PRBI Fall Trumpet 2022

Trumpet Fa l l

PEACE RIVER BIBLE INSTITUTE

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College Update We are thankful to God and encouraged by this year’s enrolment.

Our student numbers are in the midfifties this semester, giving us an increase over the previous year for the first time in many years. Please pray with us that every student will encounter Christ in such a lifechanging way that it will lead them into a deeper relationship with Him, the church, and service to the world.

When asked what he was hoping to achieve in his second year as a student at PRBI, Eugene Wiebe replied, “For twenty years, I hardened my heart against God. God graciously called me back to Himself and to Bible college. As He has been breaking down the walls around my heart, I am praying that the Holy Spirit grows in me a sincere love for people, and that through the softening of my heart He teaches me how to show that love to others.”

550 people attended our Fall KickOff on September 9. The evening featured an outdoor concert by Phil Joel and Galen Crew, who shared through music and testimony about God’s love and faithfulness. This was a great opportunity for families and youth groups to be on campus and enjoy a taste of PRBI. As a way to assist our students to encounter Christ, we are continuing

with the Discovery Bible Study method that we began using last year. This method utilizes simple questions to help participants understand the character of God, obey what they are learning, and share it with others. We have found that these studies provide meaningful opportunities for life transformation as students interact with God’s word in their peer groups.

In addition, as they take turns leading their group, students learn how to make this method transferable to their own unique situations.

Last year, we began partnering with Rising Above Ministries in Grande Prairie to offer courses in a new track called Faith Based Addictions Treatment. This track is designed to equip students to help others break free of cycles of defeat. The course we are offering this semester is Introduction to Counselling, taught

by Eric Lee from Burden Bearers.

We ended our fiscal year on June 30 with a deficit of about $89,000. The summer months are traditionally slow for donations so we have some catching up to do. We ultimately trust in God to provide as He always has, but we are also mindful that He works through people like you. Will you help us with a financial donation this month? Thank you for your continued partnership with us!

A Response to Culture

Kim Cairns President

At 5:04 pm Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, the earth shook under the San Francisco Bay Area. At Candlestick Park, the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants were getting ready for the start of their third game in the World Series. Suddenly, the lights flickered.

Steel girders holding the upper deck swayed, and pieces of concrete crumbled down. The announcer told the spectators to leave. Meanwhile, north of the ballpark in the Marina District of San Francisco, houses shifted off crumbling foundations and buildings collapsed. Gas lines exploded and fires spread. Across the bay in Oakland, a mile-long section of Interstate 880 collapsed on rush hour traffic. By 5:05 pm, the lives of thousands of people were altered forever because of powerful changes beneath the earth’s crust.

ripple through our culture. The shifting of moral values in Canada has led to the adoption of legislation that could seriously challenge some of our long-held biblical convictions on sexuality and identity. Elsewhere, prominent evangelicals have openly renounced faith in Christ. The rise of the Progressive Christianity movement is rewriting fundamental doctrines of our faith. These are a small sample of the changes we are experiencing in our culture. How do we respond?

We too are feeling some tremors, not in the earth’s crust, but in the foundation of our society. North American Christians are feeling unsettled as the waves of change

A second approach is to withdraw from society and build barricades to insulate ourselves from the change.

The mentality is more important than the physical separation. This

Historically, the church has responded to cultural change in several ways.

One response is denial. It is the position that there is nothing new under the sun, so do your best to ignore it. However, pretending that change is not happening will not stop it from happening.

withdrawal response says, you cannot have influence, so the best you can do is keep the change out of your family or group. Although there is a strategic aspect to this approach, overall it falls short. How do we love our neighbours from behind barricaded walls?

A third response is to accommodate culture. This position minimizes any tension or opposition between Christ and culture. Christ is not the Lord of life demanding loyalty, but an enlightened teacher directing people to the highest cultural attainment.

Although there may be pleasure in pursuing this position in the short term, Jesus’ warning about gaining the entire world but losing one’s soul should give us pause in embracing it.

In stark contrast to accommodation is the fourth approach of counterattack, which fights culture in the hope of gaining control. Once the upper hand is gained, then Christians will control the agenda for change. Again, there may be limited times when thoughtful resistance is called for, but will it be a sustainable response?

History would argue that Christianity often finds itself in the minority. So then, what should be the church’s response?

Follow Christ’s way! In the opening of John’s gospel, we read, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which

was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:1014). Jesus did not deny or withdraw from human culture but entered it to shine His light upon it. Christ did not accommodate the culture but endured rejection, where His truth was opposed. He did not counteract defensively but showed positively the power of grace and truth to transform humanity.

Approaching culture Christ’s way requires a thorough understanding of Christ, His Word, and His methods. We must become students of our times who are equipped to critically discern cultural influences and who know how to engage culture effectively for Christ. At PRBI, we invite students to experience the transformational power of Christ and we seek to equip them to face our ever-shifting times.

We appreciate your prayers and support as we prepare our students to encounter the impending tremors of cultural change.

Kim has served as a member of the PRBI faculty since 2009 and as President since 2019. He is married to Kimberly and they have four adult children.

Financial Update Peace River Bible Institute Statement of Operations and Budget July 2022 - August 2022

Revenue Operations

Income To Date

Annual Budget

% of Budget To Date

150,689

827,107

18%

Donations Total Revenue

55,560 206,249

876,200 1,703,307

6% 12%

Total Expenses

Expenses To Date 271,457

Annual Budget 1,749,577

% of Budget To Date 16%

Net Income (Loss)

(65,208)

(46,270)

2022-2023 Team Members

Scott Butler

Kim Cairns

Alex Gao

Jason Gayoway

Faculty

Business Office Manager

Jeremy Johnston

Director of Operations

President

Brad Cowie

Academic Dean

Jill Gayoway

Faculty

Business Associate

Anne Laursen

Vanessa Retzlaff

Dean of Women

Shaelyn Wiebe Custodian

Kitchen Manager

Halla Wilson

Communications Manager

Katrina Finke

Admissions Manager

Dave Groff

Executive Assistant

Josh Rigby

Dean of Men

Pushing Back Against Evil In a recent sermon, I suggested that Jesus had a way of pushing back evil with power and yet drawing people in with love. Jesus powerfully, sometimes terrifyingly, expelled demons, rebuked injustice, and dispensed with disease, yet He engaged the common person with gentleness, compassion, and grace rather than force. I don’t get the sense that He used power to compel people like He used power to drive back demons. He drew people rather than driving them. My suggestion was that we adopt a similar strategy of pushing back evil in the power of Jesus but drawing in people with the love of Jesus.

As you might suspect, this sparked a post-sermon conversation on

Brad Cowie Academic Dean the question: What does it mean to push back evil? These last few years have fuelled a lot of anger and frustration, and some Christians have felt the need to “push back against evil” by protest, resistance, and even revolution. Now, I have no intention in this short space of trying to unravel the political and cultural tangle that we find ourselves in, but the conversation did get me thinking. What exactly does it mean to push back against evil?

The darkest moments of church history have been when the church exercised power in a damaging way. The rationalization for use of force may have been to resist evil or advance good, but instead of overcoming evil, the church

succumbed to evil, often committing evils equal to or greater than the ones being allegedly resisted.

Think of the Crusades, witch hunts, persecution of sects, religious wars, excesses of colonialism, justification of slavery, and residential schools.

However, in other instances, the church has effectively pushed back evil with good: abolishing slavery, championing human rights, resisting infanticide, providing medical care and education, pressing for the rule of law and accountable government, calling out corruption, caring for the poor, and, of course, advancing the Gospel.

So how do we, to paraphrase Romans 12:21, not be overcome by evil but rather overcome evil with good? To begin with, we need to answer two fundamental questions: What is evil, and, how is evil overcome?

First, what is evil? We are quick to call anything we don’t like “evil.”

Governments are evil, mandates are evil, opinions are evil, coffee is evil (and while I’m at it, so are beans and olives). Certainly, ideologies and actions need to be critically examined, but we are too quick to paste the label “evil” on anything we don’t like. Not everything I disagree with is “evil.” It may be inconvenient, disruptive, and annoying without being evil.

For example, I don’t like it when highway construction crews leave

speed limit signs on long stretches of road when there’s nobody working and the highway is pretty much intact. Now, I can easily work myself into a lather over ridiculous laws, control conspiracies, oppressive time delays, lazy use of signage, and how everybody ignores the signs anyways, which increases the odds they will ignore them even where they are necessary. Just ask my wife.

But are these road signs evil?

True evils are things like racism, injustice, corruption, inequity, greed, violence, poverty, sickness, selfishness, and self-righteousness— the kinds of things Jesus and the prophets railed against. These are things we could work together to address if we could stop squabbling over whether one should put sour cream or schmaunt fat (cream gravy for you non-Mennonites) on their perogies (shout-out to former student Justin Bergen for alerting me to this conflict!). Before we even consider pushing back, we must each pause and prayerfully ask, “What, precisely, is the evil here, and is it evil or just something I don’t like?”

Second, how is evil overcome? Note that Jesus lived under multiple layers of oppressive and corrupt civil and religious governance, yet He never advocated militant revolution. That doesn’t mean He didn’t push back.

Jesus pushed back against the causes, not just the symptoms. And

since the causes are spiritual, Jesus used neither the strategies nor the weapons of human might.

Pushing back with Jesus’ power begins with prayer. Through prayer, we can lament and call out for justice, but prayer is not just a demand for the oppressor’s demise. Through prayer, we also invite God to give us the proper perspective and stance, to lead us with divine wisdom and grace, and to do what we cannot do. Prayer reminds us that the battle is God’s, not ours, and that we are to be His means of accomplishing His will, not the other way around.

A third form of power is love. Love is action for the sake of others. Love is not about satisfying my desires or making myself feel good; it’s about pursuing truth, justice, care, and honour for another. It is marked by giving of myself, not taking for myself. This does not mean that I can’t look to my own needs, rights, and freedoms, but it does mean that my perspective is filtered through the lens of principles beyond simplistic personal preferences.

“Jesus pushed back against the causes, not just Certainly, there are when God calls the symptoms.” times us to do something

Jesus’ power also flows through truth. Truth is becoming more and more elusive because all sides— all sides!—seem to prefer spin.

Under pressure, we tell ourselves exaggerated stories. We accept claims because they satisfy us emotionally, not necessarily because they are grounded in fact and logic.

We resist truth that is inconvenient, deflecting, rationalizing, distorting, and counterattacking rather than facing it. When the belt of truth is poorly buckled, nothing else stays in place. Of all the people on earth, Christians should be the most comfortable with uncomfortable truth because we know that the truth sets us free.

bold to right a wrong and push back against evil. But action must always be led by prayer, truth, and love.

Flailing or shouting at our culture will not work, nor will being blindly sucked into other cultural forms of protest or power. Pushing back evil in Jesus’ power is always grounded in awareness of and alignment to what Jesus is doing. For, in the end, it is the power of Jesus flowing through us that defeats the darkness. By all means, let’s push back the darkness, but let’s make sure we do it with the light of Jesus.

Brad is an alumnus of PRBI (1984-88) and has served as PRBI faculty since 2008 and as Academic Dean since 2019. Brad and his wife, Barb, have two adult children.

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Peace River Bible Institute is recognized as a degree-granting Bible College by the Province of Alberta. Building on Christ as our foundation, PRBI values Biblical Training, Authentic Relationships, Kingdom Service, and Strategic Partnerships. Our vision is that every student encounters Christ in ways that transform their life, energize their church, and impact their world. We are a Bible College for Life!

For more information on our Mission, Vision, and Values, go to www.prbi.edu.

The TRUMPET is the magazine of Peace River Bible Institute. It is comprised of contributions from faculty, staff, alumni, and students who are passionate about making disciples in their churches and communities. If you have any comments, please email us at development@prbi.edu. Printed in Canada.

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