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SANTA ANA, Calif. — Bill Dallas knew a little bit about God while making his way as a developer and realtor, but his Bible was called “The Art of the Deal,” written by then-little-known entrepreneur Donald Trump.
“It became mine and my partner's bible,” Dallas said in an interview on KWVE 107.FM’s Front Page Radio. “The idea we had was to make as many deals as we could, and we were going so fast that we weren't in the fast lane; we were in the median strip.”
“One thing led to the other and we had no moral compass or rudder. We were just focused on fame and fortune and when you do that, you're not worried about crossing the T’s or dotting the I’s and you're definitely coloring outside the lines,” Dallas said of his San Francisco-based business. “So by the late 1980s we had multiple projects going on and multiple millions of dollars of investors' monies and we were just living it high off the lamb, so to speak. We had the fast cars, the clothes; we had everything that went on with that type of lifestyle.”
As their economic bubble escalated, it was popped by the recession of the early ’90s. To keep it all afloat, they started more projects, thinking the quantity would make up for the depreciating values of their projects.
“By 1991 everything collapsed and we lost everything, millions of dollars,” Dallas said. “It was our money, our investors' money, our family's money; we lost everything. When you start seeing your cars repossessed and your offices shut down and your furniture taken away, it hits you right in the face there's no way to turn.”
As he began losing one thing after another, Dallas said he found Christ while alone in a penthouse suite, the last thing that remained from his years of prosperity.
“All I knew was I had this emptiness—that's what I wanted to be taken away. I wasn't concerned about the problems. I was concerned about my deep emptiness,” he said. “So I prayed this prayer and over the next few months, I began growing in my faith. It was not a ‘Damascus Road experience’ and I didn't see a bright light or hear a voice, I just had a peace and it was a quiet peace.”
Paying the price
While there was peace, there were also consequences. As a result of his shady business practices, Dallas was sentenced to five years in San Quentin. Dallas said he entered prison in 1993 confident about his new faith.
“I went in there with such high hopes and thinking that ‘it's me and God and we're going to be OK.’ But what you start realizing is that once they close those big doors of the prison behind you and once they close the door to your little cell, all of a sudden reality becomes real,” the businessman said. “I felt this aloneness—that basically God had allowed me to come to the end of my rope.”
As prison violence swirled around him, Dallas said that he began to realize that God was allowing him to be stripped of everything he had known previously known and began to rebuild him.
“Yes, it was scary, but I think the thing about it was you just feel so isolated and you feel so alone,” he said. “That was the hardest on me; it was just the aloneness and, again, even though I was walking with the Lord, I still had this aloneness that I cannot explain to anybody. I ended up in this depression and it was just a growing depression and over a period of time I used to go to the prison yard and I would just curl up in a ball on the ground, unshaven, unshowered, and I would sit there for hours just crying and shivering.”
Radio ministry
Sanity was restored through a Christian man from the San Quentin Prison Church who offered him a job sweeping the floors of the studios of SQ (San Quentin) TV, which broadcasts closed-circuit to the inmates. Eventually he had his own show.
It was that experience that prompted him to launch his own video production company when he was released from prison. Christian Communications Network, a satellite network which is now the largest satellite training network to churches in North America, is producing the Jan. 17 to 19 Rethink Conference at the Crystal Cathedral.
“So I look through this process that God allowed my mistakes to take me to prison, strips me of anything I hold onto, says, 'Yes, it's you and me, but we're going to bring others into the mix. We're going to build you and grow you. We're going to take your talents and use them for something good,’” Dallas said.
Info box:
What: Rethink Conference, which promises 30 "Aha!" moments from 30 leading influencers and thinkers in media, politics, faith, science, business and technology
When Jan. 17 to 19
Where: Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove and other satellite locations
Sponsors: Church Communication Network (CCN) and Crystal Cathedral
Speakers: Dr. Robert H. Schuller, Erwin McManus, George H. W. Bush, Chuck Colson, Larry King, Rupert Murdoch, Lee Strobel, Kay Warren and comedian Ben Stein.
For more information, visit www.rethinkconference.com or www.ccn.tv.
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