gcr church of christ

World Bible School
by John DeFore

Since the 1950's, World Bible School (WBS) has been sending Bible correspondence courses free-of-charge to students around the world. WBS now serves over 2 million students from 141 nations.  The courses are designed to teach the gospel and God's plan of salvation using prepared lessons and teachers from US Churches of Christ. 

GCR began in Kenya in 1996 to use the synergy of combining the existing WBS model with a paid, local staff.  We began using Kenyans to staff an office and eventually hired other Kenyans to do follow-up work with students there.  Soon we began to hire more workers who would sign up students within a radius they could easily reach.  Our worker sends us the names of students for the correspondence course  and when the student is ready to study with someone in depth or needs to connect with a church we refer the student back to our worker. 

This work has grown from about 5 baptisms per year before our program change in Kenya, to more than 1,000 per year during the last 2 years as we have added more workers.  This work also establishes 10-12 new churches every year in Kenya.  So far this year we have 811 baptisms and 9 new churches from our 22 Kenyan workers. 

We also hire part-time workers to sign up new students from Kenya public schools.  Our 'name-getters' sign up about 5,000 new students a month.  GCR takes what our teachers can handle and rest of the names go to WBS headquarters in Austin.  They in turn, share them with many other church’s WBS programs.

Maureen Mbuvi runs our entire operation in Kenya, overseeing these 22 full time and 12 part time workers.  All funds go through her and are distributed both to the workers and also to the eight orphanages that have been established through the efforts of our most trusted WBS workers. 

By using the follow-up workers and name-getters we now have over half of Kenya covered well for WBS work and we continue to grow yearly.  The GCR budget funds the WBS correspondence courses and follow-up workers and it has proven to be an excellent tool for evangelism. 

Some of our WBS workers in Kenya and Ministry leaders
from GCR at our recent meeting.