Prairie Bible College

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Prairie Bible College, incorporated as Prairie Bible Institute (PBI), was opened on October 9, 1922 in Three Hills, Alberta. It became renown as a major missionary training centre with alumni eventually working in more than 110 nations around the globe. It's precursor was a local Bible Study group led by J. Fergus Kirk, a central Alberta Presbyterian farmer. L.E. Maxwell (1895-1984), a graduate of the Midland Bible Institute in Kansas, was invited to come and develop a structured curriculum. He readily became the school's dynamic principal and eventual president. After 58 years of teaching Maxwell retired in the spring of 1980 near the age of 85.

From its inception in an abandoned farmhouse with eight students PBI attained an enrollment of over 900 at its height in 1948 and was for several decades Canada's largest Bible College (until 1984). Under the authority of an act of the Alberta Legislature Prairie Bible College has granted Associate and Bachelor degrees since 1980; more recently the college has reached credit and/or programmic transfer arrangements with The King's University College in Edmonton and the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. Although initially wary of outside alliances and influences, Prairie Bible College achieved the status of an accredited institution in 1997 when the Association for Biblical Higher Education accepted the school as a full member.

Ventures initiated by PBI were the Prairie Sunday School Mission established in 1929 which was subsequently reorganized as the Alberta branch of the Canadian Sunday School Mission. In 1933, at the invitation of Peace River area residents, PBI graduate Walter W. McNaughton traveled by bicycle and hitchhiking from Viking, Alberta to the Peace River country in the Province's north-west to establish the Peace River Bible Institute (now located at Sexsmith, near the city of Grande Prairie, Alberta). Later, by the 1940s, PBI had founded three general education Christian schools on its Three Hills campus: Prairie Elementary, Prairie Junior High, and Prairie High School. In 2004 these schools were amalgamated as Prairie Christian Academy (PCA) and began to operate independently from Prairie Bible Institute. PCA now exists as one of Alberta's alternative schools under the local public school division.

Another outgrowth of the school was its own campus church - The Prairie Tabernacle Congregation. This local fellowship met for over fifty years in a cavernous arena-like auditorium seating 4,300. Remodeled and renamed in 1985, the Maxwell Memorial Tabernacle was Canada's largest religious auditorium. In 2005 this building was demolished so that a new multi-purpose facility "The Maxwell Centre" could be erected. The new facility will continue to bear the name of Prairie's founder and, when completed, will house a chapel that will seat 1,200. During this reconstruction the Prairie Tabernacle Congregation continues to meet in local rented facilities.

Finally, as one of the first Bible training institutes in Western Canada, Prairie's graduates filled other needy pulpits across Canada's great plains and were quite influential in the promotion and advance of evangelical churches, especially congregations of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Evangelical Free Church. These, along with other denominations, utilized the graduates of Prairie and other emerging Bible Schools until they were able to establish their own denominational colleges and seminaries in the Canadian west.

Today, Prairie Bible Institute continues as a venerable Canadian centre for Christian higher education that encompasses three post-secondary schools: Prairie Bible College (which offers both resident and distance education courses and programs), Prairie School of Mission Aviation, and - in partnership with Bow Valley College and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology - the Prairie College of Applied Arts and Technology was opened as of September, 2006.

[edit] External links

• Prairie Bible College - Official Site
• News Releases

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