As an educational leader, you are confronted with a variety of competing priorities. To be sure, failure to ensure that student enrollment and donor support revenue streams are flowing will render other priorities irrelevant. Poor results in those realms will inevitably ensure there will soon be no institution to lead. Focus on these priorities largely determines whether the institution will survive but does little to determine what institution will survive.

Few would challenge the assertion that the Bible college movement has been a bastion of biblical vitality within American evangelicalism for decades. A large percentage of the evangelical clergy and missionary force are Bible college or Bible institute graduates. Evangelical churches are blessed with biblically competent, committed, earnest, and faithful Bible college graduates who serve as laypersons to anchor and augment the work of the church. By the 1970s, Bible colleges, lightly esteemed by more mainstream higher educational institutions, began to find their place within the higher education community.

Unfortunately, for many people, the term Bible college evokes a dismissive response: inferior, irrelevant, even injurious, according to critics like Donald Miller and others. So how should we characterize ourselves and what do we callourselves? We’re presently working with David Kinnaman and his Barna Group team, investing in research designed to test perceptions and guide our self-portrayal. For the time being, however, our collective understanding of this ethos has become crystallized in terms of the following four concepts: biblical, transformational, experiential, and missional.