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This chapter describes how Bill Bright wrote potential supporters to outline his vision, which fused spiritual and political concerns and objectives. After founding the Campus Crusade for Christ, he asserted that “the average collegian is spiritually illiterate” and “estimated that less than five percent of the college students of America are actively engaged in the church of today.” After noting that virtually all American colleges and universities “were founded as Christian institutions,” Bright lamented that “many of our state universities and colleges and other institutions deny the deity of Christ, the Bible as the Word of God, and offer not so much as one Christian course in their curriculum.”

This chapter shows how the Campus Crusade grew quickly in the early 1960s despite its conflicts with Bob Jones University and the emerging charismatic movement. In fact, by 1963, the organization had tripled in size to nearly 300 staff on 108 campuses. The ministry maintained its small office in Los Angeles and the summer training grounds on Lake Minnetonka in Mound, Minnesota. Bill Bright remained an evangelical entrepreneur, launching ministries in Asia and Latin America, beginning an evangelistic ministry to American laypeople, and experimenting with evangelism through various forms of media, including records and radio. As Crusade grew, Bright and his top assistants further standardized their evangelistic approach and adopted more formal means of staff training. The growth in staff and the organization's overseas expansion also caused Crusade to move away from an older evangelical tradition of “faith missions” toward the embrace of modern fund-raising and marketing tools.

This book presents the history of Campus Crusade for Christ as a window into the world of American evangelicalism since 1945. Campus Crusade, founded by Bill Bright at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1951, had, by the century's end, grown into a global evangelical empire. The ministry's staff talked about Jesus Christ at fraternity meetings, evangelized students from Daytona to Balboa on spring break trips, organized evangelistic advertising campaigns in American cities, brought a film about Jesus to remote overseas villages, and hosted conferences designed to “rekindle the fire” of Christian marriages. Alongside Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, Bright was one of the most influential evangelical power brokers of the late twentieth century, able to mobilize large coalitions of conservative Christians for both evangelistic and partisan ends.

Chapter 4 argues that Peter Gillquist and the Evangelical Orthodox Church (EOC) viewed the EOC as the New Testament Church restored in all its purity. Because he and the EOC looked to Eastern Christian sources as they “restored” this church, they developed an affinity for Eastern Orthodox and came to believe that the Orthodox Churches could legitimately claim to be the continuation of that same church (even if not with the same degree of purity and capabilities). Gillquist and the EOC saw themselves as uniting Evangelicalism and Orthodoxy. This led to dialogues with the Orthodox Churches. In the course of such dialogues and by way of rejections from the National Association of Evangelicals on the one hand and the Greek Orthodox Church and Orthodox Church in America on the other, the EOC was forced to cease change its self-perceptions and concluded that to be Orthodox, they needed to convert formally.