Evangelist Billy Graham has died

The Rev. Billy Graham, who shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with hundreds of millions around the world through personal appearances and television and radio programs, has died. He was 99. Graham passed away at his home in Montreat, N.C., after suffering from cancer, pneumonia, and other ailments, his spokesman Mark DeMoss said. Born in 1918 on a dairy farm near Charlotte, N.C., Graham became a passionate follower of Jesus at age 16 after he attended a revival led by evangelist Mordecai Ham. Graham graduated from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., and married classmate Ruth Bell, the daughter of missionaries in China. They were married for 63 years until Ruth’s death in 2007. The couple had five children and numerous grandchildren. Throughout his career, Graham evangelized en masse at large gatherings called crusades all over the world and in private to world leaders, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. Graham once said, “Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”