CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The other day, Billy Graham toured the showy museum that will soon open here to honor his six decades of bringing God's word to the high and the humble.
America's best-known evangelist walked through stage-set re-creations of the barn on his parents' dairy farm; the canvas tent where he held his first blockbuster revival; a graffiti-scarred checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, symbolizing his crusades behind the Iron Curtain.
As Graham finished the tour, his son Franklin recalled, Franklin asked how he had liked the tribute. The gruff reply: "Too much Billy Graham."
With Graham, at 88, in failing health, his family and friends have struggled to find an appropriate way to commemorate and carry on his work. A humble man who never saw a need to upgrade his cheap suits or his modest mountaintop home, Graham at first shrank from the idea of turning his life story into a tourist attraction.
Only when he was convinced that the project would serve as a perpetual crusade -- a tribute not to him but to Jesus Christ -- did Graham give it his blessing.
"The last thing my father wanted was to have a monument to himself," Franklin Graham said.
The Billy Graham Library is intensely focused on the Gospel, with dozens of video clips of Graham quoting Scripture. But the $27-million museum also boasts a splash of Disney, and that's troubled some of Graham's admirers.
Their concerns start just inside the enormous glass cross that forms the door to the 40,000-square-foot museum. The lobby is set up like a barn to evoke Graham's boyhood on a North Carolina dairy farm. Hens cluck on a soundtrack. A stuffed cat heaves a battery-powered sigh.
And amid bales of hay, a cow that looks uncannily lifelike begins to sing.
In a calculatedly Southern drawl -- the first attempt at a voice-over was deemed too Yankee -- Bessie tells visitors how a young Billy Frank used to practice preaching as he milked her. She invites children on a scavenger hunt as they walk through the museum, promising free ice cream at the snack bar as a prize. "Get moooving!" she urges.
Franklin Graham thinks the talking cow will teach children what he sees as the central message of his father's life: that God can do mighty works with anyone who submits to him, even a poor farm boy.
But critics, who emphasize that they have not seen the finished museum, worry that Bessie may be too gimmicky, unbefitting Billy Graham's air of dignity and purpose.
