Since 1989, Jack Graham has been pastor of the 20,000-member Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas, where he preaches to 12-13,000 people each weekend. In June he was also elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination.

Preaching: We seem to be living in unsettled times. Economically, the threat of war, cultural upheaval -- as you gauge the times in which we live, how does that impact the way you preach?

Graham: The scriptures always speak to crisis, and certainly our nation is in crisis. The world faces uncertain days. So it is a relatively easy thing to take scripture -- so much of which was written in a time of crisis. Certainly when you read the New Testament -- the New Testament church was facing an adversarial culture, and a world that was very bloody and dangerous.

We just dedicated a new wing in our facilities in Texas, and we lifted up a cross connected to the rubble at the World Trade Center. I actually held up in my hands two crosses that were forged out of the rubble and the metal from the collapse. The message of Christ and the cross rises out of the rubble of human depravity and gives us the opportunity to bring a message of hope and life to the world.

Those of us who proclaim and share the Christian faith have the most incredible opportunity and the most open door in my lifetime. 9/11 marked our generation forever, just as Pearl Harbor marked a previous generation, the "greatest generation." My prayer is that Christians in our time and our nation will rise to the occasion. We have the privilege -- those of us who preach and teach -- to undergird and strengthen believers in this time in order to take on the issues of life.

We have a new generation coming along. I look out at our young adults, our teenagers and even younger, and I really feel the weight of that. I feel the responsibility of preparing our families for hard times, and I don't expect it to get any easier.

So we have a message, and certainly when it's biblical it's concurrent with the times, but it also speaks to the future, and the promise and the hope of tomorrow that we have in Christ.

Preaching: We recently marked the first anniversary of the 9/11 events. How did you try to approach that issue in your own preaching.

Graham: It is so important for those of us who preach Sunday after Sunday to connect to the issues of the day. I remember last year right after the actual events of 9/11,1 put aside what I was doing at the time -- preaching through Ephesians. I laid aside the series to deal with the particular issues we were facing.

Then again this fall, in the rememberance of 9 /11,1 was actually able to take what I was doing. I've been preaching through Genesis this year, and the Sunday after 9/111 preached a message on "The Genesis of Jihad." I went back into the life of Abraham and even before, to Cain and Abel, to show the hatred and hostility in the human heart, and even to Adam and Eve and the hatred that exists in the human heart, the depravity as a result of sin. Particularly I did a message on Abraham and his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, and related that to the current problem.