Who was Bill Bright?

William “Bill” Rohl Bright (1921—2003) was an American evangelist and the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ International (now known as Cru in the United States). Cru is one of the largest Christian organizations committed to spreading the gospel and making disciples.

Bill Bright grew up on a 5,000-acre cattle ranch in the small town of Coweta, Oklahoma. He was one of seven children born to Forest Dale and Mary Lee Rohl Bright. His mother was a devoted Christian who took her children to church, but Bill’s authoritarian father had no interest in religion. Besides his baptism at age twelve in a Methodist church, Bill took no interest in matters of faith during childhood.

Bright received his primary education in a one-room schoolhouse before attending Coweta High School, where he was recognized as the “best-all-around student” at his graduation. In the fall of 1939, Bright entered Northeastern State College in Oklahoma, where he was elected class president and student body president, served as school yearbook editor, and was chosen as the college’s most outstanding student.

After graduating in 1943 with a bachelor’s degree, Bright tried to enlist in the military but was declined due to an ear injury. He taught extension students at Oklahoma State University for a few months, but in 1944 he moved to Los Angeles, California, to pursue financial success.

Bill Bright’s first business venture—Bright’s California Confections, which sold gourmet nuts and fruits—quickly succeeded. Around this time, Bill was invited to attend Hollywood’s First Presbyterian Church, where he began to see Christianity in a different light. As a child, he had perceived religion as appropriate only for women and children. But as a regular attendee of Hollywood Presbyterian, he met successful, attractive, motivated people who were also serious believers. In the spring of 1945, Bill Bright heard the church’s director of Christian education, Henrietta Mears, share about the apostle Paul’s conversion. As he listened, Bright converted, too, committing his life to follow Jesus Christ.

That same year, Bright began corresponding with Vonette Zachary, a childhood schoolmate from Coweta who was now a sophomore at Texas State College for Women. They were soon engaged but waited three years to marry so Vonette could complete her college degree. In the meantime, Bill began theological training at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1946. One year later, he transferred to the newly established Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, so he could better manage his confectionary business.

In June 1947, the vision for a campus ministry began to materialize as Bright, Mears, and others started a series of briefing conferences to inform college students about the need to win souls for Christ. By 1951, Bright believed God was calling him to leave Fuller, sell his business, and launch the Campus Crusade for Christ student ministry at the University of California in Los Angeles. In just a few months, hundreds of students had given their lives to Christ, and within a year, six people had joined Bright in ministering on three West Coast campuses.

Instead of building a traditional evangelism ministry, Campus Crusade focused on training young Christians to evangelize others. Bill Bright devised a simple gospel presentation called “God’s Plan for Your Life” as the ministry’s basic evangelism technique. By 1958, he had revised this method into a set of four spiritual laws:

In 1959, Bill Bright launched his Lay Institute for Evangelism (LIFE) programs to teach his method to churches. Many college campuses and churches quickly adapted and adopted the technique. Being relatively free of dogmatism and legalism made it attractive to people from diverse religious backgrounds and traditions. Because of its simplicity, the program was highly effective in leading people to an initial faith commitment without having to explain complex theological terms.

By 1960, Campus Crusade staff had expanded to more than one hundred members actively ministering on forty campuses in fifteen states. Bright expanded from these campuses into an international movement that today operates on nearly 9,000 campuses worldwide with 26,000 staff members and 225,000 volunteers in approximately two hundred countries.

In 1979, Campus Crusade introduced the Jesus film, a documentary based on the life of Christ according to the Gospel of Luke. Since its release, the film has been translated into more than 1,400 languages and viewed by over 5 billion people in some 225 countries.

In 1980, Bill Bright held a prayer gathering in the nation’s capital, with one million people in attendance. It was called “Washington for Jesus.” Five years later, he sponsored Explo ’85, a satellite evangelism training event broadcast to Christian groups in sixty-eight countries. Two years later, he unveiled a plan called New Life 2000. Its goal was to present the gospel to every person on earth and see a billion souls saved by the year 2000.

In 1996, Bill Bright was awarded the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He donated the prize money to promote the spiritual benefits of fasting and prayer. Bright received various lifetime achievement awards and honorary doctorate degrees from colleges and universities. He was inducted into the National Religious Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2002.

Bright wrote more than one hundred books and pamphlets in his lifetime. His Four Spiritual Laws booklet has been translated into two hundred languages and distributed to an estimated 2.5 billion people.

In 2001, Bill Bright announced that he was terminally ill with pulmonary fibrosis. He died on July 19, 2003, at age 81. His simple yet revolutionary training approach changed the face of evangelism, giving everyday Christians the tools to share their faith and advance God’s kingdom on earth.