Satellite Systems to Take Campus Crusade Word Around World

When Campus Crusade for Christ International spreads the gospel, the sky is the limit.

The San Bernardino-based interdenominational ministry next week will bounce the Christian message off 17 communications satellites hovering 22,700 miles above Earth’s surface.

Designed to “win the world for Christ,” the live television network will bring EXPLO 85, an unprecedented program of evangelism training, to more than 90 separate conferences in about 50 nations and territories. The project will begin Friday and continue for five days.

Called the Largest Ever

“It is going to be the largest closed-circuit satellite video conference in history,” said Michael Clifford of Scottsdale, Ariz., technical coordinator for the global event. “We expect more than 20,000 people to be involved just in the technical side of EXPLO around the world. It is actually going to be more complex technically than the 1984 Olympics telecast.”

EXPLO 85 is also the largest and most comprehensive program undertaken so far by Campus Crusade, founded 34 years ago as a fledgling student evangelism movement on the UCLA campus by Bill and Vonette Bright.

EXPLO will include four two-hour telecasts Dec. 28-31 that will simultaneously link an anticipated half a million people at the various conference sites via a central control booth in London. Speakers will include Bill Bright, evangelists Billy Graham and Luis Palau, and other international Christian leaders. Translations will be made into more than 30 languages.

Hundreds of local U.S. churches also plan to tune in through cable TV or “backyard dishes” and viewing screens.

“That way, they can tailor EXPLO to their own on-site missions conferences,” said John Jones, Campus Crusade’s communications director in San Bernardino.

Potentially, millions of individual viewers can also watch by way of 1,400 U.S. cable television systems and 30 Christian TV stations or hear the audio portion on 300 radio stations, according to Clifford.

“There is not a single spot on the globe that can’t pick up the signal,” he added in a telephone interview, noting that the programming will be carried on the West Coast from 7 to 9 a.m. on SATCOM 3R Transponder 5 at audio 6.8 and Galaxy 1 Transponder 22 at audio 6.8.

Bailey Marks, EXPLO 85’s international director, said the twofold purpose of the outreach is “to train Christians around the world in the basics of Christian living, including sharing their faith with others . . . and to communicate to participants through the live global telecasts a sense that they are part of a worldwide Christian movement--even if they are a minority in their own countries.”

The live pictures and sound will originate from six “uplink” cities--four of them in the Third World. The six sites are Seoul, South Korea; Manila; Nairobi, Kenya; West Berlin; Mexico City, and San Bernardino. The signals, received by satellite “downlink” in the London control room, will be mixed with pre-taped material and then retransmitted to the conference locations around the world.

14 Sites in U.S.

Only 14 of the more than 90 locations are in North America; the Arrowhead Springs (San Bernardino) headquarters of Campus Crusade is the only one in California.

Daily schedules will be adjusted around the telecast times, and appropriate translations will be made on the spot at each conference site.

For example, Marks said, “because the telecast will be received in Seoul from midnight to 2 a.m., conferees in that city will sleep during the days and begin their daily conference sessions in late afternoon, concluding . . . with the broadcasts.”

In addition to the live transmissions, 20 reports from “non-uplink EXPLO conference locations” will be videotaped and transmitted by Viznews, the international video news agency, to the London control room for subsequent telecasting over a four-day period, Marks added.

Some of the meetings will be held in hotels, others in gymnasiums, stadiums, churches and other, less formal--and sometimes temporary--settings. A few sites are so remote that there is no electricity, and local residents have never seen television.

“In one location in India, there’s this grass shack roped off for 3,000,” said Clifford, who has pioneered religious concepts of video-teleconferencing into a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art business. “But a field behind it can hold 10,000. We figure it’ll fill up (with viewers) if for no other reason than because they’ve never seen TV before.”

Not ‘Household Words’

More than half of the cities are definitely not on a major communications network, said Lou Falcigno, EXPLO 85’s field coordinator. Added the fast-talking New Yorker, who helped make boxing history in the 1970s by putting together the international network of fans who watched the famed “Thrilla in Manila” and “Rumble in the Jungle” fights by closed-circuit television:

“Ilorin, Nigeria, and Agana, Guam, and Reykjavik, Iceland, and Oorgam, India, are not exactly household words--certainly not communications household words!”

Clifford said he and Falcigno had obtained “almost unbelievable political cooperation worldwide” in arranging for the satellite telecasting. Only three of 57 nations approached turned down EXPLO programming, Clifford said.

Domestic satellites in several countries of Latin America, Europe and Asia “have never before been used for a non-governmental video conference” or for any “commercial” telecast, Falcigno added.

Jones, the Crusade spokesman, said “bureaucratic snags” caused “one or two” of the confirmed conference sites to be scratched from the list during the last few days.

Cost More Than $9 Million

The total cost of EXPLO 85 is between $9 million and $10 million, according to Jones; Clifford’s budget share for the technical end of the project is “just under $4 million.” The bulk of funding has been contributed by people interested in Campus Crusade’s goal to “change the world” through Christian evangelism.

“God is providing the funds in a remarkable way,” said Bright, adding, with characteristic ebullience:

“Never before has the world been so open to the Gospel; never before has the opportunity been so great to go and tell the world (about Christ); and never before has there been a Christian gathering with the scope and potential for equipping the church (as a whole) for this task. . . .

“United in prayer, properly trained in discipleship and evangelism, and sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit, those who attend EXPLO 85 could be used of God to ignite the greatest and most far-reaching spiritual awakening in the history of the world.”

EXPLO 85 is not the first mass-evangelism event for Campus Crusade, although its usual approach is personal evangelism in small-group settings.

Crusade sponsored EXPLO 72, which drew 80,000 students to Dallas that year; the 1974 EXPLO in Seoul reached an estimated 323,000. In 1975-77, Crusade workers joined about 300,000 church members from 15,000 U.S. congregations to sponsor “Here’s Life, America”--an evangelism and discipleship program commonly known as the “I found it!” campaign because of its extensive use of the slogan in advertising and on auto bumper stickers.

Since 1976, Crusade, which now boasts a worldwide staff--most of whom raise their own financial support--of nearly 16,000 in 150 countries and protectorates, has promoted a similar international outreach called “Here’s Life, World.” Turnout at one 1980 evening rally in Korea was estimated at 2.7 million people.

Crusade’s 25 ministries include Athletes in Action, the Campus Ministry, traveling speakers and the Agape Movement--a combined spiritual and vocational overseas program for physicians, nurses, teachers, agriculturalists and others. Other Crusade divisions work with families, high school students, prisoners, business executives and professionals, and in the field of estate planning.