Two Pies, One Grandson, and the Faithfulness of God

By Philip C. Johnson — May 17, 2026

http://www.globalnext.org

I just returned from a Global Next conference in Greece, and against my usual habit, I’m writing about a student group, rather than a global event. In twenty years of taking students and adults around the world, anchoring biblical truth to the places where it happened, I’ve had no shortage of exceptional groups or extraordinary stories. But this one felt like an exception inside the exception.

The students came from Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, gathered and shepherded by the esteemed Beth Groves, head of library sciences at Asbury and Global Next’s Kentucky Regional Coordinator. Most of them barely knew each other before boarding planes for Europe. By the second dinner they were already trading stories and inside jokes the way only international travel allows. By the end of the week they had become something like family.

Our theme for the conference was the strange culture we now inhabit. A culture that has, with breathtaking confidence, rewritten doctrines of marriage, reality, identity, and truth itself. Our backdrop was Greece. Athens. The Areopagus. The place where the Apostle Paul stood nearly two thousand years ago and confronted another civilization equally convinced of its own wisdom.

Truth was the thing with Paul.

The truth of Christ crucified, buried, and risen. The truth that sin carries a debt we cannot pay ourselves. The truth that Christ paid it anyway.

That is still the thing.

Two moments from those nine days in Greece have stayed lodged in my memory.

The first came through a student named Andrew Schwartz.

Just before the trip, someone mentioned that Andrew had traveled with Global Next seven years earlier, when he was fourteen years old. That would have been 2019, only months before COVID arrived and rearranged the world.

The pandemic took lives. It strained families. It isolated people. For small business operators like myself, it was a hard and disorienting stretch that often felt like trying to walk through fog while carrying weight you could not put down. There were moments when the future of Global Next itself felt uncertain.

But God, as He has done before and will do again, supplied sustaining grace.

Global Next survived. When the world reopened, the work continued. Young Christians still came, eager to understand the world through a biblical lens and to stand faithfully inside a culture that increasingly treats conviction as extremism.

And then there was Andrew.

Without intending to, he became a visible reminder that what once looked like an ending had not been the end at all.

During that Oxford program years ago, I had bought him a cherry pie from Tesco. I have absolutely no memory of why. Maybe he looked hungry. Maybe it was simply the nearest thing on the shelf. But he remembered it.

Seven years later, standing in Greece, he brought it up with complete clarity.

So I bought him another cherry pie.

It sounds small. It was small. Just a pie handed from one man to another from a small bakery thousands of miles from where the first one had been purchased. But standing there, I realized God sometimes gives us tiny physical markers so we can see His faithfulness with our own eyes.

A boy had become a man—a pretty impressive one at that.

And somehow, through all the chaos in between, God had carried both of us through and woven our lives together once again.

The second moment came in the ruins of ancient Corinth.

Avery Annas, who refers to himself as Avery “Windmill” Annas, introduced me to a man he had just recognized from a conference back home: Jonathan Lotz, grandson of Billy Graham.

What Avery could not have known was what that introduction meant to me.

Billy Graham was the man God used to bring the Gospel to my father.

My dad was, by his own estimation at the time, “pretty good.” But through Graham’s preaching, he came face-to-face with the reality that “pretty good” is not righteousness. He understood that he was a sinner who could not save himself. And there, hearing the simple proclamation that Christ had died, been buried, and risen again, my father placed his faith in Jesus.

That decision changed our family forever.

My father and mother shared the Gospel with their children. That is how I became a Christian.

Both my father and Billy Graham are now with the Lord.

And there I stood in Corinth, on the same stones where Paul once preached Christ to the Gentiles, shaking hands with Billy Graham’s grandson.

I thanked him for his grandfather’s faithfulness to biblical truth.

It felt, for just a moment, as though God had allowed me to see the chain.

Paul preached Christ.

Centuries passed.

Billy Graham preached Christ.

My father believed.

My parents taught their children.

And now I was standing in Corinth with a new generation of students, trying to teach them to remain faithful in their own age.

This is a very big world filled with billions of people and an almost endless number of stories. Glorious things happen. Horrific things happen. Most moments disappear forever without explanation.

But every now and then, God pulls back the curtain just enough for you to notice His fingerprints.

A cherry pie.

A handshake in ancient ruins.

A fourteen-year-old boy returning seven years later as a grown man.

The grandson of the evangelist who helped lead my father to Christ.

None of these things are necessary for faith. Scripture is sufficient. Christ is sufficient.

But sometimes the Father, in His kindness, gives visible reminders to tired people.

The whole week was special. One more remarkable group among many remarkable groups. But this one felt different. It felt less like I was doing all the talking and more like the Lord Himself was quietly encouraging me along the way.

And I came home reminded that the God who confronted Athens through Paul, who reached my father through Billy Graham, who carried Global Next through a pandemic, and who is now raising up students from Asbury University in this confused and fractured generation, has not changed.

He is still present.

Still active.

Still faithful across the generations.