On Bill Bright's influence on modern evangelicalism:
He was quite influential. He was perhaps the major figure in the mass marketing of evangelicalism, at least on a person-to-person basis. A key tenet of evangelism is that one ought to evangelize, and that's not easy for many people. People say, "I'd like to share my faith, but I don't know how to go about it." Bill Bright's genius was in giving people a way to do that. He had a vision for reaching every person on the planet with the gospel of Christ. He said, "Here is a booklet. Go through these four spiritual laws, ask if they would like to receive Jesus as their savior in prayer right now, and then press for a sale." And if you do it enough, if you engage in volume sales, if you make enough demonstrations, you will make sales. A certain percentage will respond; a certain percentage of those are uncertain, but a percentage will eventually stick. And in so doing, no doubt, [Bright] built up the core of evangelicals in the world to a quite significant degree. He enabled hundreds of thousands of, particularly, young people to share their faith with others and to win others to their faith, to Christianity. They went on, many of those young people, [and] either worked professionally with Campus Crusade (at one point recently, about half a million people were on the staff of Campus Crusade), or those who moved on to churches served as activists and catalysts for further activity in their churches. That was a significant legacy. That's been very instrumental in increasing the numbers of evangelicals -- he shaped it, in that way, positively. Many people think that he shaped it negatively in that he reduced the essence of Christianity to these four spiritual laws, which fall somewhat short of a full systematic theology.
On critics of his method:
The criticisms are that it's so simple it doesn't prepare people for many kinds of intellectual challenges, that it doesn't prepare them for the kinds of emotional difficulties they may face in life when they are faced with real tragedies, that it simply says, "God has a plan for your life. You are separated from God. Jesus is the only way, and you can receive Jesus." The implication is that everything will be all right. Of course, life is more complicated than that, and many people felt that unless people go much further into it and deeper into it, this will cause disillusionment.
A number of years ago, Peter Gillquist, who was a major leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, led a number of members of the organization out of it into Eastern Orthodoxy, because he felt that was deeper and more satisfying, and Eastern Orthodoxy represents something of the opposite pole from the Campus Crusade approach. That's just one example of how disillusionment was dealt with.
On Bill Bright and Billy Graham:
I think probably Bill Bright's ministry has been second only to Billy Graham's in its national and international import, and many people might actually say that it outstrips [Graham]. That's probably not true, but it certainly is a major -- I don't want to say competitor, because I think they clearly see themselves on the same team.
Billy Graham was the medium himself, even though he had an organization that prepared his crusades very thoroughly. People would say very often that even if Mr. Graham never showed up, the crusade would be a success because of all the people who had been invited and the prayers that had been offered and so forth. But still, people understood they were coming to see an evangelical star, if you will -- a person who was a famous celebrity as well as a famous preacher.
Bill Bright was unknown to many of the people who heard the four spiritual laws. People who become Christians for the first time through the Campus Crusade are not even aware that Bill Bright exists. He was much more the behind-the-scenes organizer, entrepreneur, fund raiser, master of the organization. Certainly within evangelical circles he was extremely well known. Outside those circles he was far less a public figure. His particular contribution was in providing a system and building an organization consisting of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of personal salespeople. Billy Graham was doing much of that work himself.
Bill Bright was more interested in bringing people into the evangelical circle and letting others do the job of growing. [Campus Crusade] did have a concern for building faith and giving people deeper answers than were involved in the four spiritual laws, but [Bright's] primary interest was in recruitment. Of course, Billy Graham's was as well, but there's the front of the stage and the back of the stage -- [those] were key differences. But they were great friends; they often cooperated with each other's ventures, and they endorsed and promoted each other's work and saw themselves as certainly working on the same team.
Billy Graham first came on the scene about the same time Campus Crusade began; they were both right around 1950. Billy Graham's first famous revival that got nationwide publicity was in 1949. Bill Bright founded Campus Crusade in 1951, so their careers were essentially identical in time. And when they came on the scene, evangelical Christianity had come out of a dark period, a period in the wilderness, moving away from a more narrow kind of fundamentalism after World War II. Although it was not such a numerical minority, [evangelical Christianity] was seen as something in the past. Now, evangelical Christianity ranks equally with Roman Catholicism and what's called mainline Protestantism, each of them taking about a quarter of the general populace. Now, no one doubts that evangelical Christianity is a major force. It is where much of the growth in Christianity, and much of the revival in this country, is coming from. [Graham and Bright] have not been the only contributors. There have been many, many other contributors, but certainly they have been two of the paragons, two of the strongest leaders in this. I don't think anyone familiar with this movement would doubt that at all.
