New Leader Chosen for Campus Crusade

Bill Bright, who co-founded Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951 after a conversion experience in Los Angeles, this week named longtime associate Stephen B. Douglass his successor as the organization’s president.

“I feel like I’m in my prime, but the fact is I’m almost 80,” said Bright. Douglass, 55, has been with the organization for 30 years and “has demonstrated remarkable gifts over the last 30 years,” Bright said.

Bright made the announcement in the Netherlands while attending the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn.’s Amsterdam 2000 Conference.

Douglass, now executive vice president and director of U.S. Ministries, will assume the reins of the worldwide ministry on or before Aug. 1, 2001. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s in business administration from Harvard.

Bright co-founded the ministry with his wife, Vonette, on the UCLA campus seven years after his 1944 conversion. He said the idea for a campus ministry occurred to him within days of his becoming a Christian. At the time, he was running a candy business.

“I was a happy pagan, a businessman in Hollywood,” he said in a telephone conference call with The Times and other media. “In answer to my mother’s prayers and the influence of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood I became a Christian. . . . Instead of searching for gold I began to search for God. The rest is history.”

Campus Crusade for Christ describes itself as one of the largest interdenominational organizations in the world, with more than 22,000 full-time staff members and 489,000 trained volunteers, and 60 ministries in 186 countries serving athletes, prisoners, business executives, the military, families and students. Bright moved Campus Crusade’s world headquarters from Southern California to Orlando, Fla., in 1991.

All employees, including the president, raise money to pay their salaries. The organization reported $427 million in 1999 income and said the 1999 combined income for the Brights was $64,560.