Much has been written about the Canadian and the American Bible School Movement of the 20th Century, because this movement has had a massive impact on the Christian church, not only in Canada, but also in the foreign mission field.
Indeed, a considerable number of people have attended these colleges across Canada.
I too have taken several classes at one of these Bible colleges: Vanguard College (Northwest Bible College). Burkinshaw writes that “A conservative estimate indicates that at least 200,000 people have spent at least one academic term at a Canadian Bible school or college”[1] of which some 60,000 have graduated.[2] (Just so you know, that number was taken in 1997, so I was not part of that 200,000).
An example of a Canadian Bible College would be the Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills, Alberta. It has trained and sent several thousand missionaries onto the foreign field.[3]
However, the influence of the Bible School Movement extends even farther than these figures for they do not include “the thousands of other individuals who were influenced through the auxiliary ministries of these schools such as week-end conferences, polemical literature, and radio broadcasts.”[4]
The Bible College Movement has had an undeniable influence on Canadian Protestantism.
In this and the subsequent blog post, I will be focusing on the Bible School Movement in Canada. In this first post, I will be talking about the origins of the Bible School Movement.