Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ by John G. Turner

Billy Graham will always be America's greatest preacher, but I have long maintained that his equal in terms of sheer influence was Bill Bright. John G. Turner does an excellent job in Bill Bright and Campus Crusade: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America giving us the context and history of this intriguing man and his ministry. Bill Bright was a young man from Oklahoma who moved out west to Los Angeles to seek his fortune in business. After some moderate successes, Bright was converted to faith in Jesus Christ and for the rest of his life he devoted his considerable energies towards evangelizing the world. But unlike Billy Graham, Bill Bright's greatest influence was not in his preaching, but in his entrepreneurial approach to spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ. In 1965 Bright wrote the famous Four Spiritual Laws which have been read and used 10's of millions of times in personal evangelism the world over. This was developed to make the gospel message easy to present, easy to understand, and start and end on its positives. Attesting to its effectiveness, it is available now in 150 languages. Another of Bright's accomplishments is the Jesus Film Project. He took a movie that was a painful flop in American theaters and turned it into a worldwide phenomena having resulted in 230 million commitments to follow Christ. Although these ideas clicked, Turner also points out that Bill Bright had many ideas fail and fail miserably. Bright had set the audacious goals of evangelizing the entire United States by 1976 and the rest of the world by 1980. He also had a vision to start a major university which nearly bankrupted the entire ministry before it failed. His Campus Ministry is still going strong and is regarded as one of the largest collegiate campus groups in America and yet has done little to change the tide of secularism in American students. But the larger point is Bill Bright was a man who was willing to dream big and take big risks for the sake of the Kingdom. Another aspect of his life that I found very admirable was that he dealt with millions of dollars and was in every respect a CEO, but lived a very moderate lifestyle and steered away from the scandals that have rocked so many other ministries. Along the way he also ruffled feathers and broken relationships. Once again to his credit, in the last years of his life he purposefully sought out many of these people and made amends. This book is far from a panegyric about Bill Bright. In fact in some places you want to cringe and say "what was he thinking!?" But on the other hand, I found Bill Bright's obvious tenderness and dedication to Jesus Christ quite inspirational and though he had his flaws, he attempted to offer the Lord more than most men ever attempt.