Hour of Decision

When a Portland, Oregon crusade audience pledged twenty five thousand dollars in a single night in the summer of 1950, Billy Graham had committed to building a radio program without yet having written a script, hired a host or booked a single station. The money existed before the show did. Two months later, on November 5, 1950, that gap closed: Hour of Decision went on the air live from the Atlanta crusade, broadcast over the American Broadcasting Company's radio network under the direction of Cliff Barrows, Graham's longtime crusade music director and closest collaborator.

The format was deliberately simple, a half hour built around a condensed version of whatever sermon Graham had preached that week in whatever city his crusade happened to be visiting, framed by music and brief testimony from Barrows and the rest of the crusade team. Unlike a studio program built for a fixed audience in one city, Hour of Decision changed location with Graham himself, giving listeners a sense of following a genuinely national ministry rather than tuning into a local broadcast that happened to feature him.

The program's timing mattered as much as its content. Graham's Los Angeles crusade the year before had already made him a recognizable name; a national radio program gave that recognition somewhere to go every week, reaching listeners who would never sit in a crusade tent or a stadium seat. Within its first years Hour of Decision had already begun the expansion that would eventually carry it to hundreds of stations across the world, built entirely on the strength of one congregation's willingness, on one night in Portland, to fund a program that did not exist yet.

By 2010, sixty years after its first broadcast, Hour of Decision had grown from a single Atlanta crusade feed into a genuinely global program, carried on 581 stations across the United States and more than 400 stations internationally, reaching listeners in five languages across fifty five countries. Cliff Barrows had hosted every one of those broadcasts personally since the first, an unbroken sixty four year run behind the microphone that few American radio hosts of any kind have matched.

The program's longevity outlasted the era of network radio evangelism it had helped define. Where Hour of Decision had once competed for airtime alongside a handful of similar national religious broadcasts, by the 2010s American religious media had shifted heavily toward cable and satellite television, and a purely radio format built around a preacher's weekly sermon had become something closer to a historical format than a growing one. The original broadcast ended in 2014, closing out sixty four years on the air.

Rather than end the program outright, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association relaunched it as Hour of Decision Online, an internet audio successor still hosted by Barrows. That version ran for two more years before Barrows died on November 15, 2016, at age ninety three. The association closed the program permanently on December 22, 2016, a little over a month later, choosing to let the broadcast end with the voice that had carried it from its very first night in Atlanta rather than hand it to a new host.