Updates on the Bible Institute at Raiwaqa
Teaching Updates
Since our last newsletter, I have taught two courses: Minor Prophets and Acts. Minor Prophets is one of the very first courses that I taught and is still one of my favorite classes. I actually first taught it in American Samoa as part of the Pacific Islands Bible College that is directed by brother Robert Marin. Through the years, I have enjoyed teaching this great material. In addition to my two courses, brother Emosi Sailo taught a course on 2 Corinthians and Galatians, and Dad (Rocco Pierce) taught a course on Congregational Development. It has truly been a great joy teaching with these two great men.
BIR Graduation
I have mentioned before how John Nakabea first came to us as a student in July 2022 in the middle of a school year. Dad was taking his World Religions students on a field trip to Nadi when the van he rented broke down. Dad contacted John to see if he would be available to drive some of the students on the trip. John was so interested in the field trip that he came to the school to sit in on Dad’s World Religions class. He ended up falling in the love with the program and staying. Even though John came into our program in the middle of a school year, he quickly established himself as a serious Bible student. Although he has gone through some challenges, he managed to graduate our program with a 4.0 GPA. We are so proud of him!
Since John came in the middle of the school year in 2022, he did not need the full second year of courses. Because he was our only full-time student this year, he was able to complete all of his course work at the end of July. So we held graduation on Saturday, July 27. Because this was our final graduation (more on that in the next section) and we only had one graduating student, we decided to do something special. Since John loves seafood, we decided to hold our graduation at Suva’s most famous seafood restaurant, Tiko’s. Tiko’s is a restaurant that is actually located on a boat moored in Suva Harbor. We were able to reserve a private room and have the meal catered. The Tiko’s staff did an outstanding job of catering the event.
Closing Out BIR
It is with a great mixture of joy and sadness that I announce the completion of the Bible Institute at Raiwaqa. On July 27, we held our final graduation for the full-time program. Over the last few weeks, we have worked to close down the school facility. While we are certainly sad to see our work with the school come to an end, we are filled with joy over the works that we have been able to accomplish. Over the last eight years, we have had a total of thirty-three students to complete at least one course for credit and twenty-two students to go on to graduate from our full-time program (not counting our Monday night program in Suva or our Saturday program in the West). Today, we have graduates preaching and teaching with at least ten different congregations on five islands in three countries. Additionally, we currently have five graduates who are serving as elders in three congregations (along with two elders’ wives).
Closing out the school has come with its own challenges. Since we are registered with the government, we have been required to do a great deal of paperwork to close the school down. We are especially grateful to Peter and Moira Lee for the work as our liaisons with the Fiji government during this process. Lord willing, the school will officially be closed down on August 31. One of the big challenges with closing down the school was dispersing the school supplies. The biggest part of this was what to do with the school library. Thankfully, we were able to set up a room that is now climate controlled at the Raiwaqa church building to keep the library so that it can continue to be used by the local congregations. Other materials were distributed to different congregations to be used in their works. We were also able to distribute some of the materials to some of the widows and members in need. We also transported some of the equipment (like the printer and comb binder) and supplies to our apartments (Dad’s and ours) so that we can use them to continue using them to produce materials to be used by the local congregations for teaching, training, and outreach.
Updates on Past BIR Graduates
I want to take a moment to highlight some of the fruits of our labors here with the Bible Institute. Two of our graduates, Emosi Sailo and Lesio Saurara, have been serving as the elders at Raiwaqa since January 2021. It has been wonderful to see these two men grow in their positions of leadership. Both of these men (along with their wives, Nancy Sailo and Jacinta Saurara, who are also graduates) are constantly active with various works of the church at Raiwaqa. They are regularly involved with preaching and teaching, organizing the worship services, and planning various events in the church. Both men regularly send out devotional messages to the members of the church through phone texts. Both men and their families regularly visit other congregations in Fiji to preach, teach, and encourage the brethren. These two men and their wives have become models for what our program was designed to do. They have come to understand the importance of continuing the mission to train a new generation of church leaders themselves. Recently, Nancy and Jacinta started a “Tabitha class” to train the young ladies in the church. They get together once a month for a period a devotional study and to do service projects. Emosi and Lesio started a preaching training course and invited the men from other area congregations to come and learn how to develop a sermon. While they asked Dad and myself to provide our teaching materials on preparing and delivering sermons, they have put together their own course and are teaching it themselves. The class lasts for 4-5 hours every Saturday. They have had several men (including some youths) from three different congregations to participate in the class.
In June, it was announced that another congregation in Fiji was appointing elders. The Naila church of Christ appointed four men to serve as elders in the congregation. Two of those men, Kitione Solinadrotini and Semi Sasalu, are graduates of the Bible Institute. Both men have remained active in the church at Naila over the years. We are so excited to see them appointed as elders. This makes three congregations in Fiji which now have elders, and each of the congregations includes at least one elder who has graduated from our program. Please pray for all of these elders as they seek to shepherd the flock of God’s people in Fiji.
Brother Kitione Solinadrotini from the Naila congregation visited me earlier this week in part to ask for a letter of recommendation from the school. Brother Kiti has long had a passion for doing prison ministry. In the past, he has visited the prisons on his own to try to teach the prisoners. Recently, the paper listed postings for a couple of jobs working as a chaplain in the local prisons in Fiji. If he were able to get one of these jobs, it would give him greater opportunities to minister to the prison population here. Please pray that God’s will be done as he applies for one of these posts.
Our Future Plans for the Fiji Work
While the full-time program has closed down, that does not mean that there is not plenty of work for us to still be doing! We see this as a transition phase for our work. The school motto has always been 2 Timothy 2:2, which says, “…and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (ESV). Our stated mission has always been to train our students to take over the responsibility of teaching the next generation of Christians to teach others. While we have trained several classes as students, we want to help them set up their own programs to help teach and train members in their congregations. Over the next several months, we will be working at helping them to do that.
One area that we will be focused on over the next few months will be curriculum development. One of the biggest challenges to spiritual growth in Fiji is the lack of available resources. Books are not widely available and are often expensive to the point of being unaffordable for the Christians. We want to put together resources that our graduates can use to teach their own Bible classes. The goal is to take a portion of our school curriculum and make it available to past graduates to set up their own school programs that are modeled after our Monday night program at Raiwaqa and our Saturday program in the West. We want to put together both student workbooks and teachers manuals that can be used to teach these classes, as well as putting together assignment and exam ideas to be used. While we have materials that we have used in teaching our own classes, we want to put those materials in a form that local instructors can use to teach on their own.
We also want to devote more time to helping build up and encourage the local churches in Fiji. While we have always sought to spend time visiting, teaching, and preaching at the different congregations, the demands of working full-time with the school have at times limited our opportunities. We have typically made working with the Raiwaqa congregation a priority, since they have served as the sponsor for the school. While we will continue our regular works at Raiwaqa, we are hoping to be able to spend more time directly working with some of the other congregations as well. Two weeks ago, I was able to preach at the Southern congregation in Samabula (Suva), and they have already asked me to come back to preach again in September. This week, I was visited by one of the new elders at the Naila congregation (a village about 30 minutes from us). He wanted to invite me to consider coming to Naila and teaching a course on Preparation and Delivery of a Sermon for some of their men who did not attend our program. We are looking forward to being able to travel more to the West to help with the congregations in Nadi and Lautoka, which have both gone through some periods of struggle recently. We have also been invited to possibly come and do some work on the northern island of Vanua Levu by one of our graduates, Romulus O’Brien. These are just some of the possible works that we are considering for the next few months.
In addition to all of this, we continue to work with the Raiwaqa church of Christ. Nathan and I are both part of the regular preaching rotation at Raiwaqa, preaching a two or three times a piece each quarter. This year, I am teaching an in-depth course on Wednesday nights through the book of Second Samuel. This study has been really well received, and I have noticed that our attendance has grown in recent weeks – which is always encouraging to see. The life of David is one of my absolute favorite Bible studies, so I am really enjoying getting to teach through this material each week.
