Igniting the Fire to Be Published!

I am pleased to announce that I have been offered a contract on my book, Igniting the Fire-The Movements and Mentors Who Shaped Billy Graham. It is due for release in January 2015 through Shiloh Run Press, an imprint of Barbour Books.

It is a very personal book for me. When I first stepped onto the campus of Wheaton College as a freshman in 1999, I walked around campus wondering "I wonder where Billy Graham lived," "I wonder what he did as a student," and on and on.

At the same time I met a biographer named Lyle Dorsett, a professor of Christian Education and Evangelism. He had written a fantastic biography on D.L. Moody called Passion for Souls that I read, and as I sat down to talk with him about it and other biographies, he asked me, "Have you ever thought about writing biographies?"

I had just gotten the first 'C' of my life…in writing no less, and I wasn't sure it would be possible. But later on, I worked as Dr. Dorsett's research assistant, and began doing some of my own research on Billy Graham during college. Since his archives were housed at the Billy Graham Center on Wheaton's campus, I began studying in his archives.

And then my research began to branch out, from Billy Graham's time at Wheaton College (1940-1943), back to his time at Bob Jones College (1936-early 1937), and the Florida Bible Institute (1937-1940). I wanted to know how Billy Graham became world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham.

I began researching his mentors, reading through their papers where I could, interviewing classmates of his, digging through local newspapers from Wheaton, to Tennessee, to Florida, to Pennsylvania. I met wonderful people who opened their homes to me and shared with me treasures that hadn't been seen for dozens of years.

But more than all of this exciting research is the excitement of being able to write a book that not just tells the story of Billy Graham, or even tells of the environment and mentors and institutions who shaped him; but Igniting the Fire is part of my aim and desire that the Lord would raise up new laborers for the harvest for the 21^st century.

The coming months will require some work to get it out, but I look forward to see how God will use this book. And I will keep this post updated.