Billy Graham was ordained a Southern Baptist minister, but almost everything he built after 1950 was designed deliberately not to look like a denominational ministry. His crusades were organized with local committees that spanned Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Pentecostal congregations working together, a cooperative model that departed sharply from the revivalism of earlier generations of American evangelists, whose campaigns were more often tied to a single church or movement. Hour of Decision, Christianity Today and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's later television and film work were all built to reach across those same denominational lines rather than to build up his own.
Over 417 live crusades between 1947 and 2005, Graham preached across more than 185 countries and territories, including a twelve week campaign in London and a sixteen week run at Madison Square Garden in 1957 that drew an estimated 2.3 million people in person. His own organization counts at least 210 million people reached live over that span, a figure it reports about its own founder rather than an independently audited count, and describes his lifetime broadcast audience, radio, television and film combined, as likely running into the billions once decades of syndication and rebroadcast are counted.
He advised or met with every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, wrote more than thirty books, and remained, by most public measures of American religious life, one of the most recognized Christian figures in the country from the 1950s until his death in 2018 at age ninety nine. The broadcasting infrastructure he built to answer a single midnight deadline in Portland outlived him by only two years before its own final program went off the air.