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From One Radio Program to a Publishing and Broadcasting Operation

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From One Radio Program to a Publishing and Broadcasting Operation

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.

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