Billy Graham museum underway

There’s one gospel and there’s one way to God, and that’s through Jesus,” Billy Graham said as he summed up the heart of his ministry Aug. 26 at a groundbreaking ceremony for a library and museum at his Evangelistic Association’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C. 
   
The beloved 86-year-old urged some 400 supporters at the private ceremony to carry on his life’s work. 
   
He held what he has said will be his final revival meeting in June in New York City and struggles with physical problems including fluid on the brain, prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
   
Still, he said he hopes to be at the opening of the museum in 2007. The $25 million, privately funded library is expected to attract as many as 200,000 guests a year. 
   
The 40,000-square-facility will be designed to look like a dairy barn similar to the one on the farm where Billy Graham grew up in rural Mecklenburg County.
   
Visitors will enter through a massive glass cross in one side of the barn to see multimedia exhibits that take them through Graham’s journey from farm boy to the world’s most well-known evangelist. The building will also hold Graham’s archives. On the grounds will be the family homestead. The home was moved to Fort Mill, S.C., in the mid-1980s as an exhibit in Jim Bakker’s Heritage USA theme park, but has since been relocated to the museum site.
   
Franklin Graham, who succeeded his father as head of the evangelistic association, said the museum’s goal is not to glorify Billy Graham, but to show how God used him from the moment he committed himself to Jesus at a tent revival at the age of 16.
   
“Because he was obedient and said, ‘Yes,’ God took him out of that dairy barn and literally took him around the world,” Franklin Graham said. 
   
He said he hopes schools across the Carolinas will bring schoolchildren to the museum for field trips. At the barn, they’ll get a lesson from a special animal.
   
“We’ve got a talking cow,” Franklin Graham said, adding that the mechanical animal will be an attempt to reach young visitors. “How do you get young people engaged? … This milk cow is going to talk to you, is going to talk to the kids.” (EP)