Refresh: Remembering the truth behind what we know about joy.

By Steve Nicholes

When I transferred from the Bible Institute to college, I was put in a dorm where students who decided to enroll at the last minute were housed. It was a bad scene and, to be honest, I hated my situation.

I had just come from the Bible Institute, where I was a big fish in a small pond. At the new school, hardly anybody knew me. I remember one of my Bible Institute friends coming up to me one day and saying, “Steve, I used to think you were really important....”

Every time I went into my dorm, I got depressed. That was a first for me. I was a pretty positive guy. I started asking God “Why?” The more I thought about it, the more depressed I became. It was like I was in this hole, and I was going down, and I didn’t know how to get out.

Finally, one day, in the middle of my depression, I remembered a song from when I was a little kid.

Jesus and others and you — what a wonderful way to spell ‘joy.’
Jesus and others and you in the heart of each girl and each boy.
J is for Jesus, for He has first place,
O is for others we meet face to face.
Y is for you in whatever you do,
So put yourself last and spell joy.

I knew many Scripture verses talk about this idea. “Seek first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33). “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). “Let each esteem others better than himself” (Philippians 2:3). And the greatest commands in Scripture are to (1) love God with all your heart and (2) love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39).

I believed these things were true, but I didn’t know how they would bring joy. I was desperate in my black hole, though. I prayed, “God, help me,” and He gave me the idea to get together with some other Bible Institute alumni who were at the school. One of them lived off-campus, so I asked if we could buy the stuff to make chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies and make them at his home.

After that, we took the cookies to a nursing home and began to go room to room. I took my cookies into the first room. The lady sitting there was so surprised to have a visitor. She began telling me her story. She told me that her kids never came to visit her. Over and over, she kept saying, “Thank you for taking time to come and be with me.” The next room was a similar story — and the next and the next.

By the time I stepped back onto campus, my whole mindset had changed. I had finally stopped looking at myself and had begun looking at those around me who were hurting.

The path out of my hole really was Jesus first, others second, and myself last.

If we really love Jesus and put Him first, then we can enjoy time with Him even if we are on a desert road without anyone else. Then, putting others second makes us stop focusing on ourselves. I can say that I have never again been depressed like that in my life. The new focus changed my life and my perspective.

I don’t know where this article finds you, but as I watch world news from Jeju Island in South Korea, there are so many things that can drag us down. I hope that this simple but timeless principle will help you as it did me. Lift your eyes up to the Lord first, and then look around to others who are worse off than you and lend a helping hand. I firmly believe it won’t be long before you will gain victory over whatever is trying to drag you down.

“Jesus and others and you — what a wonderful way to spell ‘joy.’”

Steve Nicholes, Class of 1981, is the director of Word of Life Northeast Asia. He now leads the campus in Jeju, South Korea, with his wife Rhonda, Class of 1985, by his side.

Confidence in the Gospel: A message from the Chancellor.

By Don Lough, Jr.

We live in a world where it is unpopular to take a stand for what is right and true. The message of the cross is considered nonsense to many. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are often labeled as exclusive, intolerant, and backward. Faced with this kind of pressure, it might appear attractive at times to simply take the path of least resistance and to assume a stealth mode.

The Apostle Paul’s declaration in Romans 1:16 jolts us back to the reality of where we really need to be as Christians: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.” If there was ever a place for Paul to be timid and ashamed of the Gospel, it was in Rome. Rome was an arrogant city, a home to every conceivable idol as well as the center of intellectualism and philosophy. Here was Paul, a tentmaker by trade, proclaiming a message about a Jewish carpenter named Jesus who died a criminal’s death on a cross. Regardless, Paul affirms, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel....”

Where does this kind of confidence come from? Here are a few truths to consider. First, Paul believed that the Gospel is superior — not some fairy tale or story fabricated in the mind of man. The Gospel is from God and is about His Son, Jesus Christ. It is superior to any religious idea or philosophy. Nothing compares to the Gospel. Second, Paul believed the Gospel was sufficient. Don’t ever forget that the Gospel does not contain the power of God. Instead, the Gospel “is the power of God unto salvation.” Finally, the apostle also knew that the Gospel is simple. “It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.” Many cling to the idea that salvation requires good works or special requirements. No — the Gospel calls for simple faith and trust in God’s Son, Jesus Christ, as the One who can save from sin.

Today, God has strategically placed you on this planet not simply to exist, but to make Him known. Do not ever be ashamed to share the Good News about Jesus Christ.

Testimony Corner: Dave Duma, Class of 1979

For many years, I could not stand to be around Christians. I hated to see those smiling faces. I just knew they couldn’t be happy all the time.

My childhood was unhappy. My mom and dad divorced when I was 6 years old. I remember them always fighting, and my mom crying at night after the police escorted my dad out of the house. My mom and we three children were left in a farmhouse with no heat and a bank repossession letter on the door, telling us to move.

The Christians I knew were counterfeit. They smiled but never helped, even after my dad left. Instead, my grandpa and grandma took us in. Mom got a decent job as a secretary in a factory, and my brother and I got jobs as kids to pay our own way. I delivered newspapers. When I was 12, I started washing dishes in a restaurant and cleaned a slaughterhouse.

Getting into the working world introduced me to different people, and I made new friends who were not good for me. The Bible says bad company corrupts good manners, and it’s true. I was a good boy who went bad — and fast. I finally had plenty of money, but that didn’t keep me from being miserable.

Still, I knew some people who didn’t have much materially but always had smiling faces and seemed genuinely happy. They seemed to like me and never judged me, and I was comfortable around them for some reason.

All these people wanted to do was to help me, and I began to think that they ay be right when they told me I just needed Christ. Before, there was no way I thought Jesus could be the answer because everything associated with God and Christianity had been so bad in my life. But these people planted the seed that got me thinking that Christ could be what I needed as my life sank further into the sin issues I was dealing with.

While battling sin and thinking about where my life was headed, one night it all finally came together. I knew I needed to come to Christ.

After a series of events, on June 14, 1977, at 11:30 p.m., I knelt on a sidewalk in Akron, Ohio, and asked Jesus to forgive me and take control of my life. I was 21 years old. On that night, 2 Corinthians 5:17 became real: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away: Behold, all things are become new.”

Starting that night, God changed all my desires. I became one of those smiling face people.

I loved to go to church, something I never did before. I loved fellowship with believers and studying God’s Word. A year later, my pastor told me about the Word of Life Bible Institute, and I decided I wanted a deeper walk with the Lord. I wanted to get grounded, and God led me to join the Class of 1979.

I never preregistered for the Bible Institute. My pastor told me that if God was leading me, Word of Life wouldn’t send me home. My Bible study small group at home had a going-away party for me and handed me an envelope with enough cash to pay my way. I knew God’s hand was on me.
I drove 533 miles in a junk car with no heat to get to the Bible Institute, and I was so happy. I showed up the day before class — campfire night.

That year, I became grounded in God’s Word, and 34 years later, I still have my verses down. They stay with you, and you’ll always use them.

I met the love of my life when working in the dish pit at the Bible Institute: Beverly Garber, now Beverly Duma. We’ve been married 32 years and have five sons, three daughters, and seven grandchildren. Three of our kids — David, Bryan, and Sarah — are Bible Institute graduates, and two grandsons — Daniel and Michael — are attending right now.

As for Beverly and me, we are stewards of a family business in Ohio. That is our ministry. We are called to support the Lord’s work and meet the needs of our employees. I also serve as a Sunday school teacher and elder at Maranatha Bible Church.

You cannot know the will of God unless you know the Word of God. God’s will is in His Word.

It was God’s Word that has shaped my life to where it is now, and it is God’s Word that can change your life, too.

Campus Update: OAE in Owen Sound.

Lucas Prosper (Wyoming, Ontario)
• First year, Owen Sound campus
• Open Air Evangelism ministry

What were your apprehensions going into Open Air Evangelism?
I was scared of going and sharing my faith because I feared that I would look stupid or crazy or something to that effect.

What opportunities did you have to share Christ?
I had many opportunities to share Christ and what He has done for my life with a few different people from what seemed like all walks of life. I had the chance to do a sketch board, which is basically street-preaching of the Gospel, and to have personal contact with complete strangers on the streets of one of Canada’s neediest cities: Hamilton, Ontario. I just hope God used those conversations to speak to those people’s lives and help them examine themselves and see that they need Christ.

How did God work in your own heart during OAE week?
God not only worked on my fear but also on how I should be viewing the people that I am sharing the Gospel with. I am trying to show them a God Who loves them and wishes that none should perish. We have broken His law and His commandments, but we can’t fix that by ourselves — we need Christ to pay for our sins.

How has this changed your life?
A member of the staff had us listen to a sermon about the way to minister on our second day, and this made a huge impact in my life! I realized my responsibility to share truth with people. I would like to say that all the apprehension of witnessing for Christ is gone, but I know it’s not. Hopefully in my time away from school I will have the opportunity to share with friends and family the hope that I have — hope in Christ.

How you can help: National Volunteer Program.

Many alumni ask us how they can help Word of Life at the Bible Institute or around the world. Here is one of the biggest ways you can get involved.

The National Volunteer Program is an opportunity for people to use their gifts and abilities to help with the ministry needs of Word of Life New York. The purpose of the program is to assist our staff in creating and maintaining an environment in which students can be trained and equipped for future ministry, our guests can be refreshed in God’s Word, and the Gospel can be clearly proclaimed.

The program hosted more than 650 volunteers in 2012, including people who came on their own, couples and families, retirees, youth groups, and church groups. You don’t have to be a professional or highly skilled to volunteer. Although some of our volunteers are trained in a craft, many know just the basics or are willing to simply do whatever needs to be done. Projects involve carpentry, clerical work, electrical jobs, general labor, health care, housekeeping, heating and air conditioning repair, computers and technology, kitchen work, landscaping, lawn care, maintenance work, masonry, mechanics, painting, and much more.

During Memorial Day weekend last year, the program hosted 300 volunteers. They helped prepare New York for summer camp and the conference season. The volunteers accomplished much and were also able to enjoy our facilities and participate in the special Memorial Day service at the Bible Institute. Alumni who are interested in helping this Memorial Day weekend will be able to enjoy Word of Life’s Homecoming weekend.

Some of the major upcoming projects in the first half of 2013 are:

• All camps: Cleanup and landscaping; volunteers and counselors for camping season
• Family Campground: Build a pavilion for the youth program
• Inn: Remodel STC housing, upgrade roofing
• Island: Finish building the beach/dome bathhouse, remodel bathrooms, replace decks
• Ranch: Remodel cabins
• Bible Institute: Remodel dorms

We are indebted to the services of our volunteers. The support they provide cannot be measured.

The National Volunteer Program is a labor of love. Please ask the Lord how He will allow you to be used as a volunteer with Word of Life in 2013.

For more information, check out volunteers.wol.org or email us at nvp@wol.org. You can also call David McClain, our program coordinator, at 518-494-6369.

From the Editor: Issue Six.

by Jen Slothower

Alumni Director Emeritus Wayne Lewis seems to think you all will enjoy getting a column from me, the editor, in every Victory Journal (and a photo of myself, at some point).

So here we go.

The reason I shied away from putting my name all over this magazine in the past is mostly that I think my part shouldn’t matter. If you are reading and enjoying what we are sending you, you’ll be reading and enjoying it, and the person putting it together is of no consequence. (And if the opposite is true, then we just have to work harder.) But as we change this Victory Journal and aim to make it something that not only blesses the alumni population but also accurately reflects you, my role in the Victory Journal’s development might be more important than I realized.

First, understand that I am not a staff member at Word of Life. While I am an alumnus, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, down near Memorial Drive, where you can look across the Charles River black like glass and see Boston, a city that has so much hope, promise, and intellect but is really as lost as this world has ever been. I have degrees in journalism and have done everything from designing the front page of a newspaper each night to covering the Celtics at the Garden to editing Sunday School lessons for teenagers. Right now, I am a diehard Yankees fan who writes baseball, football, basketball, and hockey stories for a Boston-based national sports website.

So, why am I editing the Victory Journal?

Well, why not? Think about this: When has the Bible Institute ever been about spitting out cookie-cutter Christians? Has Word of Life’s goal ever been to create a template of what every graduate should look like? When you devote a program to pushing its students deeper and deeper inside the Word, should you be surprised when some of them find Jesus Christ in the deepest of ways and then want to take Him to places where no one speaks His name, from Fenway Park to Boylston Street to Harvard Square?

My professional life right now consists of me keeping the jobs I can get as journalism melts around me. But my personal life is exactly what I have prayed it will be since I first discovered the idea of a life consumed by God (Colossians 3) at the Bible Institute. I now aim to walk with God, and then to carry the only true hope I’ve ever found to the people I see in everyday life.

The Bible Institute is billed as “a great place to start.” And it is just that — a start. For all that people love about their Bible Institute years and what happened there, the true glory belongs to the years after, and how God takes a short time of immersive Bible training and turns it into incredible changed lives all over the world.

I live in Cambridge. You live in Lynchburg, Virginia; Hudson, Florida; Chicago; California; Brazil. I write sports. You sell insurance and help in your youth group. You teach and volunteer. You raise your kids or devote your life to missions.

I rarely set foot on a Bible Institute campus, but I know why God has me using my journalism experience to make this magazine happen. The Bible Institute isn’t just about Open Air Evangelism, Snow Camp, and supervising the bakery at the Word of Life Inn during the summer. It’s about what happens when an intense year becomes a life of knowing God and spreading His Truth.

The message of the Bible Institute, of Word of Life, of Jesus Christ, is spread throughout the world in so many ways by those who are the alumni of the Word of Life Bible Institute.

We want to make the Victory Journal something that ministers to those people — that tells their stories. I hope you’re encouraged to know a Bible Institute graduate is bumbling her way around Boston, sharing Jesus, and I want to be encouraged by hearing what you are doing now. We want the Victory Journal to be a continuing dialogue of what we learned at the Bible Institute but also a place to share with each other what God has done since then.

So, send us your stories. Share your memories. Tell us what you like and don’t like about the Victory Journal (or our online blog), and how it could be better for you.

This isn’t about the Bible Institute or Word of Life — it’s about how God changes lives through the Bible Institute and Word of Life, and that means we want to hear from you.

We have big plans for the Victory Journal. We’ve come a long way, but we’re still trying to expand and do a better job of serving you. Please send us your ideas and stories via alumni@wol.org, mikebush@wol.org, waynel@wol.org or jenslothower@wol.org. We will keep you updated on what we’re doing within these pages and online.

And you know, this column might not be such a bad idea if you send us plenty of your stories to talk about in each issue.

Q&A: Gary Ingersoll

Resident professor, Florida campus

Certain teachers seem as much a part of the Bible Institute as Scripture memory or chapter titles. But few have always been at Word of Life ... or even in ministry. The Florida campus has a former titan of industry (well, close enough) as one of its resident professors — a man whose Bible training went well beyond book studies.

Tell us how you ended up at the Bible Institute in Florida.

I came 3,200 miles, from the other corner of the country, to the Bible Institute in Florida as a “job transfer” in 1997. I had been a Word of Life missionary with Local Church Ministries in Washington state for 12 years. The opportunity to be a professor at the Bible Institute does not often present itself (after 15 years, I am still the newest professor at the U.S. campuses), so when I heard an extension campus was opening in Florida, I began asking about transferring to the new position of resident professor. Some five or six months later, we were moving to Florida! 

How did you get into teaching the Bible?

Educationally, my story begins in 1970, when I was in the second of a five-year program to become an engineer at General Motor Institute (now called Kettering University, in Flint, Michigan). It was then that I asked Jesus to be my Savior through the ministry at the nearby Riverdale Baptist Church. I earned my engineering degree in 1974, took an educational leave of absence from General Motors (I worked in things like “car crash-testing”), and enrolled at Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary. I earned a masters of divinity in 1978 and became the associate pastor at my Riverdale, my home church. An economic recession resulted in my losing my pastorate. So I returned to seminary in 1981-82 to get a masters in religious education and then took an associate pastorate at Bethany Baptist Church in Seattle, Washington. In 1985, I came on staff with Word of Life as a local church missionary to Washington state, where I served until moving to Florida.

What on earth took you from crash-testing cars to teaching the Bible? What did God do in your life?

Well, I got saved when I was a sophomore in college. I was in the second year of a five-year work study program to become an engineer with General Motors when it was the largest company in the world. By that point, I had been around Christian friends for some three years — first in high school and then again in college. I knew they had an inner joy, peace, and purpose I lacked in my life. But because of my background as a teen in theologically liberal churches, I had difficulty sorting out true from error in my understanding of Scripture — I thought I was somehow already a Christian who could work my way to Heaven!

I also came to understand before I was saved that to become a Christian meant that I must change my focus in life. I had natural abilities as an engineer, so I thought I could pursue that career, make a lot of money, and, of course, live happily ever after. Yet as a “seeker” of the truth about Jesus, I came to understand that His disciples were those who took up their own crosses to become true followers or disciples of Him. I believe that the Lord was calling me to salvation but also calling me to a greater purpose in life than I had up to that point. 

After I was saved, I had several long conversations with influential older Christians like my college calculus professor, Dr. Bolander. He and others helped me see how I could become a true disciple of my Lord Jesus. He encouraged me to finish my engineering degree (after all, the Lord may just want to use that in my future, too!) and to get involved in my local church. I worked with the teen program, which was involved with Word of Life, and began to help out at some evangelistic activities in our area.

As I became more involved in working with my local churches and helping them with their youth work, I began teaching on a regular basis. So, 20 years before I became a professor at the Bible Institute, I was teaching doctrinal studies to teens at my church each week. Little did I know that the Lord was going to use all of these as preparation to continue my work with young people at the Bible Institute in Florida.

How did you end up in Washington state?

The saddest day in Fran’s and my life had to be the day my ministry to the youth at Riverdale Baptist came to an end. There was a hard-hitting recession that resulted in a third of the people in Flint leaving town to find work. My church lost close to half its membership, so I became an unemployed youth pastor. Without work in Flint, I re-enrolled in seminary and also began working as a contract engineer designing machinery to make breakfast cereal for Post Cereal (I did things like design a better “raisin machine” that adds raisin to Post Raisin Bran!). 

I continued to look for full-time ministry in a local church, but nothing was available in Michigan. But we got in touch with Bethany Baptist in Seattle, which had contacted my seminary looking for possible pastoral candidates. I started Word of Life clubs there, became fast friends with the new local church missionary, and went to my first Word of Life camp the next summer in northern California.

What makes Word of Life unique, and why did you want to stick around?

My wife, Fran, and I first choose to come on staff with Word of Life and, from time to time over the past 27 years, have chosen to remain with Word of Life instead of moving on to some other ministry based upon one primary observation: Word of Life continues to afford the two of us a greater opportunity of service for our Savior, Jesus Christ, than anything else into which we could be investing our lives! We could be involved elsewhere, make more money, and perhaps gain greater fame or a more impressive title. Yet we have chosen to invest in the lives of the 120-plus young people that each year become our students. It is our goal to help them grow in their walks with the Lord as we pastor them like a “one-year youth group.” They truly become “our young people,” whom we love!

Do you have someone at Word of Life you would like to hear from in a Q&A? Email alumni@wol.org.