A crowd of 1,500 people, including three former presidents, gathered in Charlotte, N.C., May 31 to dedicate the Billy Graham Library, something the evangelist called “just a building” and an instrument to share the gospel.
Former President George H.W. Bush was the keynote speaker for the dedication of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., May 31. Bush said Graham has comforted four generations of his family, including his mother.The 40,000-square-foot, $27 million facility sits on 63 acres just four miles from the farm where Graham grew up. It will open to the public June 5 for 90-minute self-guided tours with no cost for admission.
“I feel like I’ve been attending my own funeral with all these speeches,” Graham, 88, said during the dedication. “I know they all meant it. But I feel terribly small and humbled by it all, and I feel I don’t deserve it because it’s been a whole team of people who have worked together, prayed together, traveled together, believed God was going to do wonderful things together.” Graham had asked former President George H.W. Bush to deliver the 12-minute keynote address for the dedication, while former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter spoke for about five minutes each. President George W. Bush, Graham said, sent a handwritten letter in recognition of the library’s opening.
In addition to remarks by his son Franklin Graham, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley and others, Graham’s longtime ministry partners George Beverly Shea and Cliff Barrows sang.
Guests tour the facilities of the Billy Graham Library. To the left is the house Graham lived in while growing up, moved from its original location about four miles away.A tour of the library begins in a barn representing Graham’s humble beginnings and expands into exhibits covering the eight-week tent revival in Los Angeles in 1949 that catapulted his ministry; his trips to Asia, Africa and communist Eastern Europe; and his sermons offering hope in troubled times of American history, according to The Charlotte Observer.
Towering above the six exhibits, four galleries of more than 350 photographs and two theaters is a cross-shaped glass window embedded in the front of the barn-shaped building.
“This library is not about Billy Graham, but it’s about the message that Billy Graham has preached for the last 60-plus years,” Franklin Graham said at the dedication. “And that is the message of the cross. And if you look at the library, what you see is a cross. My father’s name is not on the building, but the cross. The only way that you can come into the library is through the foot of the cross.” – BP