After 50 years of leading Campus Crusade for Christ, Bill Bright draws upon a vast well of life lessons as he guides the movement. In an exclusive interview with Worldwide Challenge, he pared this legacy down to just one per decade.

But one all-important lesson precedes the others, Bill insists. In fact, had he not learned this lesson first, there would be no movement .

"God showed me I could trust Him more than I could trust myself," he says. "Everything flows from that." Bill and Vonette Bright first applied this lesson in the spring of 1951, when they literally drew up a contract with God surrendering their lives to Jesus' full control.

"Though I am a son of God and heir of God and a joint heir with Christ," says Bill, "I chose to be a slave of Jesus, following His example, recorded in Philippians 2, and Paul's example as recorded in Romans 1:1. I have evaluated everything I do every day for all these years, directly and indirectly, through that contract—that total, absolute, irrevocable surrender to the lordship of Jesus.

"I know full well there would have been no vision for Campus Crusade for Christ had I not first of all signed the contract to become a slave of Jesus."

Barely 24 hours after the young couple signed the contract, God gave Bill a heavenly admonishment to help reach the world with the gospel. And Campus Crusade for Christ was born.

1951-1959

By 1956, Bill and Vonette Bright had gathered a handful of full-time staff members committed to helping fulfill the Great Commission. "When the Lord led me to start the work at UCLA and we spread to other areas, I began to realize that I needed to develop literature that would help our staff communicate the good news better," Bill remembers. "Everybody did his own thing, just talked about Jesus, and though our staff was better trained than most, God impressed me to have a consultant speak to them."

This noted sales consultant addressed the staff members at a ministry conference, explaining that every successful salesperson needed to clearly communicate his message in order to be effective. In fact, he explained, the message grows more powerful when the messenger sticks to the basics instead of veering off on tangents. But the clincher came when he announced that Bill Bright had himself created a spiritual version of a "pitch," and gave the same gospel presentation to businessmen, prisoners and college students alike.

In Amazing Faith, a biography of Bill Bright, author Michael Richardson recorded Bill's response:

"The very thought that I needed to resort to what I considered Madison Avenue techniques to do the spiritual work of God was repugnant and offensive to me. I resented anyone suggesting that I or anyone else who truly loved and desired to serve the Lord had to depend on gimmicks, or that we were not led of the Spirit in such a way that the Holy Spirit was able to be original through us to the various individuals with whom we worked, according to their various needs. Further, I resented him using me as an example before the rest of the staff."

Then he realized that maybe this man was right, so Bill confessed his sin of pride. "Out of that embarrassment," he explains, "came the distilled essence of the gospel—[known today as] the Four Spiritual Laws."

This lesson—the need to make a message simple and transferable—became the bedrock of Campus Crusade. In 1957, Bill Bright applied the sales consultant's advice to a presentation about living a Spirit-controlled life as well. He then carried the lesson to other spiritual truths, publishing a series of booklets known today as the Transferable Concepts.

1960-1969

Armed with a precise yet simple explanation of the gospel, new believers were transformed instantly into evangelists. More and more people responded to Christ's invitation to know Him personally. Then, through the message of the Holy Spirit booklet, they began surrendering their lives to His control, experiencing what Bill coined "supernatural living."

College students really could influence their world, and they were doing it. But during the '60s, Bill learned that in order to reach the globe, many thousands of believers needed to be trained to get involved. Helping fulfill the Great Commission required Bill to rally more troops.

"God began to do a mighty work on the campus," Bill recalls, "which prompted laymen to come to me and say, ‘Why don't you help laymen do what you are training students to do? Will you train us?'"

Their requests carried Bill beyond the campus into many other segments of society. During this time, churches became an integral part of his plan to help fulfill the Great Commission. "I went across the nation training thousands of laymen and pastors," he says.

1970-1979

A round the time "free love" earned a place in American vocabulary, God led Bill to extend a different kind of free love.

"We invited scores of Christian organizations to come to EXPLO 72 as our guests, and we didn't charge anything for the booths," he says. "They came to promote their own movements, and asked nothing in return." The evangelism- and discipleship- training conference drew 80,000 believers to Dallas.

Bill even has a name for this lesson: the Law of Giving. And as is so common in a conversation with Bill, he sprays his point with an array of Bible verses in support:

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. As you give, you receive. Whatever you sow, you reap. Through the years we have continued to give ourselves, our influence and our finances to individuals and organizations in order to help them. Campus Crusade encourages others to accomplish their goals, without any thought of what we get out of it."

1980-1989

Ask someone to do a word association when they hear Campus Crusade for Christ and it won't take long before they say the word strategy. Ironically, the most central and well-known strategy, NewLife 2000, was not created until the 1980s. Yet this specific plan was devised in order to move tangibly, intentionally and urgently toward the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Bill had been strategic before, but during the '80s, God taught him the need for global strategy.

"We began to think strategically of how we could get the gospel to everybody on planet Earth, particularly following the production of the JESUS film in 1979," says Bill. "The vision of 1951 was to help reach the whole world with the message of God's love and forgiveness through Christ, but God didn't give me specific, detailed instructions on how to do that."

Carving the world up into approximately 6,000 pieces made the whole world a little more bite-sized. These "million population target areas," or MPTAs, comprised a key element of the NewLife 2000 strategy, which was designed to help fulfill the Great Commission by the end of the year 2000. Now into 2001, Campus Crusade continues to serve up faith-stretching strategies aimed at extending an invitation to the whole globe to receive and follow Christ.

1990-1999

Just when people thought they had figured Bill out, just when he seemed like he really only thought about evangelism and the Great Commission, he threw the Christian world a curveball. He began to promote fasting.

"When I started my first 40-day fast in 1994," Bill remembers, "I couldn't find any Christian leaders who had fasted. Maybe a day or two, but never for 40 days like I had planned. The fact is, I was only doing what God told me to do."

Of course, what looked like a tangent was really aimed head-on at the Great Commission. And that was his lesson of the '90s: to restore fasting to its rightful place among the spiritual disciplines.

"Fasting is not some tangent; it is the heart of evangelism and discipleship," says Bill. Actually, when he steps down as president of Campus Crusade later this year, he plans to concentrate much more of his time and attention on this. "I am going to give more time to promoting fasting and prayer worldwide," he explains, "because I believe that is the most powerful thing we can do to help evangelize the world. It is the spiritual nuclear bomb of all the disciplines to help destroy the strongholds of the enemy."

Beyond 2000

So what does the future hold for Bill? "As I come to the beginning of the new millennium, and the 50th year of Campus Crusade, my vision and urgency for helping fulfill the Great Commission is greater than ever. It is not something like, ‘Oh, I am getting old and my eyes are dim,'" says the 79-year-old. "No, my zeal for the fulfillment of the Great Commission continues unabated."

Until he brings up his age, it is easy to forget. For that matter, his passion appears so fresh, so young, that even after he refers to growing older, it seems irrelevant.

"All we really have to do in this life is to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, trust His promises, obey His commands and relax—while we are going 90 miles an hour," he says, smiling, although those closest to him know that he's not joking.

"Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. Everything I do should be relating to seeking and saving the lost. How? Win the lost to Christ, build them in the faith and send them out to win and build others. Frankly, the distilled essence of Christianity is just that, but often we get off on tangents: intellectualism, ego trips, all kinds of deterrents. I have tried to keep my focus on the basics."

Don't misunderstand Bill. Focusing on basics never precludes staying on the cutting edge. He has made his home up on that ledge between the way it has always been done and the way of the future. He never does things just for the sake of change; he keeps focused.

"Right now," he points out, "there are reasons to believe that, through technology available to us, every generation can fulfill the Great Commission and should. In Campus Crusade for Christ, we want and plan to be in the middle of it."

One of the projects Bill will continue to help lead and expand is the International Leadership University. Using the latest Internet technology, Bill believes, will allow millions of students on every continent to earn degrees as they are trained at thousands of extension locations around the world.

"God is in charge of this universe," he adds, "and the beautiful thing to me is that I don't have to make things happen as I felt I needed to do in business. If a door didn't open, I would knock it down. Now, my concept of God and His sovereignty, love, wisdom and grace is such that I don't have to make things happen. I just obey whatever He tells me to do."

And that's a lesson worth learning.

For more information about Campus Crusade and Bill Bright's books and other materials, log on at www.ccci.org.