Colombian Christian Mission

The Bible College Project

For years the Colombian church has seen the need for a university level Christian Education in order to better train its leaders. In a society that has always placed a very high value on education, the ability of the church to grow and reach into the higher levels of society demanded a well trained leadership. We worked successively up through the levels of Christian education, beginning with a discipleship model, and then moving into TEE or Theological Education by Extension. Finally we established a Bible institute that functioned in each local church. The standards and demands were increased as the number of students increased as well. One reason for me to get my doctorate was to be able to take this effort to the next level, the establishment of a Christian university for the education of the ministry. The Colombian leadership had been pushing for this next step for several years and the pressure and need to begin increased with time and with the growth of the church here in Colombia.

We began intensive planning two years ago. We developed a curriculum and began to work on courses and establish our functional paradigm. As we looked for accreditation, the door to internal accreditation in Colombia was blocked by the governmental demand for a massive patrimony to back the effort and give it an assured sustainability. But we saw no way to get the large amount of money that the Colombian government required of us. We looked to our Bible colleges in the States to see if one of those would back us up; taking me on as a professor and our college as an extension of theirs. None were able to do that for us. That is when we looked at an extension program we had used before with our institute. They have full accreditation and were willing to offer us accreditation. The only thing they asked in return was that they could also send their students to the classes I would teach. This led to a close working relationship in which I am the primary professor. Some classes are taken by a pure extension format while I teach others. Classes that simply disseminate information and facts can be easily taken by extension. Classes that demand analysis and research are not very conducive to being taught in that manner. This allows us to offer many more classes than what I would have time to teach as we developed our own professors here in Colombia. It would also allow us to begin the program while we raised the needed support to get the program off the ground. It granted us an accreditation umbrella while I became the qualified professor for the university that is giving us that coverage. An added and unexpected benefit was that we would also have a large student body right from the beginning because of the contacts the university had with many indigenous churches here in Colombia. That opened a great door of opportunity to share simply New Testament Christianity with them. And many of them were eager to learn what the Bible teaches in all its simplicity and beauty. As a result, instead of starting with a few dozen students, we immediately had far more than I could personally handle. Yet the extension format for many classes means that students are not held up by the limitations time places on my ability to teach the classes. With about 800 students in the undergraduate level and over 100 in the graduate school, the effort here is one of the larger efforts in the Bible college movement. It is a great opportunity that God has placed before us.

Yet that brings us to some crucial decisions that need to be made. The first is that we must develop a support base to underwrite this effort. So far we have managed to get things moving with only our own living link support and our limited work support. But it is impossible to continue an effort of this size without your help and support. We desperately need increased regular monthly support in order to cover the cost of such a large program. At a time when the diminished value of the US dollar has forced us to cut some of our regular programs, we obviously cannot take on a new major program without your backing. God has opened this spectacular but somewhat unexpected door of opportunity rather quickly. Now it is up to us to decide if we are bold enough to step through it. We need to raise $1250 monthly to support the Bible College Project. Please consider supporting this work monthly or increasing your current support to enable us to respond to God’s leading. We are also in need of support for the one-time costs of setting up such a large project. If you would like to support the Bible College Project contact Susy Morris at SusyMorris@CCMon-line.com.