MBC To billings!

Montana Bible College plans to move to Billings and formalize a partnership with the Billings Christian School.  Together, we plan to share and develop a campus for the Billings Christian High School and the Montana Bible College.

Providential

The beautiful and ironic providence is that this campus was originally the Montana Institute of the Bible, which moved to Lewistown and became Big Sky Bible College and ultimately closed in the early 1980s.  However, out of those ashes Montana Bible College was born in 1987 in Bozeman and later adopted all the alumni of MIB and BSBC.  And now, God has opened up the pathway for sustainability for Montana Bible College through a move to Billings.

This Providential pathway has been developing for the past few years, though we didn’t know until recently.  In 2019, MBC’s Board undertook a new strategic planning process.  Parts of that have been accomplished already, like the addition of new degree programs through strategic partnership.  But other parts struggled to gain traction – like campus development and long-term sustainability.

We undertook an extensive “Comparative Feasibility Study” in which we researched many different campus options.  We looked in the Gallatin Valley around Bozeman and outside the valley at other potentials.  We toured seven different locations.  We did survey work with our students to get their perspective on campus needs.  We did economic research on different communities.  We prayerfully pursued two of those options that seemed to hold promise.  But the “doors” clearly shut.  So we continued to pray and trust and work, and now the Lord has opened a way and held it open.

If you would like further detail on our situation, please review the four-part Mission Moment series released this year:

How did this pathway open up?

If you went back and reviewed the Mission Moment e-mails, you’d see that I was pretty bold in telling folks that we weren’t sustainable continuing on as we have been.  COVID had hit us hard from an enrollment standpoint, and though student numbers have been inching up, we haven’t had enough students to make the budget sustainable.  Combine that with the fact that costs of every kind have continued to increase, and it has been a perfect storm. 

On our December 9, 2022 Board meeting, our Board faced the real numbers that told us that unless something big were to change, MBC would run out of reserve funds during the summer of 2023.  Unless something big were to change, we could find ourselves in the organizational death throes if we plunged ahead into another school year.  And nobody wanted to see us unable to pay our staff or to have to abruptly close our doors and see students stuck without options.  We had learned lessons from other closures.  If we had to do it, we were committed to doing so responsibly.  But everybody believed in the mission of the college and wanted to see it continue and flourish – Board, staff, students, alumni, partners and friends.  We believe that this mission will continue until Jesus comes back!

But how?  Our Board committed to daily prayer and weekly fasting, to researching and taking seriously each potential option that could see us become sustainable, and to an intense series of meetings to report on the findings and take action.  We also put out the need to our financial partners to see if the Lord might provide through extraordinary giving.

During Christmas break and into January, we dove into exploring each potential option, and all but one of them were decided to be insufficient or impossible.  But one option started moving.  It started as a potentially unlocked door.  It opened a crack and became a potential.  The door opened further and began to show promise.  At our January 20 Board meeting, there was enough promise that the Board decided to pursue the potential with full energy.

Pause the MBC side of the story for a moment and jump to BCS.

About a year ago, the foundation had just completed a successful capital campaign to raise money for school expansion.  However, they realized that even more expansion would be needed.  Long story short, the Yellowstone Christian College moved from Billings, and Billings Christian School was able to purchase the campus through the foundation.  The campus has become their high school campus.

But with Yellowstone Christian College leaving Billings, the school felt that this was a loss to the community and to their own students.  For example, they lost the option for their students to take dual enrollment courses.  Therefore, BSC began to envision starting a Bible college and developing the campus so that both the high school and a college would be there.  And this started working into their strategic plan.

The two independent processes were brought together through MBC’s Vice President of Finances, Les Walton.  He came to President Ryan Ward after MBC’s December Board meeting and explained the potential he saw.  Ryan encouraged him to have an initial conversation.  This was the door that appeared to be unlocked.  Les’s initial conversation was met with open enthusiasm.  The door cracked open.  And so began formal dialogue to explore whether we might truly have the alignment that would be needed for this potential to move forward.

We pursued the conversations privately since for both organizations this this potential involved another organization and there were factors present for both constituencies that made it so we could not share such a potential unless we were to arrive at something solid to give people. 

Both sides worked intensely, for timing was of the essence.  For MBC’s part, though our financial partner giving was good and even increasing (Praise God for each of our partners!), it was nowhere near to a level that could give us any kind of confidence to move ahead.  It became increasingly clear that if the promising potential fell through, we would be facing some form of closure in order to wind down MBC responsibly and help all our students transition and take care of the staff.

The Board, President and Vice Presidents put in many, many, many hours working on all of this.  On the one hand, the process moved incredibly fast.  To get from a cracked door to a place where two organizations could walk through together is a monumental feat in just two and a half months.  On the other hand, it seemed to take so long since many things at MBC had to keep moving toward next year – like student plans, recruitment, and academic plans. 

All of this culminated in the critical Joint Stakeholders’ Meeting on March 10.  The three boards met together with an external facilitator.  For an entire day we prayed and deliberated.  We considered all the reasons “why” we had discussed.  We listed all the challenges and “why nots”.  The three boards then met in separate rooms for an hour and finally took individual votes.  And the result came back as a unanimous “Yes” from each of the three boards.  The facilitator asked each Board chairman to report the results aloud, and when the third report of a unanimous Yes was stated, the whole room paused . . . and then broke out in applause and cheers!

The Campus

 (what there is and a vision for what there can be)

The campus is located on the West side of Billings off of the Shiloh Road Exit.

Here’s the chapel building:

There’s a library & classroom building:

There’s an admin and classroom building:

There’s a half gym.

And there are two dorm buildings:

There is a master plan being developed to take the campus from its current state to a fully developed campus with the addition of a gym and performing arts center, an additional academic building, and new student housing and student center:

The campus is close to all the amenities students will need – jobs, food, medical, airport – all things identified as important to students in our survey work.

Understanding the Partnership

We recognized at the outset that if this would not lead to a greater impact for God’s kingdom, then it’s not worth doing.  And we saw many ways a partnership could lead to greater kingdom impact.  

A partnership would be built on a common commitment to educating students for the glory of God.

But we needed to dive much deeper.  We explored our missions, our values, our beliefs.  These, too, must be aligned.  And they were. 

Here are the two mission statements one after the other.

As we continued to talk back and forth and have meetings, it became clear that we could be stronger together than apart.  Here is a list we put together.

Each school also recognized individual positives to be gained.  For MBC’s part, here is a starter list.

Beyond answering the “Why”, we also worked to envision the way a partnership would be effectively structured.  There are four basic components:

1. A partnership on a shared campus. This means that both the high school and the college will be on the same campus, sharing some spaces (like chapel and gym), and having others separate (like dorms).
2. Both the school and the college remain separate 501C3 organizations and are governed by their respective boards. We believe this is best because each has unique organizational and operational needs.  And each functions under separate accreditation.  And if either were sued or got in trouble, the other would be insulated from that issue.
3. The Foundation becomes the link between the two schools. The foundation’s mission is to raise the funds needed to see the missions succeed.  The foundation will hold the property for both.  And with the help of a good Christian business attorney, we’ll work out the details of how we manage shared components such as facilities, IT, marketing, and business functions.
4. We’ll establish a system to provide alignment through joint representation so that the boards communicate and stay in sync. We’ve set a 30 – 60 day window in which to accomplish the formalization of the arrangement.