Billy Graham Center Archives Continuing to Preserve Evangelical History

Although the BGC Archives is open to the public and welcomes unexpected visitors, it remains one of Wheaton’s best-kept secrets.

Few visitors to the Wheaton College campus in Illinois—whether potential students and their families, attendees at college-sponsored events, or the general public—realize that the campus houses a storehouse of evangelical history at the Billy Graham Center Archives.

Named after pioneering 20th-century evangelist, Billy Graham, the BGC Archives was founded as a resource to pastors and evangelists, offering a glimpse into the development of evangelism methods and the figures who practiced them in North America from the mid-19th-century to the present.

Although the BGC Archives is open to the public and welcomes unexpected visitors, it remains one of Wheaton’s best-kept secrets.

If the staff of the Billy Graham Center Archives are used to hearing one response from visitors, Wheaton students, and even faculty, it’s this one: “I had no idea this was here!”

While the staff of the BGC Archives thrive on collecting and preserving pieces of evangelical history, the best parts of the job is introducing visitors to treasures from the archives vault—Corrie ten Boom’s baptismal certificate, Billy Sunday’s obituaries, Chuck Colson’s correspondence, or Kathryn Kuhlman’s photo albums are just a sampling of the unique items available to use at the BGC Archives.

During the recent GC2 Summit at the Billy Graham Center, pastor Rick Warren toured the BGC Archive and leafed through missionary martyr Jim Elliot’s journal from 1949 that contains his famous quote: “He is no fool who gives what cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

Since the Billy Graham Center opened in 1980, the BGC Archives has served evangelists, pastors, scholars, and the general public by ...