultural influence in over 150 countries, 49 of which hosted his mass meetings that reached, in the aggregate, billions of listeners and millions of believers
• Graham’s marriage to Ruth Bell which inspired men, women and families to a deepened personal faith life and encouraged future family and relationship ministries
• His intellectual engagement with education leaders and students that spawned seminaries, colleges and universities, helping shape a worldwide evangelical movement and revival
• His pioneering vision for racial integration that inspired the American civil rights movement – in 1953, he shockingly removed ropes that separated his audience by color – and in association with Howard Jones, a full-time BGEA associate
• Graham’s uncompromising stand for ethics and morality, setting strict rules for his own behavior and that of ministry associates, which helped prevent moral scandal and compromise that destroyed many other ministry leaders and organizations

“No man has had more personal, one-on-one, impact for faith in Jesus Christ than Mr. Graham,” said Michael Austin, a Christian commentator and spokesperson for Christian History magazine. “He and his family are a living testimony to the faithfulness of the Biblical message he so clearly delivered from the start of his ministry. Billy Graham’s impact for good in this world is incalculable.”

A special report from the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission.

“The world hasn’t seen an evil like this for a generation.” This is how the national spokesman for Iraqi Christians in the United States described atrocities by ISIS terrorists in northern Iraq, which include beheading of children and their mothers and fathers, and forcing almost all Christians in the region to flee. While the United States has resumed military action to deal with the crisis in Iraq, its commitment reflects half-heartedness and fails to match the enormity of suffering and potential threats.

“They are systematically beheading children, and mothers and fathers … There’s actually a park in Mosul that they’ve actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick,” Mark Arabo, the spokesman for Iraqi Christians, told CNN. “This is crimes against humanity. The whole world should come together. This is much broader than a community or faith … They are doing the most horrendous, the most heart-breaking things you can think of.”

The Episcopal Vicar of Iraq, Canon Andrew White, recently visited the town of Qaraqosh, which like many other towns and cities has been captured by the ISIS, to assess the situation. “The majority of the town’s 50,000 people have fled, fearing that, like other Christians in this region, they will be massacred. The militants, in a further act of sacrilege, have established their administrative posts in the abandoned churches,” he said, according to Catholic Online.

Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako of Baghdad has called for “international support and a professional, well-equipped army,” saying the situation is “going from bad to worse.”

U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement last week about the American military involvement in Iraq acknowledged the suffering of minorities. “These terrorists have been especially barbaric toward religious minorities, including Christians and Yazidis,” Obama said, but while carefully underlining the humanitarian nature of the intervention. He said it was meant only to prevent the likely advancement of ISIS terrorists toward the U.S. embassy in Baghdad or the U.S. consulate in Arbil, and to help save Iraqi civilians stranded in the Mount Sinjar region.

Obama referred to the more than 50,000 people from the Yazidi ethnic minority, who like Christians were forced to flee their villages and are now trapped on the Sinjar mountains with ISIS men surrounding them. The subtext of his statement was a promise only of a short-term, limited involvement.

It is, of course, a moral obligation of Washington not to leave Iraq in the lurch after its 2003 invasion and subsequent pull-out of its forces. But in fulfilment of this moral obligation also lie America’s interests.

The U.S. took on al-Qaeda and its former leader Osama bin Laden, but now its offshoot, the ISIS, which is also known as the Islamic State, has emerged as far more brutal and powerful – and therefore a likely threat to America in the days to come.