graphite · the person, and the ground they chose
PLATE I · THE KINGS
Jack
Graham
Prestonwood Baptist Church · the pastor who was handed a broken church and spent thirty-six years healing wounds he did not cause
In 1989 he was called to a Dallas megachurch just broken by its founding pastor's affair — members leaving for the disgraced man's new congregation, trust in ruins — and his real work was never the growth everyone counts, but healing wounds he had not caused. He stayed thirty-six years in one place while lesser men chased bigger platforms, and he answered that inherited betrayal the only honest way he could: by modeling, in public and for decades, the faithful marriage his congregation had been burned on. The steadiest thing about him is simply that he did not leave.
The drawing is how we see them; the photograph is the proof we looked. Senior pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas since 1989; two-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention, 2002–2004 · wrote Courageous Parenting with his wife Deb, teaching the very fidelity the church had been wounded by · called Billy Graham his "spiritual father."