[piano intro] - Hello.

I'm Nido Qubein.

Welcome to "Side By Side."

My guest today is one of the most influential voices in faith and stewardship.

Leading outreach in 170 countries, he's the president of Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Join me today as we discuss a message of hope with the Reverend Franklin Graham.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side" with Nido Qubein is made possible by... - [Announcer] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- [Announcer] For 60 years, the Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group.

Great people, smart service.

- [Announcer] Truist.

We are here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our teammates makes the difference every day.

Truist.

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[bright music] - Reverend Graham, welcome to "Side by Side."

I have so much I want to talk to you about.

I know you've had a life filled with success and framed with significance, and I'm so impressed with all the good works Samaritan's Purse does.

And I know that you have been a committed person of faith, helping people all over the world.

I want to dig into some of that with you.

But first, how does it feel to be the son of a very internationally famous individual, Billy Graham?

- You know, that's always been a very difficult question to answer because I have nothing to compare it to.

You know, he's just- - He's the only dad you've had.

- The only dad I had and just, he was a very loving person.

He and my mother, we had a happy home.

I never saw my parents argue one time.

- You've never seen them argue?

- [Franklin] Never argued.

- That's because they got you out of the house first when they argued.

- I think if they had differences of opinions, they took it back to the bedroom and closed the door and had their conversation.

- [Nido] Yes.

- But not in front of the children.

- Yes.

- So I never saw them argue.

- Yes.

But in terms of, you know, when there's a famous dad and a very powerful dad, as your dad certainly was, and then you followed in wonderful ways to make sure that the association continues, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and the library came to be while you were certainly in leadership and all of that, some people sometimes struggle with that, you know, following in the footsteps.

You don't seem to have that bother you at all.

You seem to have done amazing things in your own way, in your own right.

- I think I never tried to be Billy Graham and never planned to preach 'cause I knew I could never fill his shoes.

And so when I was about 18, I was in the Middle East, working at a little hospital in Jordan, near the Syrian border.

And I just felt that that was something that I wanted to help people and just, that's what I felt that God calling me to do.

And so that was my focus.

And so over the years, Samaritan's Purse grew and the organization got bigger.

So when my father got ready to not retire, but he just didn't want to run the day-to-day of his organization, he just said, "Franklin, would you be willing to take the day-to-day leadership?"

I said, "If that's what you want me to do, I'll be glad to help you."

He said, "What will you do with Samaritan's Purse?"

I said, "I'm not gonna do anything."

He said, "You can't run both of them."

I said, "Why not?"

He said, "I don't know.

I've never heard of anything like that."

I said, "It's not that I run every aspect of the organization, and you don't do that at the Billy Graham Association."

I said, "Well, you have good people.

They just have to be given direction.

This is where we're gonna go this year.

This is what we're gonna do today or this week.

This is our focus.

And you let your team do it."

I said, "That's the way I'll run it."

He said, "Okay, we'll try it."

[laughs] So that's what we did.

- And you did, and it has worked just fine.

- Well, it took the pressure off of him.

- [Nido] Yes.

- And I understand that 'cause I'll be 73 this year, and you understand, you look at the future, and I've already got my youngest son who will take over Samaritan's Purse.

I've got my oldest son who will take over the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

So I understand the pressure of succession.

- [Nido] Yes.

- And making sure that it is done right.

- [Nido] Yes.

- And put your right people in it.

So I'm fortunate, I've got wonderful children that understand ministry, but also understand business too.

- [Nido] Mm-hm.

- Because it is a business.

It is not that you're there to make money, but you want to spend money wisely.

You want to use it correctly.

And you've got to understand just basic principles of business.

- No question.

Whether it's a university or, you know, Samaritan's Purse or anything, you have to have the fundamentals.

Just give us a quick overview of the distinction between Samaritan's Purse, distinction and relationship between Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

- The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is evangelism.

And my father believed in taking the stadiums of the world, taking TV and radio, internet.

He didn't have a chance to use the internet too much.

It was new in the last years of his life.

But using whatever opportunity to tell people about God's son, Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, "I'm the way, the truth, and the life and no man comes to the Father but by me."

And one of my father's Bible verses that he anchored his ministry in, John 3:16, that "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him shouldn't perish, but should have everlasting life."

And so this was kind of the foundation of my father.

That was his focus of his ministry.

Samaritan's Purse, we do the same thing, but we take the ditches and we take the gutters and we take the wars and we take the famines of the world and we help people, but we do it in Jesus' name.

I want people to know that God loves them, that he hasn't forgotten them.

And many times when a person goes through, like what we saw with this last storm, Helene- - [Nido] Western North Carolina.

- Yep.

Well, people think that God is mad at 'em.

You know, why did I lose my house?

Or why did I lose my son?

Or why did I lose my daughter?

Is God mad at me?

Is He judging me?

No.

God loves us, the Bible tells us.

But we go through these storms in life.

And so at Samaritan's Purse, we take these storms and we try to find ways to help people in the middle of these storms and do it in the name of Jesus Christ.

So the two organizations are different.

- Are they distinguished one from the other?

- Oh, yeah.

Two different board of director, different management, different teams, and- - Different budgets.

- Different budgets, all of that.

Yes.

So I wear two hats, but I have two teams, wonderful teams.

And the teams that we have are committed to taking this gospel message.

- Which is the bigger organization?

- Samaritan's Purse.

- It's a bigger one.

- Yes.

- So give us some statistics.

How many countries are you working in?

How many people are involved?

I hear a lot about volunteers who love working with Samaritan's Purse.

I know, I have some understanding of what it is you do.

But give us some statistics about numbers.

- Volunteers, we would have about 240,000 or so volunteers.

- 240,000.

- Volunteers.

- Not all in the US.

- That would work with us at some capacity during the year in Samaritan's Purse.

So we have a staff of several thousand.

I think... And that would include our staffs overseas, but not our, I think it's about 2,000, you know, we have here in the US.

- That's a big organization.

- It is, yes.

- And its revenues come- - It's private.

- Strictly from donations?

- [Franklin] Private donations.

Yes, sir.

- Philanthropic donations.

- Yes.

We don't- - No government money.

- No.

Now, there would be, it wouldn't be more than just a few percentage points of our total income, but like USAID overseas, there may be a certain part of the world that they would like us to help do food distribution 'cause we're already doing it.

- Right.

- And so they would give you so much money for that.

You can't use it for evangelism, but you certainly can use it to buy the food and so forth.

And we do that.

- And how does, I like your wording, ditches and famines and, you know, basically catastrophic events that happen in the world that you are there helping them- - [Franklin] Yes.

- Deal with these difficult times.

How do you get in there if it's a war-torn part of the world, for example?

You mentioned Syria.

I read somewhere where you were in Gaza- - Yeah.

- Doing something.

How do you penetrate a part of the world that is so dangerous and difficult, let's say, to be engaged in?

- Carefully.

[both laugh] - Very carefully.

- Yes.

- Very carefully.

- To give you, for instance, right now, Christmas Day, we set up a hospital in Sudan.

And this would be north of Khartoum and south of Port Sudan, kind of on the road in between.

And we worked with the Sudanese government and they allowed us to come in.

So it's a maternity hospital, so it's a, and we keep here in North Carolina about five hospitals in our warehouse in North Wilkesboro.

So if we need to set it up for, like we did for maternity, we set it up for that here, put it on our plane here in Greensboro.

- Equipment and supplies, or- - Yes, everything.

And your staff.

And we flew them into Port Sudan.

And so we then we trucked them up to this area where they want us to set it up.

And it was Christmas Day, we opened it up.

And now that's a very, Sudan is in the middle of a civil war.

Right now in Syria, the fighting is still unstable, but Damascus has gotten, what I would say, calm.

And so you go into Beirut and you go up to the border and there was nobody there to check your passport.

They just kind of wave you through.

And we go in and we begin to ask questions of the Minister of Health.

And we met with them and talked to them about what we could do.

And we'll go back at the end of this month with a survey team about putting another hospital in.

It's here.

But sometimes you just have to go and look and, you know, if you get turned away, you get turned away.

But we always pray before we go.

Always just, our teams and myself, "God, if this is what You want us to do, open the door for us.

If this is not something that You want us in, close the door."

And God always opens doors for us, so.

- How do you select where you do your work geographically?

How do you select Sudan or Syria versus, you know, some other part of the world?

- Well, we've worked in Sudan for 30 years.

- Have connections and associates and volunteers.

- 30 years we've been working there and been involved in the South quite a bit.

And that's been, you know, again, another war zone.

Difficult.

One of our hospitals got bombed by President Bashir.

And so I went to Khartoum to talk to him about it.

I said, "Mr. President, you bombed my hospital."

He turned to one of his aides.

He said, "We bombed it, right?"

And the aide, "Yes, Mr.

President."

And he kinda laughed.

He thought it was funny.

And I thought, well, I'm not gonna let him get by with that.

I just, I said, "Well, Mr. President, you missed."

And he quit smiling, quit laughing.

And then we began to have a conversation.

But then we, sometimes you just have to go and talk to these people.

And as a result of that conversation, he opened up an opportunity for us to put a hospital in Khartoum, a maternity hospital, so.

- You've had many opportunities to talk to US presidents and other leaders around the world.

Does someone stands out in your mind as a person who told you a story or a person who has done something or a person who has influenced you in some way that is memorable and you would share it with your children or grandchildren?

- Oh, there's... George H. Bush was an incredible person and a very engaging person.

Remember when I was with him and my father at his son's inauguration of Governor of Texas, and we're all on one floor at the Omni Hotel, and the whole Bush family was on one floor and my father and I had our rooms up there on the same floor with the family.

And so a little unusual to open up the door to go in the hall and you see President Bush running down the hall in his pajamas to- - Trying to get ice from the machine.

- To get something.

But at a dinner, we sat together and he sat beside me.

He said, "Franklin, let me share with you who my family is."

And so he pointed to each person.

And now this is a niece and her name, and he'd tell me a little bit about her and what she did.

And one of them was very much involved with the Dalai Lama.

And so he said, "You know, if she corners you, you know, she's going to bring this up, just so you are aware."

"Well, thank you.

I appreciate that, Mr.

President."

[laughs] You know?

And but so each person in the room, what they did, who they were, where they worked, and what their faith was and how much I appreciated that just to, yeah, I was just there to help my father who was getting old, help him, you know, to get in and out of cars and so forth.

And how the president, how engaged, how interested he was in me.

- [Nido] Mm.

- And that I understood his family.

- [Nido] Mm-hm.

- And you cannot be in the presence of Donald Trump and not be impressed.

The man is brilliant.

And he's got... [laughs] You know, this past year, and I share this because he has said it.

He would use salty language in his messages.

And I wrote him a note.

I said, "Mr. President, people love your rallies and you're doing an incredible job communicating, but you don't need to use that salty language to get your opinion."

- Did you write it in your handwriting or did you type it up?

- No, I had it typed.

I wanted to make sure- [both laugh] - So it's formal.

You meant business.

- So he mentioned that in one of his rallies and he said, "Franklin Graham tells me I can't cuss."

[laughs] He said, "You know, maybe I don't need to."

He said, "I try to get my point across and I use this language sometimes to emphasize the point."

And so, and he mentioned that a number of times, that he was trying not to use that language anymore.

- Yeah.

- You know, that's- - Courageous of you to take the initiative to write that note.

- Well, I think if somebody doesn't tell you, you don't know.

- [Nido] Yeah.

- And I think to be honest, too many people in powerful positions have yes people around them.

- [Nido] Yes.

- People that tell them things that they want to hear to try to pump up their egos or whatever.

And if you're gonna be a friend to someone, you have to be honest, but not beat 'em up, but- - Lovingly honest.

- Lovingly honest, yes.

- Yes.

- Good way to put it.

- Yeah.

And you have done so much.

Samaritan's Purse has certainly done enormous work in Western North Carolina.

You were born in Asheville, North Carolina.

You live in Boone, North Carolina now.

It's a dear part of your life, that section of North Carolina, for historic reasons, obviously.

What is your take on what happened and how quickly it might turn around?

- Ooh.

We've never seen anything like this in my lifetime.

In the mountains, a little stream that'd be maybe be as wide as from me to you, just a little mountain stream, turned into raging rivers that would be almost as wide as this platform that we're on.

And so what happens is people that lived along these small streams, their houses weren't right there, but they were backed off maybe a few hundred feet from the stream, all that got destroyed.

The homes were washed away.

The wells were compromised.

The septic systems were gone.

But it was on either side of the streams.

So if you flew in a helicopter, you look, you don't see much damage.

But on either side of the streams, bridges are gone, culverts are gone, houses are off the foundations, barns are gone, people's pens for their livestock, gone.

So the damage in the rural areas, we've never seen anything like this.

If you go down toward Burnsville, Spruce Pine, the drainage area in Burnsville comes off Mount Mitchell.

And so it's about, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 miles of just these drainages.

And it took out everything below them.

Small dams collapsed.

If a person lived on this side of the stream and you want to go over there to get to the road to get to town, well, you couldn't because the culvert's gone.

And then once you got to the road, maybe you could go a mile, but then now there's a landslide and you can't get past the landslide or the mudslide.

So this type of, it hindered us.

We have a helicopter.

We started using a helicopter to go to fire stations and churches to see how we can help them, because the fire stations and the churches became kind of the local rallying where people rallied there.

- Yes.

- And went there for help.

- [Nido] Mm-hm.

- So, but I only have one helicopter.

So we called Joe Gibbs and he loaned his helicopter, Rick Hendrick.

"Yeah, sure.

Take our helicopter.

We'd be glad to help you."

And then we talked to, my son was in the military for 16 years, special operations.

He called some of the people he knew at Fort Liberty or Fort Bragg, which is now Fort Liberty, and 82nd Airborne sent some of their big heavy lift helicopters.

We started buying thousands of gallons of gasoline.

We took generators and we would deliver thousands of generators, tens of thousands of gallons of fuel.

And we'd take these big high-lift helicopters, these chinooks, and we'd fly 'em through the fire stations and we'd offload this.

Those helicopters would come back to the Boone Airport and we'd load 'em up again.

They'd take off.

And so we had a, it was probably the highest or the largest, at least that we've been told, the largest civilian airlift in the history of our country.

- How do you access all of these supplies?

You simply warehouse in anticipation?

- We have a large warehouse in Wilkesboro where we do warehouse, but for this flood, we weren't ready for it.

We needed generators.

We've always kept small amount of generators, but everybody needed a generator.

- [Nido] Not that many.

Yes.

- Nobody had fuel.

- Yes.

- And you had so many people that were sick, they were on oxygen and so forth, and they needed electricity.

So, but we didn't want to make the decision of who to give the generator to.

I mean, I don't know.

- One of the local organizations.

- You let the local people, let the pastors do it or let the fire chief do.

- It's an amazing logistical- - Yeah.

- It's hard for me to comprehend the logistical capacity to make something like that happen and make it quickly and to do it in as many countries as you're doing it.

How many countries is Samaritan's Purse engaged now?

- About 160, I think.

- 160, 170 countries.

- Yeah.

- And that alone is a massive amount of organizational expertise.

As you look forward to the many years that lie ahead of you, what is it that you have not done that you would like to do?

- Hmm.

I don't think...

I've never had a list of, you know, of things that I want to do or not do.

I just wake up in the morning and I ask this, my prayer is that God would guide and direct me according to His plan.

And it's not my plan, but His plan.

So if you look at Samaritan's Purse, it's not something that I have done.

It's just something God has done.

And God has brought the people, He's brought the finances, He's given us the resources.

I've always believed in infrastructure.

If an organization's gonna be successful, you have to have infrastructure.

You have to build in capacity, and you've got to have the ability.

So like having a warehouse, but having the right things stored there, ready to go, because when there is a crisis, the things that you need, everybody else is going out trying to buy the same things that you need.

But if you already have them, then you are able to get out in front and help people immediately.

And so I've always believed in having, like here in Greensboro, we have our heavy lift department.

That's where we keep our DC-8 aircraft.

We have a 757.

We are in the process now buying a 767 and having these aircraft so that when there's a crisis in the world, we used to charter airplanes and everybody said, "Well, you ought to charter.

You just call and, okay, you can do that," until there's like a longshoreman strike in California and every cargo plane in the world is flying from China to the United States because the ships can't be unloaded.

- I'm amazed at all the work that you have done.

I'm also very appreciative for all the good discipleship and stewardship that you have done through both of these organizations, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and certainly Samaritan's Purse.

I thank you so much for being with me today on "Side by Side" and- - Thank you.

- May your blessings continue to come abundantly because you're making the world a better place.

- Shakran.

[bright music] - [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side" with Nido Qubein is made possible by... - [Announcer] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- [Announcer] For 60 years, the Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group.

Great people, smart service.

- [Announcer] Truist.

We are here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our teammates makes the difference every day.

Truist.

Leaders in banking, unwavering in care.