PRBI Spring Trumpet 2022

Trumpet S p r i n g

PEACE RIVER BIBLE INSTITUTE

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RESULTS

$129,000 Thank you for helping us exceed our goal of $100,000!

College Update Thanks be to God for His generous provision for the 2022 version of our annual February Fundraiser. After cancelling our Circle of Friends event because of provincial restrictions, we turned to a radio, letter, and social media campaign. Our target was $100,000. The final total was $129,000! These funds will play a significant role in accomplishing our vision of “Every student encountering Christ in ways that transform their life, energize their church, and impact their world.”

these graduates have grown and been equipped, God will use them to energize their churches and impact their world. If you live in the area, we invite you to participate in this celebration.

On March 10 to 12, we were excited to have about 100 high school and post-high school students on campus for Youth Alert (YA). They were treated to uplifting rallies, great food and fun, and a taste of what Bible College could be like for them.

The PRBI Board, staff, and students wish Arnold Newman a happy 100th birthday! Arnold, an alumnus from 1951, turned 100 years old on November 15. In his memoirs, Arnold wrote the following about his time at PRBI, “For some time I had felt that as a Christian I should be able to defend my faith by using the Scriptures, but I was completely ignorant… It never entered my thoughts that I should ever be a preacher, but I applied and was accepted. Bible School was nothing fancy. Just a few frame buildings.

The studying was difficult for me. I barely scraped through grade eight, and that had been a long time ago.

I worked hard and graduated…with a four year diploma. I remembered that we were reminded to always ‘trust the Lord.’”

Representatives from several Christian camps joined us on March 24 for Camp Day. We value the partnership we have with these camps that helps them meet their staffing needs and allows our students to make connections for summer jobs and ministry.

God has blessed us with an incredible school year! We are thankful. This year’s graduation ceremony is at PRBI on Saturday, April 23 at 10:00 a.m. We will be graduating nine students. Pray with us, that as

We have two tour teams going out to share in churches in Alberta and British Columbia between Sunday, April 24 and Sunday, May 1. Their schedules are posted on our website.

Please pray for them as they travel and minister.

A Place to Serve Since the summer of 2021, I have been pursuing a theme with my Trumpet articles. I began with the idea that Bible College is a place where young people can search for answers to the big questions of life.

I followed that up with the thought that Bible College offers students a place to reflect on how to live well, knowing that a Bible College education can help them construct a cohesive Christian worldview that will be sustainable for life. My previous article highlighted the opportunities for spiritual growth that attending Bible College facilitates. Bible College, then, is a place to search, reflect and grow, but to what end? In this final article, I want to show that the Bible College is a place for students to be exposed to the needs of God’s world and it is often here that they discover

Kim Cairns President where God is leading them to make an impact.

The starting point on this path is being not doing. The first step is learning what it means to be a disciple of Jesus before gaining the skills of becoming a disciple-maker.

Character development precedes training for service. Not that both cannot happen simultaneously, but the order of being then doing must be maintained. However, being is not enough. Jesus calls us to service, so our training also reflects this principle.

Learning to serve begins with finding a good fit in the body of Christ. As Paul teaches in his letter to the Corinthians, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same

Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Co 12:4-7). Our students can explore in a variety of ways and with the guidance of mentors how God has gifted them for service.

Understanding one’s gifts should lead to developing those gifts through use. Paul encouraged his disciple Timothy to, “not neglect the gift you have” and, in another place “to fan into flame the gift of God” (1 Ti 4:14, 2 Ti 1:6). Our students have several ways that they can practice their gifts. In the classroom they can speak, teach, and make presentations. Our chapel services are excellent spaces for learning how to lead in worship.

Through practical work experiences, they have hands on opportunities as they serve our PRBI community.

In partnership with local churches and community ministries, our field education program allows students to use their gifts in actual life situations.

As they gain confidence in using their gifts, we also expose our students to local and global needs through courses, mission conferences, and visits from mission agencies.

Students are not only encouraged to inform themselves about the state of the world, but we regularly provide opportunities for them to pray for our neighbours, those both near and far.

In addition, at least once a month, our community life groups look for a local need that they can meet through service.

The end of the path is that students will find their place in God’s kingdom and that they will, in the power of Christ, make an impact for His glory.

Some students will be part of mission trips. Others will serve in internships in camps, churches, and international locations. A good number will find their place in the local church, serving in a variety of ministries. Those who pursue vocational Christian service may take up to five years or more after PRBI to find the place God wants them to serve. Others will train for vocational ministry only to be led into other opportunities where they use their training with great effectiveness.

I am sold on Bible College! I believe in what we are doing at PRBI. It is a safe place to find answers to the big questions of life. Students can build a solid foundation of faith for life as well as grow their relationship with Christ. All the while, they can explore what God has for them to do and where He wants them to serve.

Will you encourage a young person in your circle of influence to consider attending Bible College? I can attest that it is a great place to be!

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.

Student Loan Grant Program For many years, the federal government has included grant funding within the Student Loan program. Recently, this has meant that many of our students enrolled in our programs that are 2, 3 or 4 years in length have been eligible for $3,000 per semester in grant funding from the Student Loan program. But there is a catch, to be eligible for the grant funding (free money), you have to apply for a student loan.

There are a variety of thoughts and opinions on student debt, even within the Christian community, but we won’t get into those here. However, before we discard the idea of student loans, there is a workaround for those who do not want to incur debt but do want the grant funding.

The first possibility is to only ask for the grant funding. In other words, you apply for a student loan through the Student Loan portal, but you indicate within the application that you only want to receive the grant funding.

This is not only possible, but easy to do, and completely above board.

Jeremy Johnston Director of Operations The second solution is to opt to receive all of the student loan money that the government is offering and put it in an interest-bearing savings account or GIC. This is what I did when I was a student. After 3 years, I cashed out the investment, and paid the government back. Not only did I earn interest over the course of the 3 years, but the government also forgave some of the student loan principal amount without me even having to ask. It was a pretty good deal!

It is important to note that we never want our students to feel pushed into getting a student loan. It is completely their choice. That being said, since we know there are students and parents who are unaware of this program, we do feel it is our institutional duty to explain some of the benefits of applying through the Student Loan portal.

The application takes about 15 minutes, and is usually totally worth it!

Recommended Reading “Is the animal you are thinking about an elephant, by chance?” This is the surprising and maybe even chilling question a television magician asked some years ago in a trick designed to make it appear as if he could read the minds of the watching audience. As a matter of fact I was thinking about an elephant – and, like the rest of my family, was captivated by a sense that something magical had actually happened. Under analysis, as it turns out, there are not very many grey, African animals starting with the letter ‘e’ that come to mind for the common person – no magic here.

had a knee-jerk reaction, which would again cause me to press the pause button on prayer and begin talking to myself. This became my way of turning to self-management instead of to God. … Instead of bringing these feelings to God, I would pause prayer and say to myself, ‘John, it is not good to be angry.

It doesn’t help. The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God, so let it go.’ I would not address my pain, not even to myself. Then I would unpause my prayer and say, ‘Sorry, God, I should not be so angry at this person. Forgive me.’ Then I would try to continue praying.” 1

But when the authors of Where Prayer Becomes Real described in exact detail a bad habit of my private prayer life, I knew it was no trick. “While talking to God,” John Coe writes, “I noticed some deep anger, or at times resentment and pain, in my heart. I

Surely Coe and co-author Kyle Strobel have no magical insight about the prayer life of some random Bible teacher in the upper reaches of snowy Alberta! What they do have are a series of scriptural principles on prayer aimed specifically at

Scott Butler Faculty correcting a number of the bad habits we all carry in this critical discipline of prayer. In the end, these principles translate into two lifegiving opportunities: pray as if God already knows and pray as if grace is real.

A conundrum for many students of the Bible, no matter the age, is why we bother praying if God already knows what we need. Yet it is precisely this point Jesus lands before He offers His disciples the Lord’s Prayer, truly the centrepiece of His teaching on how to pray. In my own paraphrase: ‘You do not have to offer up heaps of words in the faint hope that some clueless and heartless deity might do something for you’ (Mt 6:7). The character and ability of our Heavenly Father, Jesus taught, is altogether different. Not only does this mean that God does

not need to be begged to act in our favour, but also that there is nothing off limits as we reach forward to converse with Him! Personally, I think it would be absurd to pray to a god so dull that he relied on you to fill him in on your situation and your needs. Do you really want a god whose will is inferior to yours?

Yet the moment after I glory in our Heavenly Father’s supreme knowledge, I am confronted with my silly habit: pausing my prayers – thinking I can hold something back from the One who already knows what I need… and worse yet, fix it outside of His presence.

Strobel and Coe add to this another vital teaching of Scripture on prayer: the Son, raised in power, intercedes for us at the right hand of God (Ro 8:34) and the Spirit, knowing the

mind of God, utters sighs too deep for words on our behalf (Ro 8:26).

Not only does our God know what we need before we pray, He prays for us when we do not know how. With that sort of prayer team on my side, why would I hold anything back?

Using the Psalms in particular as a summons, a note of permission, and an excellent guide, the authors develop a number of practical strategies that draw readers forward to pray as if God already knows.

The second opportunity they offer is to pray as if grace is real. The most basic response that the human family has to sin is to run and hide.

Even before blaming his wife and the snake, Adam took off to hide among the trees (Ge 3:8, 12). God is not fooled and His seemingly bewildered questions serve only to highlight the absurdity and the tragedy of what sin has introduced.

Yet again, my habit of dropping out of prayer – or ‘ghosting God’ as the tech-savvy generation might say – is exposed for its foolishness.

Confronted with our true selves in the quiet of prayer, we might draw away from our Maker. Faced with the reality of sin, we feel compelled to try and clean ourselves up, to use our words to smooth over the problem until at last we might present ourselves to God riding high once

again. It is almost as if we think He does not know. Or worse, that the one thing we pin all our hopes on as Christians – the grace of God in Christ Jesus – is not really real. And what a time to have this theological crisis!

Where Prayer Becomes Real refocuses us on whom exactly we take our cues from in prayer. Not even the condemnation of our own hearts, 1 John 3:19-20 teaches, gets priority over what God has decided. Not only has condemnation been banished for those in Christ Jesus (Ro 8:1), He has paved and lit a pathway to God’s throne of grace, “so that we may receive mercy and find grace for help at the time of our need” (He 4:16b).

Like me, you may find this book lays bare your own habits. Yet its power is no strange magic – just truths each one of us can hold onto as we journey forward in honest prayer.

Scott has served as PRBI faculty since 2015. He is married to Jane and they have a young son and daughter.

[1] Kyle Strobel and John Coe, Where Prayer Becomes Real (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2021), 67-68.

Financial Update Peace River Bible Institute Statement of Operations and Budget July 2021 - Feburary 2022 Revenue

udent Revenue Student

neral Income Sales

Fees & Other Programs

& Non-Program Fees & Services

sidence Rental Rental

Income

nation - Undesignated Donations

- Undesignated - Designated Total Donations

nation - Designated Donations

ademics

udent Life

Total Revenue

Expenses

Income To Date

Annual Budget

% of Budget To Date

397,542

666,100

60%

106,506

24,550

434%

80,686

145,845

55%

559,999 42,400 602,399

800,000 76,200 876,200

70% 56% 69%

1,187,133

1,712,695

69%

Expenses To Date

Annual Budget

% of Budget To Date

Academics

15,166

24,235

63%

Campus Life

10,727

47,000

23%

65,593

94,228

70%

od Services Food

Services

velopment

Promotion & Development

89,863

127,000

71%

missions

Admissions

26,489

62,050

43%

871,374

1,394,067

63%

79,307

100,000

79%

6,653

6,000

111% 0%

ministrationAdministration

aintenance

Facilities & Maintenance

udent Aid

Special Project

udent Aid

Student Aid

-

15,000

hers

Others

-

-

Total Expenses Net Income (Loss) Excludes Amortization Expense

1,165,172 21,961

1,869,580 (156,885)

62%

Tour Team Dates HIGHEST CALL

EARTHEN VESSELS

April 24 La Crete, AB

April 24 Hinton, AB

April 25 High Level, AB

April 25 Castor, AB

April 26 Goodlow, BC

April 26 Vauxhall, AB

April 27 Prince George, BC

April 27 Medicine Hat, AB

April 28 Dawson Creek, BC

April 28 TBD

April 29 Nampa, AB

April 29 Daysland, AB

April 30 High Prairie, AB

April 30 Mayerthorpe, AB

May 1 Grande Prairie, AB

May 1 Onoway, AB

Visit www.prbi.edu/springtour for more information!

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ABOUT PRBI Peace River Bible Institute is a Canadian Degree Granting Bible College in Sexsmith, Alberta, founded in 1933.

PRBI is known for quality academics and its highly relational culture that purposefully fosters an atmosphere of spiritual growth. PRBI has a distinct commitment to train students in a thorough knowledge of the Word of God and to train students to become disciple-makers whether at home or abroad. PRBI’s educational model purposefully integrates the academic learning experience with an experiential learning component making us a Bible College for Life.

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780-568-3962

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PRBI - Peace River Bible Institute

The TRUMPET is the magazine of Peace River Bible Institute that 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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