Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 3, 1993 TAG: 9305040465
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
Getting rid of it became a high priority.
"A very high priority," said David Shanks, a member of the Bible college's board of directors.
Built by two Muslim professors at Virginia Tech, the defunct Virginia Solar Energy Institute was to have had a dual role as a school and a place of Muslim worship.
It never opened.
But for years, the completed - and empty - mosque was a landmark on Interstate 81.
It was an unusual, even jarring symbol for this town, which just a mile away is crowded with Protestant church steeples.
For a Bible college, it was something worse.
"We didn't want that because of the significance that it bore," college President Sterling Brackett said of the Muslin temple.
More pointedly, "It was an obstacle to the flow of funds in support of the college," Shanks said. Brackett disputed that the mosque affected fund raising.
Some favored tearing it down, Shanks said - but cooler heads prevailed. In June, 1991, the college removed the mosque's distinctive copper dome and replaced it with a wooden roof. The building is now used as a library.
Atop the minaret, meanwhile, appeared a triumphant cross.
They'd earned it.
The mosque aside, if L.I.F.E. Bible College East hasn't exactly risen from the grave in five years, it's came close.
In its first year of operation in Christiansburg, after moving from a campus in Ohio, the school's finances were so grim they nearly turned out the lights, college officials said.
How bad was it?
Brackett - who arrived in the spring of 1989 - uses words like "desperate" to describe a school sinking beneath the weight of a $2.6 million debt.
The first president, Mark Ballard, had bailed out. So had almost all the faculty and staff.
"We didn't have any faculty," said Brackett, recruited from his South Carolina ministry to rescue the failing college in 1989. "We had one maintenance man, who was a part-time faculty member. It was a very tense and difficult time."
It's better now.
For the past four years of operation, in fact, the 100-plus student Foursquare Gospel college has been consistently, if not overwhelmingly, in the black. "We are financially stable, Brackett said.
Over the same period the college, which is just outside the Christiansburg town limits, has become a familiar and welcome part of the community, town residents say. Its students - most of whom must work - are fixtures as waiters and waitresses at area restaurants. Cracker Barrel once employed 35 Bible college students at one time, Brackett said.
"I think the community is fortunate to have them," said Carl McNeil - the Realtor who handled the original property sale. "They're sweet kids. I think they're good for the town."
Shanks, who runs the Small Business Development Center in Blacksburg, said his family has begun attending church service at the college - as have dozens of others in the New River Valley.
Christiansburg Mayor Harold Linkous said he hears positive comments about the students.
Linkous, who lives across the street from the college, also said the college is so quiet, "you would never know it was there."
\ Not your typical church
Boring, L.I.F.E. Bible College is not.
On a recent Thursday morning, a hundred or so sleepy would-be preachers were singing at morning chapel, accompanied by a piano.
Arms were lifted, bodies swayed. Eyes were closed in apparent euphoria.
Then the song ended. And it began.
The noise. The jabberwocky. The murmur of alien voices - like the waiting room at Ellis Island, maybe, or the jungle soundtrack from a Tarzan movie. "A-ba-ba-ba-ba," someone bleated, the syllables standing out above the mishmash. "-A-ba-ba-ba-ba."
Understand that the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel is not your typical, white bread, Protestant Christian religious denomination.
A Pentecostal denomination founded by flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s, the church came of age in Southern California - which says something. Its traditions include speaking in tongues.
McPherson herself was an object of controversy in her lifetime. Married four times and thrice divorced, she also was once involved in a mysterious month-long disappearance - McPherson claimed she was kidnapped - that sparked rumors of an adulterous affair, and then perjury charges. The perjury charges were later dropped.
Whatever the reason, McPherson's fledgling church appealed to the spectrum of humanity, from Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford to immigrant farm workers, said a recent article in a religious periodical, Charisma & Christian Life.
Its popularity has endured. In 60 years the Foursquare Gospel Church has spawned more than 1,500 congregations in the Unted States alone, the Charisma article said. Worldwide, there are more than 25,000 congregations - including some 7,000 congregations in Brazil.
McPherson herself was a blend of evangelical fervor and personal turmoil. Born in Canada, she married evangelist Robert Semple while still in her teens.
After a missionary trip to Hong Kong, she returned to the United States to conduct a series of religious rallies across North America, with the help of second husband Harold McPherson - Semple had died of malaria.
She and McPherson were divorced in 1921. After her divorce, Aimee claimed to have had a vision in which God revealed to her the tenets of a new church.
From then until her death from an overdose of medication in 1944, McPherson's accomplishments were considerable - including the building of the original Life Bible College and the Angelus Temple, both in Los Angeles. McPherson reportedly preached daily at the Temple to standing-room-only crowds.
The college she built in Los Angeles remains. Unlike its counterpart in Christiansburg, it is accredited by the American Association of Bible Colleges.
\ Happy with stability
Shanks said L.I.F.E. Bible College East is "working in the direction of" accreditation.
The fact is, they're happy just to be here.
After Brackett arrived, the Foursquare Gospel Church intervened to buy the college's burdensome property loan, and restructure the debt on terms the school could handle, he said.
Brackett also stipulated that he have some immediate working capital - and that he not be expected to cope with the still unsold campus in Ohio. Church leaders agreed, he said.
And, tentatively, the Bible college began anew.
"We started out with basically nothing. But we didn't owe anybody in the community," Brackett said.
These days, "The college has stabilized academically," Brackett said. "It has stabilized financially.'
Colleagues credit Brackett, who they say runs a tight ship.
"Mr. Brackett's a good businessman. Every penny is held tightly," said Dorothy Furlong, the school's academic dean.
The college survives on its $2,400 annual tuition and some help from the Foursquare Church and its members. Faculty salaries, said Brackett, are very modest. Students come from a number of states, though predominantly from east of the Mississippi River.
The college also enforces a rigorous discipline that would send many other college students packing. There are strict bans on alcohol, tobacco, recreational drugs, gambling, pornography "in any form," dancing, homosexuality or indeed any sex outside of marriage.
It is also at least as egalitarian as a typical state college - about 45 percent female, and 5 percent black.
Brackett stressed that the college is designed to train preachers, and does not pretend to offer a palette of courses a liberal arts major would like. Few of its courses transfer to traditional four-year institutions.
"This is not a liberal arts Christian college," he said. "We're not training them to be public-school teachers, we're not training them to be dental assistants. We have one subject. . . . We make them know where they're headed."
Students say their years here are "no picnic." They also say the discipline and the outside work are parts of a special education.
"I think you learn as much outside the class as you do inside," said Wanda Edmonds of Kokomo, Ind., who works as a waitress at Ponderosa Restaurant.
"It's very rewarding, I think," said Della Fonseca, 27, of Boston, who attends with her husband Daniel - a waiter at Cracker Barrel. The Fonsecas have three children. "We've gained a security, and a new foundation," she said.
"It's been a growing experience for me," said her husband.
Many L.I.F.E. students - the letters stand for "Lighthouse of International Foursquare Evangelism - are older than the average college student. Some bring interesting pasts.
Brian Dotson was a criminal justice major at the University of North Carolina, a probation officer and a rock 'n' roll guitar player. He said the Bible college has been more challenging than he expected.
But he also said, "I love it."
by CNB