Billy Graham, Son, Tour Storm-Ravaged New Orleans, Will Preach This Weekend

c. 2006 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Billy Graham, the aged and frail lion of American evangelicalism, arrived Wednesday to preach to a battered New Orleans for the first time in more than 50 years. “I’d thought I’d read it all, but it doesn’t compare to what you see in just a few minutes’ […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Billy Graham, the aged and frail lion of American evangelicalism, arrived Wednesday to preach to a battered New Orleans for the first time in more than 50 years.

“I’d thought I’d read it all, but it doesn’t compare to what you see in just a few minutes’ tour of this area,” Graham said as he toured St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward.


Graham and his son, Franklin Graham, toured the area with two local pastors, the Rev. David Crosby of First Baptist Church of New Orleans and Bishop J.D. Wiley of Life Center Cathedral in Algiers.

Crosby and Wiley are among a corps of New Orleans pastors who asked the Grahams to give a lift to New Orleans. Their event, called a Celebration of Hope, will be Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. at the New Orleans Arena.

Crosby’s church at the edge of Lakeview was relatively undamaged, but lost most of its congregation in the first months after the storm. Wiley’s Algiers church was severely damaged and remains unusable; six months after the storm, he holds services in a nearby tent.

As their motorcade continued, they saw piles of kindling that once were homes, cars flipped in yards and a neighboring Mount Carmel Ministries dead as an empty sepulcher.

“God bless everybody,” Graham said. “My prayers are going to be more intense for the people who live here.”

Hurricane Katrina’s violence drew Graham and his son and heir, Franklin, through St. Bernard and ultimately to the same Lower 9th Ward neighborhood that for months has steadily drawn thousands of awestruck visitors, from the ordinary to the famous: Prince Charles of Britain, the king of Jordan, the ecumenical patriarch of Orthodox Christianity _ and even on this day, President Bush, who a few hours earlier walked a damaged levee a few blocks away.

As wreckers hauled away flooded cars and a distant pile driver hammered away at levee repairs, Graham said the lesson of Katrina is “that there is more to life than material things.


“There’s a moral and spiritual strength that’s needed not only in New Orleans and the 9th Ward, but everywhere,” he said.

“We’re living in a very tumultuous time,” marked by the violence of hurricanes and war in Iraq, he said. “If ever a country needed to turn to God, it’s now.”

Yet unlike some conservatives across Christianity, Judaism and Islam, neither Graham nor his son sought to assign any divine meaning to Katrina _ particularly that the storm was God’s vengeance on New Orleans or the country for public wrongs.

“I know a lot of people have asked the question: Is this God’s judgment?” Franklin Graham said. “I’ve no idea, and I don’t think it is. Because good people lost homes. Churches were destroyed.”

Instead, he said, the meaning of Hurricane Katrina is found in the compassion and unity engendered by the rebuilding process.

Franklin Graham, who also heads Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical relief organization, has been to New Orleans five times since Hurricane Katrina.


But the elder Graham is increasingly debilitated by age. At 87, he suffers the effects of Parkinson’s disease and a broken hip, among other ailments.

On Wednesday their motorcade halted at the intersection of Forstall and Galvez streets. Graham climbed out of the back seat of his SUV with the assistance of several hands. He did not try to walk about.

Franklin Graham helped his father back into his seat and arranged the seat belt across his lap.

“I’m sorry I’m so crippled,” the elder Graham told those outside.

Spokesmen for his ministry, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said Graham was so moved by images of suffering beamed from New Orleans that he felt compelled to come preach hope despite his disabilities.

Graham has prayed publicly at several major New Orleans events, including the 1988 Republican National Convention, but apparently has not mounted a trademark crusade here since 1954, when he preached a monthlong event at Pelican and Tulane stadiums.

Since Katrina, spokesmen said, Samaritan’s Purse has contributed $38 million in relief to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The organization has coordinated the work of 5,000 volunteers and purchased 230 trailers for churches to distribute to their members.


MO/JL END RNS

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

Editors: To obtain photos of Billy Graham and son Franklin Graham in New Orleans, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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