For Josiah Teeple, a 20-something young man who is now planting a Grace Brethren church in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, the time he spent in Florida studying the Bible was invaluable.
“It was a turning point in my life,” he says of the program at the Grace Brethren Church in Sebring, Fla., known as the Great Commission Bible Institute.
Now poised to begin its 6th year, the institute takes up to 12 students for a rigorous ten months of studying the Bible – nothing else. Each student receives a wide-margin, no notes Bible as a textbook.
“I want you to read all of it, study all of it, and make it your own study Bible,” Randy Smith, pastor of the church, tells the students.
Fifteen years of living and studying in Israel convinced Smith that something was lacking from his theological education.
“Kids are learning what the Bible means before they ever read it,” he says. “There’s something academically that lacks integrity, when you know everything about what it means, but you don’t know what it says,” he adds.
His professors at a Jewish university pressed him to understand the Scriptures in a way he’d never considered. “[They’d say] you guys walk around telling us there is Jesus under every rock and you don’t even know the story of Isaiah,” he recalls.
Upon his return to the U.S. in 2002, he was challenged by Ed Lewis of CE National to begin an intense discipleship program-one that would teach young people the Bible in a way they had never previously experienced and that would provide them a biblical framework for ministry.
The result was the Great Commission Bible Institute. Designed for young adults who want to be more grounded in the Word of God and to be equipped to serve where He leads, the school uses the principle approach to studying the Scriptures. Students learn to extract principles from the Bible to be applied in their own lives.
The students also are expected to be active in a local church and to be involved in mentoring relationships, so they have the tools to become disciple-makers.
The core of the program is 12 hours of teaching done by Randy over two days each week. Prior to class, students are to have read and marked the text and have an understanding of what is written. In the classroom, he provides the framework for the text, finally peppering them with questions. What are the principles behind this that God wanted you to know? God preserved this story, why do you care? Why did God tell us this story?
He knows his style differs from most American education systems, but he’s finding that it works.
“I wanted to take something I learned over there [Israel] and bring it to a world that made sense to kids,” he says. “I think they get it. Some of the students have better developed ideas in many passages than I do,” he adds.
“At the end of it, you shouldn’t end up with just a theology,” he says, “you should end up with a strong and consistent walk with God.”
“[Pastor Randy’s] goal is to break the text down to its irreducible minimum and, by the leading of the Holy Spirit, allow us to come to our own convictions,” stresses Cameron Sandel, who with his wife, Sarah Beth, serves as a mentor for the students.
At the end of the semester, the students are asked to relate the story of the Bible, almost as if they were sitting around a campfire. “No good missionary today can afford to not be a good story teller,” Randy emphasizes. “[I] drop you into a mosquito ridden Indian village in Central America. Tell them what the Bible is about. They’ve never read it; they can’t.”
In five hours over a two-day period, the students write all they can. “If you can’t tell the story so people can grab onto the story, you don’t have anything,” Randy emphasizes, adding, “I want them to leave with a sense that God gave us a minimum of what we need to understand the pattern of life here on earth in these 66 books.”
The program in central Florida is bare bones by design. Students live and study in a 1927-era hotel overlooking historic downtown Sebring, about 10 miles from the church building. The facility is owned by a couple in the Sebring Grace Brethren Church who have leased it to the congregation at no charge. Volunteers helped renovate the space.
Families in the congregation provide evening meals for the students four nights a week. Two nights they are hosted in homes and two nights, meals are brought in for the students. It allows the students to become better acquainted with families in the church (and vice versa).
Cost for the two semesters is $5,000 for room and board. “There’s no tuition,” says Randy. Others from the community are permitted to sit in the classes when possible – all at no charge.
A spring trip to Israel (led by Randy) is an additional $3,400 that the students must raise on their own. “GCBI hosts at least one major community fundraiser during the fall semester and we connect students with part-time jobs and opportunities to raise funds,” says Sarah. “The Israel trip is not required. We know that some students are simply unable to come up with that extra funding.”
She notes that in the past five years, GCBI has discipled 45 young men and women. “Only three were unable to go on the Israel trip, and one of them came back the following year to do it. Someone else raised the funds for him as a gift!”
“I don’t want to stand before God and say, ‘I discipled this many people, and this is how much I made doing it,'” underscores Randy, who admits he’d do the program for free if he didn’t have to pay the electric bill or put gas in the Institute’s 15-passenger van.
“We’re not in this to get rich,” adds Cameron. (The Sandels must raise their own support.) “We’re in this to equip the saints.”
For that reason, plans are being made to film classes so that other pastors can replicate the program in their own communities. The lectures will be available on the World Wide Web.
Randy hopes that pastors will do one of three things with the material. “You can do your own study and present it to people in your church,” he says. “You can put them in front on an Internet connection and let them watch it, or you can watch it, make it your own, and teach it.”
It’s all about helping people walk with God, then encouraging them to share with others.
“The Bible isn’t written to tell you how God does what God does,” concludes Randy. “The Bible is written to tell you what you should become.”
