Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright dies – News – Obituary
John Dart
William R. Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, which grew into one of the world’s largest evangelical ministries, reaching well beyond collegiate venues, died July 19 in Orlando, Florida, of complications from pulmonary fibrosis and prostate cancer. He was 81.
Starting in the late 1940s, “Bill” Bright came under the influence of Hollywood Presbyterian Church’s dynamic teacher Henrietta Mears–as did young evangelist Billy Graham, whose 1949 Los Angeles crusade gave him national visibility. Though Bright took seminary classes at Princeton Theological Seminary and the then-new Fuller Theological Seminary, the layman decided to use his entrepreneural skills, creating dozens of niche ministries from a mountainside headquarters near San Bernardino, California.
Both Graham and Bright would garner million-dollar Templeton Prizes in Religion for, among other things, innovatively multiplying their outreach through film and other media. Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws booklet, criticized roundly by many for presenting Christianity simplistically, was printed more than 2.5 billion times in more than 200 languages. An estimated 5.1 billion people have seen the John Heyman-produced movie Jesus that Campus Crusade dubbed into more than 800 languages.
Bright and Graham expressed admiration for each other’s ministries. In fact, Graham said in a statement July 20 that Bright “has carried a burden on his heart as few men that I’ve ever known … for the evangelization of the world.” But Graham, who had learned to avoid partisan politics in order to reach a wider audience, was among evangelicals who warned Bright publicly in 1974 against his new “Christian Embassy” in Washington, D.C., that could be seen as forming a political bloc in the capital.
For the most part, Bright eschewed social-political controversy and the secular press, putting his emphasis on spiritual goals. One of the few times he made headlines was when he wrote to Universal Pictures in 1988, offering to reimburse the studio for its investment–thought to be 810 million–in the controversial film The Last Temptation of Christ if all copies of the unreleased movie were turned over for destruction. The studio refused.
Outgrowing his southern California base by the start of the 1990s, Bright moved his headquarters to Orlando. The tightly run organization had grown to 22,000 full-time staffers by its 50th anniversary in 2001. That same year, doctors determined that Bright was afflicted with pulmonary fibrosis and he was officially succeeded by Steve Douglass, former executive vice president.
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
