September 18, 2000
Finlay Graham remembered as missions pioneer
___By Erich Bridges
___SBC International Mission Board
___DALLAS (BP)--As a battle-weary Royal Air Force navigator flying over the Middle East during World War II, young Finlay Graham looked down and asked God to show him where he might serve in peace after the war.
___God answered that prayer. Graham, a tough Scotsman with a deep and abiding love for the Arab people, went on to serve nearly four decades in the region. He became Southern Baptists' first missionary to Lebanon, a gifted Arabic scholar and translator, and founder of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Beirut--now a center for training Baptist leaders from throughout the Arab world.
___Graham, 80, died Sept. 3 in Dallas after a period of declining health. A memorial service was held Sept. 9 at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas.
___Graham had many close encounters with danger and death during his action-packed life: During his early mission service in postwar Palestine, he and his wife were mistaken for Zionist spies and targeted for death. Instead of fleeing, which would have implied guilt, they welcomed into their home the men sent to kill them--and proved their innocence. The men left, thanking them for serving the Palestinian people.
___When serious fighting broke out in Lebanon in the late 1950s, Graham was temporarily running the Beirut Baptist School. "The bus drivers would not drive in certain areas where there had been fighting," recalls longtime missionary colleague Jim Ragland. "So Finlay got behind the wheel of this school bus and charged off into those areas to pick up students."
___Years later, he kept the seminary running when rockets were landing in the courtyard. The school didn't close for a single class day during a solid year of civil war in the 1970s. Once he was taken prisoner by PLO fighters in the city and taken to their camp. They released him, declaring him "harmless" after he showed them a tract about gaining peace with God.
___Graham got some of his grit from his native Scotland. Born in 1920, he grew up in hard times, eating mostly potatoes in a struggling but faithful Presbyterian family. Graham embraced Christ as his personal Savior at age 19 and later became a Baptist. He was in a university and already considering missionary service when World War II and RAF service came. When the war ended, he visited the empty "Garden Tomb" in Jerusalem, believed by many to be Christ's burial site.
___"I can't explain exactly what happened," he said. "But three hours later, when I came out (of the tomb), I was convinced that the Arabic-speaking world was my calling."
___He never wavered from that call. He returned to Palestine in 1946 as an independent missionary, with support from "a few praying friends" and savings from military service. While studying Arabic in a Jerusalem language school the next year, he met and married Southern Baptist missionary Julia Hagood, whose first husband, missionary Henry Hagood, had died in 1946. Graham was appointed a Southern Baptist missionary. Later he became a U.S. citizen and earned divinity and doctor of theology degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
___Today there are more Baptist churches in Lebanon than there were individual believers when the Grahams got started.
___"They all have their roots back in that first church," says Nancie Wingo, another retired missionary colleague. "All of us who followed are keenly aware that without what Julia and Finlay had done as pioneers, there wouldn't have been work in Lebanon."
___The Grahams left Lebanon in 1976 to serve as field representatives helping coordinate work throughout the Middle East for the Foreign (now International) Mission Board. After retiring from missionary service in 1986, he taught missions and Arabic to future missionaries at Southwestern Seminary and at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif.
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