Dr Bishara Awad

Every year all over the world, thousands of students attend Bible College. How wonderful it must be to study God's word in the city where Jesus was born! Started in 1979, the Bethlehem Bible College is a story of hope against the odds. Paul Calvert spoke with Dr Bishara Awad, the Principle, about its beginnings and the miracle of where they are today. Paul began by asking him how the college was started.

Bishara: This Bible College started in 1979, at that time I used to be the Principle of Hope Secondary School in Beit Jala which is the town right next to Bethlehem and many of the students wanted to continue their Christian education. I looked around and there were no Bible Colleges. Sometimes a student would get to know a missionary and that missionary would send them to America to study, but once the student is in America they don't come back; this has been a great loss for future leaders for the churches so I came up with an idea, which I felt was a vision from God. What we need here is a Bible College, so I shared my idea with all the Church Leaders from different Churches and different denominations. I shared in a big meeting and I told them that we needed a Bible College and they all agreed. One Pastor said 'you can do it', another said 'here's my first cheque, you can do it', so I looked at the cheque - it was $20; I said to myself 'Oh God what are you doing, how can we start a Bible College with just $20'? But this was the seed money and since I was the Principle I had the keys for the classrooms, so we started the classes in the evening. Missionary's came to help us free of charge so really we didn't need the $20 and we went like this for two years.

In these two years many people would come, many Churches would say, you are doing something good and we'd like to become partners; so after two years we were able to rent a place, a beautiful place. We had two apartments open to each other, but they became too small in no time because the Lord continued to open our avenues, to open our tent; so in 1990 the Lord led me to these premises where we are at right now. It used to be a school for the blind, the Helen Keller home for the blind; they allowed us to use the building. It took us six years to raise the funds to buy these buildings, but after six years we were able to buy it with 1.8 million dollars so we praise God that $20 can provide 1.8 million dollars! Now we are in beautiful facilities here in Bethlehem on the main Jerusalem Hebron road.

Paul: So how many students have you seen come through the Bible College over the past 30 years?

Bishara: We have graduated over 370 students. Many of them are Pastors and Leaders in the community and that is our goal. Our aim is to train indigenous leaders and that's what we are doing and the work is really fulfilling! It's just beautiful to see; many are teachers of Christian education, many are counsellors, many are working for Christian organisations.

Paul: What courses do you provide here at the Bible College?

Bishara: We are a Bible College that teach all the books of the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. We believe the whole Bible is inspired by God. We teach Church History, Geography, Music, History of the Holy Land, Counselling courses and we teach Media courses. We are fully recognised by the Ministry of Higher Education as a four year Bible College, so you can get a BA degree.

Paul: You said you have a Media Department and you make a TV programme; what is that programme and how successful has that programme been?

Bethlehem Bible College

Bishara: Yes we do have a Media Department, we have a studio and we have students who study media; they stay with us for two years and their emphasis is just media and they become very good in production in television, in radio, in journalism and web page design.

One day the man in charge of Bethlehem TV came to me and I was surprised because he is a Moslem; he said listen I hear you have mass media, I'm willing to give you an hour on air! We took that challenge and we have now completed a whole year. We are in our second year having an hour on air every Sunday and the same programme is repeated every Friday.

We produce the whole hour from A-Z and the whole hour is just a beautiful hour. It's divided into 4 sections; the first section you are in a Sunday school setting, we teach a Bible Story; then we have something for the youth; something for the adults and the last part is called a place and an event, it looks at what happened at this place in the Bible. This has been very successful. It's not evangelistic as such because we have to be very careful, but it is uplifting. It brings ethical problems up in the community and we bring people who are specialists in counselling in drugs and specialists in dealing with certain diseases and we interview them so that we can help the community. So it has been a very good and accepted programme in the community, no one person in the community has came along and said this is not good.

Paul: You're based here in Bethlehem but you also have an extension, where is that and how easy is it to have an extension in another part of the country?

Bishara: Yes we have one extension in Nazareth, which is a mini Bible College. That has a Director, a Secretary and a Library. We are renting a place from the YMCA; we have 42 students over there. The programme is continuing, some teachers are able to travel to Nazareth and we use some teachers from Nazareth too. That programme is working really well.

The other programme we have is in Gaza, we train about 20 students and we have a graduate from the Bible College, Pastor Hanna, he is in charge of our students in Gaza. We cannot go to Gaza and Gaza people cannot go to here, so we use Hanna and we use another missionary to help teach courses in Gaza. One of the things we are going to do to solve this problem is buy a video conference projector so that we can give a lecture here and the same lecture can be heard in Gaza. This is needed very much because we cannot go back and forth, but we praise God at least there is light for the Lord Jesus Christ in Gaza.

Paul: For those who would like to know more about the Bible College, you have a website what is that?

Bishara: Yes we do have a web site, please look us up, it's www.bethlehembiblecollege.edu. We have many ministries on the website and you will love what we are doing for the Lord Jesus.