Billy Graham is often at pains to distinguish himself from the band of preachers known as "televangelists," and his programs have typically been formulaic in the extreme. Still, no evangelist has used television as efficiently, effectively, and, ultimately, as creatively as has Billy Graham.

The legendary preacher's initial experiment with television occurred in 1951, when he attempted to take his phenomenally successful radio program, The Hour of Decision, to the new medium. Some programs featured filmed segments from live crusades, where Graham was at his best, but most were studio productions that showed him in a study or living-room setting. They often included obviously rehearsed interviews and did not allow him to preach with the kind of intensity and effectiveness he could manifest before a large crowd. The program ran for nearly three years on the fledgling ABC network, but neither Graham nor his associates have ever regarded it as a particularly memorable effort. Years later, he told an interviewer, "They are interesting films, but I can't find anyone who ever saw one! Prime time on Sunday nights on network TV, and no one remembers."

Graham's next attempt to fulfill the Great Commission via the cathode ray tube came in 1957, during his summer-long crusade in Madison Square Garden. At ABC's invitation, and with J. Howard Pew's financial guarantees, Graham began airing his Saturday-night services live from the Garden. The first broadcast, on 1 June, posted an 8.1 Trendex rating, which translated into approximately 6.4 million viewers, more than enough to convince the evangelist of television's great promise as a vehicle for the gospel. A Gallup poll taken that summer revealed that 85% of Americans could correctly identify Billy Graham, and three-quarters of that number regarded him positively. In an innocent masterpiece of understatement, Christian Life magazine cautiously observed, "Undoubtedly, this fact will affect Graham's ministry."

Those first telecasts were quite simple. Cliff Barrows led a huge chorus in familiar hymns. George Beverly Shea sang "How Great Thou Art," a celebrity or two gave a testimony of the power of Christ in his or her life, Billy Graham preached, and hundreds of people streamed toward him when he offered the invitation at the conclusion of his sermon. Remarkably, Graham has stuck to that same prosaic formula for nearly forty years. To be sure, production values have improved dramatically, viewers are sometimes treated to a brief tour of the host city, Graham has adjusted his speaking style and bodily movements to the smaller screen, and the programs are aired weeks after the crusades end rather than live, but the basic elements remain the same.

One key to Graham's success in using television was an early decision not to attempt a weekly Sunday-morning program. As years of Nielsen and Arbitron ratings have demonstrated, the audiences for his programs, usually aired in prime time in groups of three on a quarterly basis, are far larger than those for the syndicated Sunday programs of other religious broadcasters. This larger audience also appears to contain far more unchurched people than do the Sunday shows. No less important, twelve programs a year, filmed while he is doing what he would be doing anyway, cost less than a weekly studio program, minimize the risk of overexposure, and cause far less drain on the evangelist's time and energy. In recent years, the production team has filmed all services in a crusade, then blended the best segments into three composite programs.

In addition to reaching for a mass audience with an edited product, Graham has long used the medium to carry crusade services live to audiences in locations far from the central arena. In 1954, during a twelve-week effort that packed London's Harringay Arena, the sound from the crusade was carried to various sites by landline relay. Twelve years later, during his 1966 visit to London, Graham used Eidophor projection equipment to supply a television feed to beam his message into auditoriums and stadiums in British cities where the ground had been prepared as if he were going to be present for a full-scale live crusade. A similar effort, also in London, followed in 1967. In 1970, he used an ambitious and innovative television relay system to transmit a crusade in Dortmund, Germany, to theaters, arenas, and stadiums throughout Western Europe and into Yugoslavia--"unscrambling Babel," as one aide put it--to reach speakers of eight different languages in ten nations.

In recent years, many of Graham's crusades, especially those outside the United States, have used satellite technology to elaborate on this means of multiplying the effectiveness of his crusades. Interestingly, the number of "inquirers" responding to Graham's invitation almost always match or exceed those registered at the central site. Encouraged by such results, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association launched an ambitious effort to reach virtually the entire world in a series of transmissions. In 1989, Graham preached from London to more than 800,000 people gathered at 247 "live-link" centers throughout the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and to an astonishing 16,000 sites in 13 nations of Africa. In most cases, the down-link was effected by means of low-cost portable satellite dishes. Another 20 African nations received the program by videotape a week or two later, usually after translation into one of nine different languages. The aggregate attendance at the African sites exceeded 8 million. In 1990, similar technology was used to beam Graham's sermons from Hong Kong to an estimated 100 million souls assembled at 70,000 locations in 26 countries of Asia. In 1991, a Buenos Aires satellite mission reached 5 million people at 850 locations in 20 countries.

The climax to these efforts and, in all probability, to Billy Graham's 50-year ministry, came in March, 1995, when the 76-year-old evangelist's distinctive voice and familiar message soared upward from his pulpit in Puerto Rico to a network of 30 satellites that bounced it back to receiving dishes in more than 165 countries. Plausible estimates indicate that, when network television telecasts and delayed videotape presentations were included, as many as one billion people heard at least one of Graham's sermons during this campaign, aptly titled "Global Mission." Graham sees no contradiction between "the old, old story" and the newest means to transmit it. "It is time," he observed, "for the church to use the technology to make a statement that in the midst of chaos, emptiness and despair, there is hope in the person of Jesus Christ."

-William Martin