Greetings from Big Sandy! I am presently "in between Holy Days" on the Big Sandy campus tending to many details relative to the opening up of Ambassador College this autumn.
We particularly enjoyed our visit with the Youngstown-Akron area churches and a larger than expected crowd for the first Day of Unleavened Bread, including several hundred co-workers or donors who were visiting perhaps for the first time.
I was especially inspired to learn that in — the Youngstown area and surrounding smaller cities like Warren, Ohio, and elsewhere, we are dispensing 20,000 PLAIN TRUTHS in our newsstand campaign each month! This does not include the Cleveland, Akron-Canton area or any of the other larger cities, but is in the Youngstown area and its environs alone! I was inspired to walk into a little restaurant cafe just prior to my departure and see a big newsstand chocked full of PLAIN TRUTH magazines (though I think I would have been more inspired if it had already been empty).
All of us were very encouraged over the signs of positive growth and the definite foundation being laid for future growth in this part of the country — and hope and pray the same is true for all other parts!
In discussing the tremendous new developments in our educational arm of the church, I couldn't help but muse over the situation that developed in the early and middle 1960s on the Pasadena campus. Many of you will remember how we were elated over the fact that up to 30 and even 40 percent of our incoming freshmen in some given years came to Ambassador College already possessing a degree from another institution. Many of these men, even including Dr. Kuhn, Dr. Geis, David Wainwright (currently on a doctoral program) and many others, came to Ambassador College for a second undergraduate degree, when in fact it would have been much better if they could have come to a graduate level program and been pursuing a higher degree in their respective fields.
At long last, God has opened the door for precisely that kind of program! Now, with the development and expansion of a full-fledged graduate school of theology, with several important degree programs on the Pasadena campus, we have the opportunity to accept men of this caliber directly into the graduate school, leading to greater personal and professional involvement within the church itself, without what could be in fact a waste of time in spending years in a second undergraduate program!
I am positively excited beyond words at the cleanness of this new separation of the undergraduate program and the maintenance of our undergraduate college on the Big Sandy campus, the creation of a very fine Graduate School of Theology on the campus in Pasadena, and the powerful new emphasis on church visibility, church growth, church programs and activities at the headquarters of the church in Pasadena.
We will be going to Montgomery, Alabama for the weekly Sabbath following the last Day of Unleavened Bread — I plan to speak before the combined churches in the Big Sandy area on the last Holy Day and then will be returning to Pasadena by Monday.