The Bible Institute’s latest satellite is Word of Life’s most distinctive stretch into the lost countries of Asia. See what we wrote when the campus first opened in 2011.
China censors its media and restricts its citizens, hanging a black cloak over society even as it preaches growth and builds new bridges and homes with promises of a bright future.
Japan boasts some of the finest technology in the world, with innovation a second nature, but the island nation also has the highest suicide rate worldwide, with young people having everything to live for but deciding it’s not worth a try.
Russia lives under the grasp of narrow ambition, its leader playing societal roulette with a vision that works to grip only the moment with violence, restrictions, and silence.
Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and the islands lay in the squalor of want, the heat of the day baking hungry bodies, the rags of need covering lives searching for meaning.
Campfires began on the shore of Schroon Lake 65 years ago and then lit up the world, country by country. But of all the nations filled with campfire glow on a given summer evening, one place has stayed very dark: Asia.
Until now.
It was at a campfire in Schroon Lake decades ago when Steve Nicholes heard God calling him to be a missionary. Steve committed his life to reaching the world that night.
In fall 2011, Steve stood next to a new fire as about 40 young people gathered, flames being fueled by their sticks of dedication. This time, though, the ashes were sinking into the ground of Jeju Island, South Korea.
Jeju is like many Word of Life ministries that have sprung up around the world through timely giving and a miraculous string of events. But in many senses, it is very different. The biggest reason is that Jeju is, after over half a century, Word of Life’s strongest beachhead into the lost continent of Asia.
HOW ASIA CAN BE REACHED
Steve was on a missions trip in the Philippines during his college years when he began thinking about reaching Asia, where over half the world’s population lives — and where half the people have never heard the Gospel. While considering a ministry there, he met a missionary from the Navigators.
“You cannot go to every Asian country,” the missionary told him. “You cannot learn all their languages and cultures. To make a difference reaching Asia for Christ, you should select one country and spend your life training and discipling a few young men and then begin to send them out to each of the Asian countries. Then, when you are 70 years old, looking back on your life, you can see that you made a difference in reaching Asia for Christ.”
Steve and his brother, Mike, began searching for that one country, and they soon settled on South Korea. The nation had suitable resources and a stable government, and 25 percent of its people call themselves some kind of Christian. From there, Steve and Mike hoped to reach the rest of the continent and its varying cultures, shifting governments, and highly secular, pagan, or Buddhist or Hindu beliefs.As Steve and Mike visited Korea in the fall of 1986, pastors and missionaries told them that the country’s biggest need was someone to reach its youth. Knowing this was the chief goal of Word of Life, Steve and Mike left Korea with a firm belief that it was where God was leading them.
A KOREAN BASE
Word of Life’s Korea ministry officially began in 1995. In those early years, Steve and Mike discipled Korean young men, established Bible clubs, translated Word of Life materials, and built relationships with pastors.
The young Christians with whom Steve and Mike were working soon moved on to the Bible Institute, usually in the United States or the Philippines. Many early students had trouble with the program, though, so the staff at Word of Life Korea started a prep school.
More students completed the year, but then another problem was discovered: The Koreans were using their study skills to pass tests and graduate despite understanding only about a fourth of what they were hearing due to the language barrier.
That challenge was met by a discipleship training center, called the School of Youth Ministries in English (SYME), which began in January 2000 near the northern border. Students would come to the eight-month, resident school to learn English and be discipled.
Since 2003, the program has had about 45 to 50 students a year, with about half of them going on to the Bible Institute. Several have returned to Korea and joined the Word of Life staff.
ASIA COMES WITHIN REACH
As the Korean ministry went from being a pocket of young disciples to a year-round evangelism and development effort, the missionaries’ eyes turned to Asia once again.
Steve, who was named Word of Life’s regional director for Northeast Asia in 2007, suggested taking SYME and discipleship training center formats to other countries. Japan’s SYME opened in June 2007 with 21 students on a $10 million mini-hotel property that Word of Life got for just $200,000. SYME began in Taichung, Taiwan, in February 2009.
AN ISLAND CALLED JEJU
Throughout the ministry in Korea, Steve and Mike had been looking ahead to one day starting a Bible Institute. At one point, the leadership team looked into getting property on the South Korean mainland, but each attempt fell through.
Then, in December 2008, without any warning, Steve got a call from Don Lough. An anonymous donor had given $365,000 to buy a property on Korea’s Jeju Island, to create a home for a Northeast Asia Bible Institute.
Jeju Island looks more like a vacation getaway than a place for an upstart Bible school, but because of that, it has automatically taken Word of Life’s Asian ministries from a methodical creep to holding a prime base from which many more students can be trained and sent to new countries.
Jeju has been designated a “free visa zone” and is just a two-hour flight from Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Bible Institute site is 20 minutes from the airport, 15 minutes from the ocean, and 20 minutes from the tallest mountain in South Korea.
As well as a miracle price, God also worked to get the property’s nine joint owners to sell together. And the island’s population, which is only 5 percent professing Christians, has already become its own mission field as God has worked in specific people there to help the Bible Institute get its needed permits and materials.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF HEALING WATER
One of the situations where God worked was drilling a well on campus. Jeju is an inactive volcanic island, meaning that when it rains, water goes through its porous rock like a giant filtering system. Because of this, water from the island is highly prized. The government sells it with the promise of curing diseases and extending life spans.
An official on Jeju’s water council vowed to block Word of Life’s application for a permit, but then the island’s governor stepped in and helped the Bible Institute get its well.
Building permits came next, and from the March day when volunteers began to break ground, it was a rush to September 2010, when the school opened. Short-term construction teams helped build three dorms and prepare the campus for college life.While evangelistic events and the SYME centers have done their jobs well for the last two decades, Word of Life now has its premier option for training disciples established in Asia.
THE VISION FOR ASIA
As students from the Jeju Bible Institute get involved in ministry, Word of Life is once again looking to reach further.
Two new SYME locations have been planned, for the Zhejiang province in China, for 2013, and in southern Korea, for 2015. Word of Life also wants to have a regional Northeast Asia office by 2015. By 2020, Word of Life hopes to have 10 discipleship training centers throughout Asia.
Word of Life is also using its already-established Bible clubs, youth leadership training seminars, evangelistic sporting events, and English and summer camps to reach new people with the Gospel as well as train nationals to reach their own countries for Christ.
On a continent where spreading the Gospel has often been painstakingly slow, campfires are now springing up faster than ever. Oppression continues, regimes strengthen their grips, and darkness lingers.
But more than 20 years after Steve and Mike Nicholes first turned their eyes toward Korea with only hope and faith that God could use it to reach the rest of the continent, Asia’s distant shores are showing unmistakable light.
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