It was the summer of 1972, a few months after my conversion at the age of 16, when I confronted, firsthand, Bill Bright’s evangelistic mission. I had taken a Greyhound bus cross-country from Ohio to Dallas, Texas, to attend Explo ‘72, Campus Crusade for Christ’s (CCC) week-long evangelism training conference. There, through daily workshops and evening praisefests at the Cotton Bowl, the zeal of the Jesus freaks was effectively harnessed. We were trained to use the Four Spiritual Laws (Bright’s evangelistic formula for pitching the gospel) and then unleashed to advance in an evangelistic blitzkrieg in our hometowns.
I broke in this innovative system on an easy target — my little sis (aged 15). I hoodwinked her into meeting me on the swing set, and then I laid out God’s blueprint:
• GOD LOVES YOU AND OFFERS A WONDERFUL PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE.
• MAN IS SINFUL AND SEPARATED FROM GOD, THUS CANNOT KNOW AND EXPERIENCE GOD’S LOVE AND PLAN.
• JESUS CHRIST IS GOD’S ONLY PROVISION FOR MAN’S SIN.
• WE MUST INDIVIDUALLY RECEIVE JESUS AS SAVIOR AND LORD. [see #35479 for detailed version]
Got it?
Without hesitation she told me she wanted to “receive Christ” and “pray the prayer.” I read the prayer from the booklet; she echoed. She cried; I cried.
I thought, THIS IS EASY.
We finished with a recitation of the principles outlined in the back illustrated by the Fact-Faith-Feeling train. The FACT of what God has done in Jesus is the engine that drives the train; FACT pulls FAITH behind it; FEELINGS take up the rear in the caboose. (“Our feelings — the caboose — must never drive the train,” I said.)
That encounter saved my sister.
Fifteen years after that Ohio summer she and I shared another life-changing moment. We buried her first-born child, who died of head injuries sustained in a freak accident. She died the day before her second birthday. The birthday cards were already in the mail.
During those dark days I pleaded with God that the faith my sister owned that day on the swing set would hold up.
In the end, it held. (Though her understanding of God’s “wonderful plan” moved into a new dimension.)
I have never dismissed the value of the Four Laws. I used to keep one copy in my wallet — just in case the opportunity to witness to somebody presented itself. But the booklet became so tattered and worn (from being dutifully kept but never used), I ended up throwing it away. I guess I stopped thinking about my Christian witness in terms of laws, plans, and trains.
In a similar vein, segments of evangelicalism have felt ambivalent about the Bright blueprint for kingdom building. The misgivings focus on three fronts: CCC’s “simplistic” theology; the “mass marketing” approach to evangelism; and the embrace of pragmatic means to fulfill the inspired end of reaching every person with the gospel.
THEOLOGY. Richard Quebedeaux notes in his biography of Bill Bright (I FOUND IT, 1979) that many dismiss his approach as “crassly superficial.” Former CCC staff worker Peter Gillquist led a handful of Crusade staff (and hundreds of other evangelicals) to Eastern Orthodoxy in the late eighties, citing a hunger for “something more” than the “reductionism” of Crusade-type evangelicalism. Ole Anthony of the Trinity Foundation points out: “The Laws offer nothing about the cost of discipleship.” Mark Noll writes in THE SCANDAL OF THE EVANGELICAL MIND that Bright and other “popular authority figures” have contributed to an intellectual environment in evangelicalism today that is “naive, inept, or tendentious.” Many Christians can’t abide reducing Christian doctrine to simple how-tos.
MASS MARKETING. Bright is a businessman. His business acumen has emboldened him to lurch ahead where many evangelicals fear to tread: He has wedded spirituality and marketing principles. J. I. Packer calls Bright “God’s entrepreneur to middle America.” “Some brilliant people can see their way to a formula that fits almost everybody,” Packer says. “Henry Ford did it with the Model T; Bill Bright did it with the Four Spiritual Laws.” Bright understands America’s appetite for a simple message with straightforward appeal. So the gospel presentation he has fashioned can be mass produced, expeditiously disseminated, and proficiently advanced.
But he is not JUST a businessman.
Bright is convinced that God has given him the mandate to reach “every single human on earth” with the gospel. Campus Crusade is the vehicle to that end. So he is also a visionary. And the wedding of these two forces can, at times, result in the passing over of the mundane details of ministry management and the sometimes faltering human element. And this introduces the third area of ambivalence.
PRAGMATISM. Campus Crusade has one mission: to get the gospel to every human on the planet. It is fueled by visionary zeal, plotted according to marketing principles, and executed by a multimillion-dollar ministry that includes over 14,000 workers. So things can, and do, go wrong. Bright finds himself in the center of painful controversies, some attributable to his own missteps, some not. Good people are sometimes swept up and away in the whirlwind of reaching the larger goal.
All of these, for good or ill, are parts of the picture of Bill Bright. Yet there is another side of him that completes the picture.
Entrepreneurs are supposed to have one thing on their minds: profit margins. While Bright epitomizes the hardball business wizard in his orchestration of CCC’s mission (Bright raises more money than you or I can dream about — Packer quips; “Bill stage-manages mass money”), on a personal level, he defies his entrepreneurial persona by renouncing personal wealth and material gain. In fact, his latest preoccupation is calling American Christians to self-denial, to repent through prayer and fasting.
So the businessman advances the cause by shrewdly applying market principles; the visionary defines his motives by denying self-gratification and greed, the very engines that drive our consumer culture. The visionary sees the landscape of possibility by the power of God, the businessman translates that vista into real estate. He rubs elbows with multimillionaires like the Bunker Hunts of the world, though his annual income is comparable to that of a McDonald’s manager.
Whether because of, or in spite of, Bright’s approach, God’s blessing is evident in his life and on his work. Campus Crusade’s marketed gospel, billboard tactics, and no-holds-barred global mandate are changing the world. Superficial, reductionist, tendentious or not, God used the Four Spiritual Laws to save my sister.
RANCHER TURNED VISIONARY
“Every farmer is a fool [DRAMATIC PAUSE] for who will stand by year after year and see his soil washed away without doing anything about it?” This provocative elocution won the young, lean, bareback bronco-riding Oklahoman William R. Bright (then 18) the national Future Farmers of America oration contest in 1939. The speech, entitled “I Dare You,” exhorted farmers to take advantage of the various methods of soil rotation (land terracing, treated soil, and fertilizer) to preserve the viability of their land. “Two farmers could be side by side — same soil, same sun, same rain; one is poor, the other is rich,” Bright, now 75, recalls. “There’s a difference in the way they do things. My challenge to them was: ‘I dare you to be different.’ “
Bright took his own advice. He, along with his wife, Vonette, launched Campus Crusade for Christ 46 years ago on the campus of UCLA, their first meeting targeting a sorority known as the “house of beautiful women.” Today the organization employs 14,200 staff along with 163,000 volunteers in 167 countries. The JESUS film alone (the life of Jesus on film, based on Luke’s gospel), created and produced by Crusade, has been viewed by over 850 million people in 219 countries in 400 languages. (According to their calculations, “tens of millions” have “responded” to the message.) U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT ranked Campus Crusade as number one in America’s “biggest” religious charities in 1995, outranking in total income the Christian Broadcasting Network, Focus on the Family, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Wycliffe Bible Translators. MONEY magazine (1993 and 1995) labeled it the most “efficient” religious organization in the U.S. (measured by the percentage of the charity’s income spent on programs). In 1996 Crusade’s “world revenues” (including U.S. and international ministries) totaled nearly $300 million.
According to the Brights’ estimate, CCC has helped reach at least 2 billion people with the gospel. They know this because, for years, Crusade quantified their results by tracking numbers, a method they no longer use (to Bright’s regret — “It’s important for accountability”). As newspaper editor and former CCC staff worker Ken Sidey says, “It is hard to go anywhere in Christian circles and not meet someone who has been touched by Campus Crusade for Christ.”
Still, Bright is self-deprecating. He calls himself a “puny termite somewhere out in space.” In his acceptance speech when he received the Templeton Award for Progress in Religion last year, he recounted how, before he became a Christian, he was driven by “selfish goals — materialistic pursuits.” All that changed after he surrendered his life to Christ at the age of 23. A few years after his conversion, he renounced his worldly inclinations and drew up a written contract with the Lord, proclaiming, “I am your slave.” Since then, Bright’s spiritual sensibilities have been consistently quickened with “overwhelming impressions” from God.
In July 1994 the Lord “impressed” upon Bright to pray for revival in America. He prayed, “Lord, I’ll fast for 40 days, but you’ll have to help me.” The third week of that fast he sensed that God heard his prayers and promised to send revival. “The Lord impressed me that he was going to send a revival that would be the greatest spiritual harvest this nation and the world have ever seen. But first,” he says, “there had to be a humbling and a brokenness on the part of believers.” Bright is not “given to prophecy” (“I’m a Presbyterian”), but he would “stake his life” on these promises. His confidence rests on the simple fact that this is what God “told” him.
CONFECTIONS TO CONVICTIONS
Bill Bright grew up “in the saddle,” the sixth of seven children on a ranch in Coweta, Oklahoma. His grandfather had been a pioneer in oil, so the family was very prosperous, though not pampered. The Bright ranch was also the “entertainment center” of the surrounding area, with a constant flow of people either soliciting his father for advice on cattle or attending one of many watermelon and ice cream parties the family sponsored.
According to Vonette, Bill inherited the “finer fibers” of a spiritual nature from his mother, Mary Lee Rohl Bright, who, says Bright, “was truly a saint, though I didn’t appreciate that when I was growing up.” He credits her strong character for many of the spiritual qualities he would eventually adopt.
He graduated from Coweta High School in 1939 (having developed his own herd of registered shorthorn) and went on to study economics and sociology at Northeastern State College in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. After graduating in 1943, Bright served for a year as part of the extension faculty for Oklahoma State. Then he moved west to seek his fortune in California.
Before “making it big,” however, Bright faced an unusual test. “The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, we all signed up for the military,” he says. “They knew I had a perforated eardrum, and they rejected people with perforated eardrums because of poison gas. So I went to the air force, the navy, the marines, the coast guard — anything to get in. I had three brothers and all of my fraternity brothers in the military. I was the only one left.” He went to California with the hope that he could overcome the obstacles he faced in his small town and find his way into the service there.
“I can remember watching Bill during that time,” says Vonette. “His face was red all the time. He was embarrassed to be 4F. It was the first thing that he’d ever wanted that he was not able to accomplish.”
His mother’s prayers began to catch up with him on his very first evening in L.A. While out looking for a good time, he picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be a member of the Navigators and, worse, the housemate of Navigators founder Dawson Trotman. He invited Bright to dinner with the Trotmans. Bright became positively predisposed to Christianity as a result of the Trotmans’ gracious demeanor. Later that same night he ended up at a party given by Dan Fuller, son of radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller (and soon-to-be founder of Fuller seminary).
Bright had no interest in God or related subjects at the time and by now had launched his own business, Bright’s California Confections, purveying “epicurean delights” — fruits, candies, jams, and jellies. But the pull toward faith became more acute when the elderly couple he was living with relentlessly urged him to come to their church (First Presbyterian of Hollywood) and hear their pastor, Louis Evans, Sr., preach. One Sunday, after a trail ride, he felt the pull to slip into the service (“smelling like a horse”) to hear Evans preach. Shortly after that, a young woman “with a come-hither smile in her voice” invited Bright to a church-sponsored party, which introduced him to the church’s social scene. He thought, if nothing else, becoming part of the church would expose him to the rich and famous who attended.
But his church attendance carried the additional effect of introducing him to the solid, radical declarations of the teacher of the college students there, Henrietta Mears. In the spring of 1945, when Bright was 23, Mears spoke about Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road. He recalls: “She ended her message by saying to us, ‘When you go home tonight, get down on your knees and say with the apostle Paul, Lord, what wilst thou have me do?’ “
There were no bells and whistles when Bright prayed this prayer. But, he says, “The Lord knew my heart; he knew I was sincere, and he changed my life.”
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Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Christianity Today magazine. July 14, 1997 vol. 41, no. 8, page 14
