Brandon in Chapel

We are getting ready to check in and board the flight to Palau in a little while. We will be there 5 days to teach the Genesis Exegesis class and talk to church leadership about ways we can improve our delivery of teaching and training materials to the leadership of the Palau church. Today we had a good exchange of ideas in the faculty room with our Academic VP, Brad Boydston and our Liebenzell Mission Area Director Harald Gorges. I am hoping we can incorporate some of the Bible training technology that Brandon's group, iAlethia Worldwide, could provide into our distance education programs. Brandon also shared in our Guam chapel service (pictured) from Psalm 73. We will be going to Chuuk for the same purposes next week. Please pray for God's work to be done as we are there.

We are also still working on expansion plans into Hawaii and Tonga. As soon as there is an update I will let you know. In the meantime I appreciate your continued prayers for wisdom and discernment.

Super Bowl Party and a Prayer Request

Super Bowl Monday has become an unofficial island holiday on Guam. A lot of people take at least the morning off to go to a hotel or have a bunch of friends over to their houses to watch the game. Remember, because Guam is on the other side of the date line, we get live American TV when America's today is tomorrow - err or something like that. The normal live Sunday afternoon NFL games come on here at 3 and 6 AM. The Super Bowl, fortunately came on at 9.30 AM this year. We had a good group of PIBC faculty, staff and students over to eat hot wings, cake, chips and other assorted game food. Yes, I have eaten hot wings at 3.30 AM at other football parties. Joyce made triple chocolate cake for my birthday (not low carb) which I was happy to share with the group, even though our Dean of Women, Melissa Heck ate her piece before she sang Happy Birthday to me. I made my pre-game prediction, 38-10 Patriots, about which I was happy to be wrong. It was a great game and a fun time of relaxation and fellowship.

On a more serious note.. our Yapese students were informed last week that they will no longer receive the Yap State Scholarship because they are majoring in Bible. The commission in Yap has decided that that Bible is not a priority field of study and is denying even the students that have been receiving this scholarship for the last few years. This will be a real financial hardship on many of them. Please pray that God will supply their needs. Also pray for Joyce and me as I head to Palau tomorrow.

It's February

Wow, we are already a month into the year and two weeks into the semester. This weekend is a little different because we have a visitor with us, Brandon Buie. Brandon is a student at Dallas Seminary and the founder of iAlethia Worldwide, an organization that promotes biblical education and ministry training worldwide through the use of modern technology. He and I met 3 years ago through internet and email and got to know each other during my recruiting trips to DTS. He is working on translating biblical training and materials into the Micronesian languages and will be going with me to Palau and Chuuk over the next couple weeks to work with possible translators and form a strategy for using his materials in the islands. We will also be working together to teach a PIBC course Exegesis in Genesis. We will leave Tuesday for Palau.

Yesterday Brandon recovered from the long flight, though he did help Dale and Joyce with a little of the construction work on our new laundry room. In the picture Joyce is putting the mortar into the top row of blocks. We took Brandon on a tour of Guam today. It was a beautiful, but windy day. After church, Joyce and I, with her mom and dad, took off on the Southern circuit of the island. Above you can see Brandon and I at the Santa Marian Kamalin Park in Malesso. We also stopped and looked at Inarajan Pools, Ceti Bay Overlook, Agat Park and Asan Overlook.



One of the fun stops was at Fort Soledad in Umatac. This fort was built in 1810 near where Magellan originally landed on Guam in 1521. After touring the fort there we met a friendly Chammoro man who gave us a lesson about carabao and sold us some sweet Guam bananas.


After the tour we stopped at Jamaican Grill for my birthday lunch. Jamaican Grill is our kids favorite restaurant on Guam - sorry kids to eat there without you - and certainly one of our favorites. We got the Family Platter Deal with more ribs and chicken than we could eat. We also loved the fruit salad and chicken kelaguen. We finished with a fried banana dessert. Thank you Dale and Marion for a great birthday dinner.

Tuesday we will be heading down to Palau to teach the class, meet with the Palau Evangelical Church leadership and with several PIBC alumni and friends. Please pray for us that the LORD will give us a productive time down there and that we will be able to minister effectively to the students and others we meet.

Good News At PIBC

Today seems to be a day of good news and answered prayer. When I got up this morning there was a notice in my email that the visa request for Jens and Karin Schulz, our CFO/Guam Campus Director and Registrar, was approved. Jens and Karin had to leave Guam before Christmas when their religious worker visas were revoked. We have been operating very short handed without them, while hoping and praying that they would be able to come back as soon as possible. Now they need to complete the paperwork in Germany and we should have them back within the next month. We also heard good news from Steve and Anne Stinnette that his eye is healing in a way that borders on the miraculous. It may be that we will have our administrative group back completely intact sooner than we expected. This is good because we will need all our people since the LORD may be moving us toward a major expansion into Hawaii and Tonga. We will be working with some partners in Hawaii this month on a project that would add these two sites to the PIBC family and also would add a full seminary program to our curriculum. We hope to work out all the details and have a proposal to present to our accreditors by the middle of next month. If all works out these sites and programs would be up and running by this coming Fall. It is easy to look at this and say "No Way! Too Much" but we already see God bringing in the people and resources to accomplish this. Please pray with us that we will have clear direction and wisdom as plan for this next step in our PIBC adventure.

One other comment on the good day/week. One cool thing about PIBC is being able to go to chapel. I had the opportunity to share with the students on Tuesday and 4 times per week staff, faculty and students get to fellowship with preaching, music, etc. We get everything from classic homiletics, fiery exhortation, funny skits to, as we got today from Ned Farnsworth a sermon that included a super hero short and a Broadway type musical number. It is really a blessing to be able to worship together more than once a week.

House Project Update

Joyce and her mom and dad have been keeping busy working on our house. At the same time our neighbors ripped out the fence between us on one side of our house and put in a better one. I reported last week on how things were going so I thought I would give you an update. It looks like the fence is pretty close to done. A lot of Joyce's trees and plants had to be ripped out so she is already working on some new ones. As you can see from the picture it already looks pretty good and I know that soon the plants will be as big as the ones we ripped out.


On the other side of the house the enclosing of the laundry room continues. Joyce and her dad have been laying one row of bricks every day. Now they have one more full row to go. They should be done with the block by the end of the week. Joyce is having a great time pouring the concrete into the blocks while she is up high on the scaffold. I was a little concerned about her back with all this, but she says that when she woke up Saturday her back pain was gone. She is certainly getting around a lot better.



We found one surprise in the roof supports of the laundry room. This very large centipede had made its home up there. Joyce removed it on the broom after taking its picture. We think these things are poisonous but we don't know for sure. It's gone now, but you never know what little beasties you are going to encounter here.

First Week of the Semester

We have completed the first week of the new semester on the Guam campus. We were excited to have several new students enroll that we were not expecting. I don't have a final count yet on how many students we will have, but we should have that soon. We are still busy shuffling students around in the classes making sure they get into the right classes to get them through their programs on time. I am teaching two classes. One class (pictured - they are taking their first memory verse quiz) Survey of General Epistles has eight students - all men. I think this is the first all-male class I have ever taught at PIBC. Three women dropped out of it because of conflicts with other courses they needed. My father-in-law will be leading the lecture-discussions for the next four weeks as I travel. My other course is a partial distance education course, Exegesis in Genesis. We have 37 students in that class. 22 are Guam campus students, 10 will be taking it in the Chuuk Teaching Facility and 5 more in the Palau TF. I will lead 8 classroom lecture discussion sessions on each of the the three sites, but most of the discussion and class work will be done on line. This week our on-line discussion deals with views of origins, creation-evolution and intelligent design. I really enjoy the distance education classes because the students come to the class from all over and there is a very wide age range. It is great to see them exposed to a wide range of perspectives.

I also need to comment on chapel today. It was one of those days that reminds me why I am here. (We do sometimes forget in the busyness of running a school.) The Chuukese Christmas mission team to Saipan was in charge of today's chapel. After some Chuukese songs, two of our male students gave the message. Keiny talked about how he saw God do miracles in people's lives through their humble efforts and urged the students to go out and fulfill the Great Commission because Jesus promises to always be with us. Then Calvin, talked about how the trip was conceived, planned and executed by the students without help from the faculty and staff and eloquently exhorted the student body to take personal responsibility for obeying the call of Christ and serving others. All I could say was AMEN!

Home Improvement

One of the projects that Joyce's mom and dad have been working on this month is the rebuilding of our laundry/storage room. Last month I posted about how the termites had eaten up the wooden walls of our old laundry room. Joyce decided that we needed to replace the wooden walls with concrete block. A wise decision in the tropics! So, Dale has been laying a row of blocks each day for the last couple weeks. As you can see in the pictures it is starting to look very nice with a couple windows and a door. It was all open before. Besides providing more secure storage we were thinking that we might be able to use it as another guest room. It will still have a steel roof. It will be nice to have a bigger and better storage and laundry area.

While we were in the midst of this project our neighbors asked us if they could tear out our fence on the property line between us and build a newer and better one. Our fence actually strayed off the line and was a few inches on to their property. This sounded like a good idea to us and we were glad to contribute our fence materials that were already there to the project. The fence will have a concrete block lower part and then a wire fence on the upper part. It will also cover the whole property line. So we are thankful for a new, better fence at little cost to us. We have the blessing of construction on both sides of the house now.