“Having this family legacy of proclaiming the Gospel is a gift,” said Will Graham in the BillyGraham.TV special The Legacy of the Gospel. Over the coming weeks we will be sharing a new limited blog series that take a look at this family legacy.

The Prayer in the Pasture

Following a near-fatal accident in 1932, Billy Graham’s father, Frank, was reminded of the importance of his spiritual life.

“For days the outcome was uncertain,” recalled Billy in his autobiography Just As I Am.

“Mother summoned her friends to intensive prayer. Both my parents ascribed the full recovery to God’s special intervention in answer to prayer.

I have no doubt it was partly that experience that prompted Father to support the Christian businessmen in Charlotte who wanted to hold one of their all-day prayer meetings in our pasture [on the farm] in May 1934. The group had held three similar meetings since they started praying together fourteen months earlier. My mother invited the ladies to the farmhouse for their own prayer meeting.

Years later my father recalled a prayer that Vernon Patterson had prayed that day: that out of Charlotte the Lord would raise someone to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.”

The life on a dairy farm in Charlotte, North Carolina, hardly seemed like the place where God would call out a preacher to be His ambassador to the world, but Billy’s parents, Morrow and Frank Graham, had a vision for their son. They prayed he would accept Christ. That prayer—and the prayer in the pasture—was answered in the next decade as Billy recognized God’s call on his life for the purpose of evangelism.