August 30, 2009
The new teaching website continued relatively smoothly during the 3rd quarter. New Bible/English studies soared from 209 in April to 562 in May, to 855 in June. In the 3rd quarter, the numbers continued high at 846 in July, 788 in August, and 730 in September. The downward drift was caused by suspending advertising several times until the waiting students were assigned.
The huge increase has been handled by the 74 existing teachers increasing their number of students, and by 22 new teachers taking up the challenge to share their faith around the world. Teachers set their own limits, but several have 400-500 students. Thanks to all who have taken to heart the Lord’s command to “go and teach” and are using WEI’s teaching website as the means.
When new students have waited for an assignment to a teacher for more than 48 hours, we suspend ads temporarily. The resulting downward drift shows we still need more teachers!
Nine hundred new Bible/English studies a month is not the upper limit on what can be done. Just as the number of new studies can be reduced by suspending the ads, so it can be increased by increasing them. Money has already been contributed for such an increase, but it would not be good stewardship to spend the Lord’s money to gather students without having teachers for them. Please help us recruit new teachers!
At the “Around the World Forum” at Harding Lectureship recently, Bob quoted John Reese, President of World Bible School, as saying, “WEI has the potential to have as many students as WBS,” which currently starts over a million new Bible classes a year. Privately, John corrected Bob, saying that WEI could have ten times as many, because “for every person who wants to study the Bible, there are ten who want to learn English.”
What an amazing tool WEI is for teaching the Gospel! Any Christian who speaks English can teach the Good News to people anywhere in the world—and without learning another language.
