Dreams
The faculty of the School of World Mission was scattered to the winds. The dean was at a conference in South Africa, the former dean in India, one faculty member in Illinois, another in Nigeria. I had often complained about the fact that year after year Ralph was gone almost all summer long on one trip or another, speaking or teaching here and there. But for some reason, Ralph was home for most of July and August that year. And the Lord was talking to him.
That evening when he spoke to the Swedish students, Ralph remembered the words of the other faculty members several months before when they had discussed using the Pasadena College campus as a mission implementation center.
"It costs too much."
"It's too far from the seminary."
"Maybe the administration won't approve."
During those intervening months, Ralph had become more and more burdened about the 2.5 billion unreached people. It seemed to him that nothing was being done but talk about them — only talk! And he was becoming increasingly frustrated.
Unbeknown to me, Erik every now and then would mention the campus to Ralph. And one day in July, at his
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urging, we walked all over it with him. We were impressed by the number of large buildings, quite well kept.
"Roberta, I had hoped to wait until the faculty were all home to discuss my burden with them. But most of them are gone until September. I tried to talk to one, and even discussing it seemed to make him very uncomfortable. Yet I feel so strongly that God wants us to buy that campus and start a center that will stress the unreached peoples. I just can't shake this conviction. I can't wait any longer. I've got to move."
Ralph really didn't know where to start. Although I had gone to school there for one year almost thirty years before, and the year afterward he had taught a class in oral Greek on the same campus, neither of us knew anything about the legal or ownership structure of the property. Ralph assumed that it belonged to the Church of the Nazarene, and began by contacting the district superintendent, whose office was just two blocks to the south. But Paul Benefiel said, "This is an office of the denomination, not of the college. You'll have to contact the college board. But I am a member of that board, which just happens to be meeting tomorrow. I'll tell them about your proposal and see what they say."
The next few days were a flurry of contacting various of the members of the Board of Trustees of Point Loma College (the new name for Pasadena College) trying to find out the terms of purchase. Very quickly he found out that the board of trustees had had many offers to buy the property, but all had either fallen through or were for some reason unsatisfactory. It became clear that a number of the trustees were not only willing but even eager to hear him out when they arranged for him to meet their Executive Council at once.
Yet, Ralph's proposal to them must have seemed almost preposterous. He made it very clear that he was not speaking for Fuller Seminary, but only for himself. They could tell that he obviously didn't have the money necessary, certainly
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not the millions of dollars which the campus would cost.
Yet in a very strange way God seemed to be overseeing the entire situation. "The Lord must have sent you," one board member told him privately afterwards. "We are at an impasse. We must sell. We desperately need the money to pay for our new campus in San Diego. Yet the only good offer we have right now besides yours is from a cult known as the Church Universal and Triumphant (or "Summit Lighthouse" University). Our constituency is up in arms about the possibility of selling to them. Either we split the Nazarene church in this area or we split the college board."
Almost immediately we began negotiations with them. Ralph knew that his demands would seem to them to be absolutely unreasonable. "But," he told me, "if they accept these terms, we will know that God is in this. These conditions will be our fleece. Anyhow, I don't see how we can do anything else, under the circumstances."
Gideon's fleeces were not very reasonable either. If they had been, he would have doubted that they were truly God's guidance. Never, in all my relationship with Ralph, had I known him to resort to fleeces; ordinarily he didn't believe in that kind of guidance. But this time was different. Because so much was at stake, we needed more than just our strong convictions. We needed for God to make his way extremely clear before we dared to move ahead.
Yet there was no time to rethink our guidance. One of the board members told us that the college board already had in its hands an unsigned rental contract with the cult which included the statement with the option to buy. Various people hinted that they had the money necessary. For the college board to deal with us instead would be a miracle in itself.
It was next to impossible under the circumstances for the college board of trustees to yield to our ridiculous terms. Only God could bring that about! Would He?
