Four-Day Graham Festival Reaches 187,350 in India

CHENNAI, INDIA, Jan. 25, 2010—Evangelist Franklin Graham completed a four-day Festival in Chennai, India over the weekend (Jan. 21-24), reaching 187,350 in a country that is 83 percent Hindu.  Hearing the Gospel message of hope, nearly 15,000 people responded to the invitation to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.

"Life is precious but life can also be short, and we never know what day will be our last," said Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and international relief organization Samaritan's Purse.  "Many people in Haiti recently woke up and had no idea they would be victims of such a horrific tragedy. If you were to die today, are you ready to stand before a holy God?"

While in India, Graham continued to lead a more than $10 million aid response to the earthquake ravaged nation of Haiti.  Both Samaritan's Purse and the BGEA have been working on the ground since the initial disaster providing both spiritual and physical relief.

The BGEA has responded to the crisis in Haiti by sending chaplains to help victims deal with their emotional and spiritual stress.  Trained chaplains provide comfort and prayer to those that have lost friends and loved ones or been injured by the earthquake.

Samaritan's Purse has responded by providing disaster relief experts, clean water, medical aid and temporary shelter to desperate earthquake victims.

Also during his visit in Chennai, Graham and his team gave out shoe box gifts to children in one of the poorest parts of the city.  A project of Samaritan's Purse, Operation Christmas Child has hand-delivered more than 6.6 million shoe box gifts to poor and neglected children in the country since 1998.  

Graham also met with many of the leading pastors and city leaders in Chennai.  Some 1,400 local churches took part in the Festival.

The Festival in India is Graham's first event of 2010.  Other Festivals will be held this year in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Edmonton, Calgary and Fraser Valley, Canada; Osaka, Japan and Riga, Latvia.

Following the Chennai Festival, Graham traveled to Africa to visit relief projects in Sudan.  To date, Samaritan's Purse has provided hospitals, food programs and rebuilt more than 300 churches destroyed during the countries deadly civil war.