Billy Graham Evangelistic Association

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association exists because a crusade audience in Portland, Oregon took a preacher's offhand challenge seriously. Billy Graham had been approached about starting a radio program to carry his preaching beyond whatever city he happened to be visiting, and, not entirely expecting to be taken up on it, he told his summer 1950 Portland crusade that he would commit to the idea if listeners pledged twenty five thousand dollars in a single night. The congregation gave roughly twenty four thousand dollars during the service, and two more five hundred dollar gifts arrived at his hotel room before midnight.

Graham now had a program to build and no legal entity to build it with. His business manager, George Wilson, filed incorporation papers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association came into existence on September 15, 1950, its very first job being simply to hold and account for money that had already been pledged for a radio program that had not yet gone on the air. Hour of Decision followed within two months, first broadcasting that November.

What began as a receiving account for one night's pledges grew, over the following decades, into the organizational structure behind everything the Graham ministry produced: crusade telecasts, films, Christianity Today magazine founded in 1956, and Decision magazine. The association moved its headquarters from Minneapolis to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2003, closer to Graham's adopted home state, and continues operating today under the leadership of his family, seventy five years after a single Portland crusade audience decided a preacher's dare was worth funding.

Hour of Decision was the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's only product for less than six years. In 1956 the association backed the launch of Christianity Today, a magazine intended to give American evangelicalism an intellectually serious publication of its own, distinct from both liberal Protestant journals and the more populist fundamentalist press of the era. Decision magazine followed as the association's own membership publication, and crusade telecasts and films extended Graham's reach well beyond whatever city or country he happened to be preaching in that week.

The association's structure mirrored the shape of Graham's ministry itself: built to be interdenominational rather than tied to any single church body, and increasingly international as his crusades moved from American cities to London, to Asia, to what was then the Soviet bloc. By the time Graham stepped back from active ministry in his final years, the organization that had begun as a receiving account for one Portland congregation's pledges was producing television specials, films, two magazines and a radio program syndicated across hundreds of stations worldwide.

The association moved its headquarters from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Charlotte, North Carolina in 2003, and Graham himself lived his final years nearby in Montreat, North Carolina, where he died in 2018. BGEA continues today under the leadership of Graham's children and grandchildren, still publishing Decision magazine and maintaining the archive of six decades of Hour of Decision broadcasts, even though the program itself went permanently off the air in 2016.