The Progress of the Bible School

We are now in the middle of the so-called “ten days of awe,” which are the ten days between the Rosh Hoshana and Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins Sunday evening, September 27, so it is our next official watch date.

In light of the banking news that I just posted, we may see some further developments in the financial realm. Recall that the Day of Atonement is also the Jubilee, where all debts are to be cancelled. I won’t venture a guess beyond that.

The Feast of Tabernacles is from October 3-10. Our livestream conference is scheduled for the weekend of October 9-11, which covers the eighth day of Tabernacles. We will be giving a Bible School progress report during the conference.

A team has been working on test questions for the Bible School courses during the past year. In the process, they have had to study the books and to understand the basic concepts thoroughly. This team is the core group of teachers and facilitators, but we could use a few more to help with the test questions. They have been discussing these things on a zoom meeting on Saturday mornings from 10-12 noon.

We will soon be ready for our first class (“cohort”). Because of the backlog of students, we will be starting with those who want to be teachers, so we can increase the number of teachers first. We will be sending out a survey or questionnaire soon to get an idea of who and how many are interested in taking the courses. Right now, we are only able to do an online school. Later we plan to add correspondence courses for inmates and others who have no computer.

One thing should be made clear: The online school will be through zoom meetings (or some equivalent of zoom). We hope to teach the Scriptures to some Chinese communist officials who monitor all zoom meetings, hoping to build profiles on everyone.

You can start school right now, of course. The text books are in the curriculum, currently posted on our website. Click “Start Here” in the link at the top. There is a description of the school and the five “Modules” (like semesters), with the books in each. In order for anyone to be included in a class (zoom meeting), he or she will be required to read the books ahead of time. The online meetings will not be where students read the books. The books are all posted online free of charge, so anyone with a computer can begin to study them today. Or they can be ordered.

The zoom meetings will not be designed to teach but to answer questions, discuss what you have learned, and for the teachers to monitor the students’ progress. The teacher’s responsibility will be to make sure the students understand the material so that they can build upon it in the next Module.

Students may be ready for just Module 1 (Evangelism Studies). They may have to wait some weeks or months in order to read the textbooks in Module 2 before starting the next class. That is alright. We anticipate that at some point all 5 Modules will have students at the same time, each being taught by a different teacher. When we have enough students for a cohort, we will start up a new course for them.

So at the present time we are gearing up toward starting the School with those who have already read at least the first set of textbooks. It looks like I will be teaching the first cohort to get things started, so that the others can continue devising test questions for the rest of the Modules. The test questions have been completed for only the first two Modules.

Those who have already done their reading over the years will take less time to complete the courses and will quickly provide us with more teachers. When we have an abundance of teachers, then we might have the luxury of taking on students who know very little. Such students will need much more time to progress, perhaps many years.

But meanwhile, there is no reason why you cannot already start teaching, as long as there are those who want to learn. My daughter started a “book club” this past summer, going through The Laws of the Second Coming. She asked me to assist, so I have been participating in her zoom meetings for the past few months. This has given me a better idea of how long it takes to teach those who have been raised in a “normal” church setting. Such believers are not used to serious Bible study, because churches are not Bible Schools. There are so many new concepts that their brains tend to freeze up when full.

Yet observing this has given me a better perspective of the big job that lies ahead. You who have been learning these things in past years are the teachers of the future. It’s just that there are a lot of books to study, and only a few of you have actually read them all.

We do not intend to make everyone read all of the books, of course. Furthermore, the Modules will be modified from time to time, especially as I continue writing. What we have listed at the end of the “Start Here” link already needs some modification, as we will be including The Gospel of John and Theology of the Logos and perhaps Isaiah in the Apostolic Studies. We will be updating this shortly, as well as updating the link itself.