The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Bill Bright
1921–2003 · American
Sold his candy company, wrote a four-point gospel booklet handed out in the billions, and produced the most-translated film ever made.
The life
Bill Bright was running a specialty candy business in Los Angeles when he and his wife Vonette wrote out and signed a contract surrendering everything they owned to God. He wound up the business and started a ministry to students at UCLA in 1951 with the sorority houses as his first mission field. To give ordinary students something they could actually say, he boiled the gospel down to four points on a small booklet, and it has been handed out in numbers no one can verify but that run to the billions.
In 1979 his organization released a film on the life of Christ taken almost entirely from Luke's Gospel, and set about dubbing it into every language that had translators; it has been shown in villages with no electricity from generator-powered projectors. He won the Templeton Prize in 1996 and gave the million-dollar award away to promote fasting and prayer. He died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2003.