'Tomorrow the World'

It sounds "farfetched, audacious, insane," says Bill Bright, 55, the hard-driving head of one of the world's biggest evangelism conglomerates. Nonetheless, he firmly believes that Christians must quickly carry out Christ's message to his followers to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations." Bright wants to saturate the U.S. by the end of 1976 and the entire world by 1980. He is convinced that God Himself has ordained those deadlines, and his Campus Crusade for Christ hopes to raise $100 million to help get the job done.

With only days left to go in the U.S. and four years worldwide, $10 million has been raised, but things are running a bit behind schedule. Right now the action centers on the Atlanta-based Here's Life, America! campaign, which has launched locally run blitzes in 165 U.S. and Canadian cities this year. It will hit 50 more by mid-1977 to reach a total of 60 million households.

TV Tease. Here's Life markets Jesus the way others might introduce a new brand of soda pop to a city. I FOUND IT! tease the TV and newspaper ads, billboards, buttons, bumper stickers. Found what? The ads offer a telephone number that will provide the answer: Jesus. In Chicago, church members manned 100 telephones 15 hours a day. Said one local convert, Banker William McLaren: "I had an unbelievable feeling. I cried for six hours."

As with all Bright operations, the 400,000 Here's Life volunteers around the country use Blight's 77-word version of Christianity, the Four Spiritual Laws. Law 1: "God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life." Law 2: "Man is sinful and separated from God" so he doesn't know about Law 1. Law 3: "Jesus Christ is God's only provision for man's sin . . ." Law 4: "We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God's love and plan for our lives." Simplistic theology, but thousands testify that this upbeat message has led them into the kingdom. Campus Crusade policy is to steer its converts into local churches.

William Rohl Bright's appointment with 1980 began a quarter-century ago. He was running a fancy-foods business, Bright's California Confections, and taking seminary courses on the side. One night, while studying for a Greek exam, he had an "intoxicating" vision: "God showed me the whole world and gave me the confidence that He would use me and others in this generation to reach the multitudes of the world." That was 1951, and since a generation runs 25 years or so, Bright concluded that victory would come in 1976 and 1980.

After receiving the vision, Presbyterian Bright became a lay evangelist at U.C.L.A. He concentrated on gaining converts who would influence other students--athletes, political activists, beauty queens. His Campus Crusade spread quickly to other U.S. universities (currently 426) and beyond. Its slogan became "Today the campus, tomorrow the world." The staff now numbers 5,300, of whom 1,100 are foreign nationals working in their own countries (84 of them). Among recent staff recruits is Ralph Drollinger, a 7-ft. 2-in. basketball center from U.C.L.A., who passed up pro bids to join the crusade's Athletes in Action. It has seven teams in various sports on tour, sandwiching half-time preachings into their exhibition games.

The star athletes get the same pay as everybody else: $365 a month for single persons, $660 a month for married couples, both of whom must join the crusade, plus child allowances of $170 a month. (Bright draws about $12,000 a year.) Each crusader must raise contributions equal to his salary, plus 17% for overhead and expansion, or endanger his job.

This $34 million-a-year operation is based at a onetime resort hotel in the mountains above San Bernardino, Calif. The hotel provides staff training, and several times a year it gives Executive Seminars to evangelize the wealthy. In an unusual event for the headquarters, ex-Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and his wife Kathleen were baptized in the pool last Oct. 10. Expanding in Washington, meanwhile, Bright got wealthy laymen to donate $500,000 for a French-style mansion that the Catholic archdiocese wanted to unload as unfittingly grandiose, and he turned it into the Christian Embassy for low-key evangelism of government officials. Though less than 5% of his staff members have any theological training, many hold Ph.D.s or business school degrees. With its computerized efficiency, Campus Crusade can readily report that last year its U.S. staff presented the Four Laws in person to 1.9 million people and logged 150,000 conversions.

Back Off. Even those who favor this born-again brand of Christianity are often privately critical of Bright's methods. Campus Crusade is "run like a dictatorship with a military style," says one prominent Evangelical. Complains another: "The system becomes more important than the message."

Bright's system sometimes touches the right-wing edge of politics. In 1974, during a Campus Crusade campaign that drew hundreds of thousands in Seoul, Bright praised the anti-Communist South Korean dictatorship for supposedly allowing more religious liberty than the U.S. A year ago, he wrote a pamphlet to urge U.S. Christians to elect "men and women of God" to public office. He also got entangled with Third Century Publishers, which espouses Evangelical Christianity and hard right-wing politics. (It opposed Jimmy Carter because of his liberalism.) Even the tolerant Billy Graham publicly criticized Bright for trying to organize Evangelicals into a political bloc. Bright has backed off, claiming his role was distorted. In the process, however, Bright has undergone a political conversion of sorts. Only last year he had warned, "We have 14 months to turn our nation around, or we will reach the point of no return and the ultimate loss of our freedom." Now, he says, he has a more optimistic view of the nation's future.

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