"Contending Earnestly for the Faith" by Clark Wray and Zack Johnson

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

So welcome everyone to Strength to Strength. It's good to have you on. Our goals are to advance Jesus' kingdom by tackling thought-provoking topics and stimulating candid discussions and sharing faith-building testimonies. So I think we're going to have maybe a mix of some of them here this morning. Looking forward to having Clark Ray here on and talking about historic faith, and Zach Johnson talking about Sattler College. I think before we get started, we'll have a word of prayer. I'll ask these brothers to introduce themselves before they start their topic. We're doing a two-part this morning. I'll just back up here a little bit. We'll do a two-part this morning. The first half hour, Clark is going to be sharing about historic faith, and then around 6:20, 6:25, we're going to have a stop for some Q&A for him.

And then we'll turn it over to Zach, and he will talk about Sattler College and have a Q&A after that as well. So be prepared if you have some questions. Be ready to shout them out and share them, and we'll see what we can get in some discussion there. So let's have a word of prayer before we start.

Father in heaven, we thank you. Thank you for this another beautiful morning you're blessing us with. As I can look out my window and see the sunrise brightening up the east, Lord, thank you for that. Thank you for the promise of new life in Jesus.

And I just thank you for that. I pray that your life can be lived through us today, and I pray that that life would be attractive and compelling to those who are seeking. Thank you, Father, for this opportunity, and I pray your blessing on Brother Clark as he shares and Brother Zach as he shares about the works they're involved in. And I pray that by these efforts, that your will could be done and your kingdom would come in a fuller way in our lives and the people we impact. Just pray your blessing here and be glorified in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Okay. So we'll start with you, Brother Clark. Go ahead and introduce yourselves and take it from here.

All right. Well, thank you very much, Lowell. It's a blessing and an honor to have an opportunity to share with everybody here today. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, so give me just a moment.

So as I said, my name is Clark Ray, and I'll just introduce myself here by introducing my family a little bit. I'm the director of IT at Sattler College, and my wife there is Alyssa Ray, and I have three children with a fourth on the way. So the Lord has blessed us with a growing family here in Boston. We moved from California three years ago today, actually, on an invitation to come out here to help get Sattler College started with the technology needs there. And it's been quite an adventure and a journey and has stretched me in ways that I couldn't imagine.

And the historic faith has been a big part of that as well for me. It's been going for about two and a half years, started a similar time frame. So I'm excited to share with you today what that project has looked like and kind of some of the journey there.

I want to give a little bit of a disclaimer up here. You may end up seeing one of those little faces come join me on my lap. Our household got COVID over the last couple of weeks, and my wife is still pretty down. And so I told her to explicitly sleep in, and we might just have a little one join us for some additional presentation at some point if they happen to get up early enough today. So I'll go ahead and get started here.

Excuse me.

The historic faith has been a project of mine since almost the start of Sattler College. And the goal here, like our tagline there says, is to offer practical online courses that will strengthen your obedient love faith relationship with Jesus and his kingdom. This is a personal testimony for myself. Much of the content that is on the historic faith is from David Brousseau, and that's exactly what many of his lessons have done for me. They were fundamental in changing my trajectory from chasing a pseudo-American dream/personal salvation life with Christ to really redirecting myself to see the big picture of the grand story of God and his church and the amazing opportunity it is to serve his people and be among his people and know his people throughout history.

So I'm excited about where this could go and what it could be. We feel like we're still perpetually a little bit at the early stages. But when I was asked to do this as a ministry update, I wasn't quite sure what that should look like. And so what I'm giving you here today is basically a few weeks ago, we did an internal departmental presentation where the staff and faculty of Sattler College got together, and I kind of showed them the project and what it's been looking like and what we're hoping it to be and get feedback. And so I'm giving a very similar presentation today. So you get to see a little bit behind the scenes, some of our development process, how I got started, and some of our challenges that exist today.

And then just like they gave me feedback and maybe some new ideas, I would love any new ideas or feedback that you would have for us as well to make improvements or to make changes that might benefit people more. So I'll go ahead and get started with kind of the vision behind it. In summer of 2018, when we arrived here in Boston, Brother Finney Carvilla had brought up the idea a few times of taking, at that time, David Brousseau's audio lessons. He had 100-plus audio lessons, several dozens of hours, over 100 hours of audio lessons available via CD and some of them available via MP3 and even fewer available via YouTube.

And we were seeing this treasure trove of lessons and teachings of the early church, maybe not reaching as broad of audience as it could. And we had this idea of, or he had this idea of taking those and creating a streaming website, a place to just take all those audio files, put them on a website, and offer them for a monthly price to access all of them in just a little library.

So the vision was, one, to take those teachings from David and make them available on a modern streaming website. And then we were sitting and talking about the need for work study for Sattler, and this became an obvious project for that. And so this is also another part of this vision is to provide work study income for students. And then three, if possible, as a ministry to have a dual purpose: to, one, support getting this message out there, as well as also provide an income source for Sattler College and its mission there.

And we're at varying levels of success with each one of those goals there. So what the idea ultimately became, we had some challenges with the idea of just simply taking all these MP3 files and putting them on a website and saying, "Hey, do you want to pay $10 a month for these?"

The expectation for a sermon website is that it's free, which is obvious. And we just didn't see the value proposition at that point for that and wasn't sure people would actually be interested or especially be interested over a long period of time, which is what makes subscription-based memberships and donations viable. Otherwise, people would just jump in and out to grab what they wanted and move on. And so we adjusted the idea a little bit to actually take David's messages and create a little bit different value proposition by organizing them into small courses and along with some small quizzes to kind of keep people engaged in the content itself and kind of offer kind of pathways for people to kind of learn certain sets of information.

We also wanted to create a community website where the subscribers could discuss what they're learning so they could become engaged with the community more. And then we also wanted to have a place where we could host live Q&As with David Brousseau.

At one point, he traveled a lot to do a lot of speaking, and he slowed down on that for a lot of reasons, namely so he could focus on actual creating new books and audio messages and things like that. But this would be an opportunity for him to be able to get out there still and be able to answer questions to people that read his content and as well as other guests and other hosts. So we currently have that going as well.

And then we also wanted to maybe use some of some modern tools of engagement for the benefit of the kingdom in the sense of gamification certificates and see if that could actually encourage people to spend more time learning from these courses and then take all of that and charge $10 a month. So that was the plan. And we launched June 2019, so about one year after we came up with the idea or finalized the idea.

And we successfully launched with six courses. At that point, it was all David Brousseau content. And a few of the lessons and takeaways we got from that was that the concept was proven. We were able to grow. We got customers, and it seemed to be engaging to people. People were leaving positive reviews and seemed to generally like the platform.

We had some limitations. The community options on our first version were very limited. There was one single forum that didn't have the ability to sort or search well. And then we had limited subscription options, no group pricing. We could only set one price point. We were very locked into how we could structure the memberships.

And we had limited marketing ability. The platform just didn't allow us to market very well for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here. We also had limited course features. It was a pretty locked platform. We couldn't customize or change anything.

One of the highly requested features was playback speed, and we just couldn't do anything there. And then also high cost. We were locked in at a per user cost of $2 to $3 per month, which felt like over time would be eating up a huge chunk of the revenues that the platform could generate. So 20 to 30 percent of our revenue is going to the platform itself.

So we relaunched a year later on a new website that was built from the ground up via more modular technology. And we launched and have since grown to 22 courses, soon to be 23 courses, including several video courses. So we've expanded from the audio messages that we originally launched with to some high-quality video courses from Brother Brousseau himself. Recently, we just launched our first video course from him. We also have Finney Carvilla and Dean Taylor and Chuck Pike all have video courses on our website as well.

And I didn't post numbers from the previous page or from the previous site. We've seen a better conversion rate and better retention through this new platform. We think some of that is the better community options available. It's better forums, better places to discuss. We have something called an activity feed, which kind of surfaces a lot of the conversations. So when you log in, you can kind of see what people are talking about and join in. We've added things like playback speed, course notes, and in-course discussion so people can kind of have conversations about what they're learning in more real time.

We also were able to add more membership options. This has been a blessing in kind of two ways. One, it's given people that have the resources to pay more an option to do that, which has increased our overall revenues. But the thing that I'm most happy about is from the beginning, it felt like we wish that we could make sure that people that couldn't afford it could actually get access to it. So if someone legitimately doesn't have the money to access these teachings, it doesn't mean we don't want them to have an opportunity to learn them. And this gave us an opportunity to make a custom option that gives someone six-month free access that can be renewed.

And it just asks them simply, "If you can't afford to donate, we would love you to take this option." And that's been a blessing. We've had a couple of hundred people sign up on that over the year. And it makes me excited about the global mission because there's many places in the world that simply can't afford $10 a month.

And this opens some doorways there that I'm pretty excited about. It gave us some better marketing analytics. I won't go into that too much. And then no more per user licensing. So we're able to scale it without increasing our costs greatly.

So I'm going to play this video. Many of you have probably already seen it, but I think David gives the best backdrop to the actual reasoning for what the historic faith is and what the type of content that will exist there better than I can.

And so I'll go ahead and play this here. Most Christians know more about the history of their country than they do about the history of Christianity.

Okay. What is the historic faith? Paul told Timothy, he said, "The things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." So there was a faith that was complete.

Paul had taught it to Timothy in front of a lot of witnesses. It wasn't something secret, something that all kinds of people knew. And it wasn't just Paul. It was all of the apostles teaching this. And he trained Timothy so Timothy could train the next generation and hand the faith to them. And he said, "Prepare them so that they can teach others also." So this would be passed from one generation to the next. So the faith was complete by the time the last apostle died, John, which would have been around the year 100 AD.

And yeah, we just have to go back and see what did Christians believe at that time period? Obviously, the New Testament is our best witness. It's our only inspired witness to what the historic faith was. The problem is that today you have thousands and thousands of different churches, denominations, sects. Each one says, "We go by just what the Bible teaches," and yet they all teach contradictory things. So with the early Christian writings, we can go back and we can see what did Christians believe when there was still just one church where everywhere on earth, all Christians believed the same thing, and they could trace it back to the days of the apostles.

So the value of the early Christian writings is we have a witness to what people believed right after the apostles died, and particularly the writings of men who were personally discipled by the apostles. Now, one of the key things is that I do not want any of my listeners to take my word for, "Oh, this is what the early church taught." Everything I share in these messages are things that people can go themselves and look in the early Christian writings.

So many people think that if they go to a Bible encyclopedia or to a commentary, that they've researched the subject by going to that kind of source. Now, the only way that you can research any subject, and this applies to secular subjects as well, is to go back to the primary sources. That is historical documents, if we're talking about history, that were written at or about the time the event took place. So like the New Testament, you want to get as close to it as you can. What did people believe when the New Testament was finished? The people who lived right in that time period, just after that, who heard it from the apostles, how did they understand the Greek?

How did they understand the setting of the New Testament? So that's one requirement is using a primary source. The second is you have to start with a blank slate. If you already have your mind made up of what the historic faith is or what the New Testament teaches, then you're not going to get anywhere with any kind of research. You're just going to be looking for things that bolster your own view. So you've got to start off with a blank slate. "Look, I may be totally wrong on this matter. Let me see what people believed in the beginning."

This isn't about head knowledge. Reading the early Christian writings totally changed my life. I thought I was a strong, zealous Christian up until the time I read their witness, and then I realized, "Boy, if I'd lived in the church back in those days, I would be considered a backslidden, really washed-out Christian." So it really took me back into the New Testament and made me seriously look at what Jesus Christ was saying, what his apostles were saying. Through these courses, our listeners are going to be learning a lot about the New Testament. They're going to learn a lot about church history and what the early Christians practiced back then. But the whole point is to help them build an obedient, love, faith relationship with Jesus Christ for that to be strengthened so that they can become vital citizens of God's kingdom.

So that gives a good overview of what the type of content that we're shooting for. And whether it's David Brousseau's messages or some of the newer speakers that we've added to the platform, the. Most Christians know. That.

The goal really is to open the door to the testimony of the early Christian witness, to create a lens for us to have a basis for interpretation that isn't simply our own modern context to understand how people saw the world in those early days of Christianity.

So I want to continue on the site tour here. This is a picture of our activity feed. And like I already said, I won't spend much time here, but it's a place where our users can quickly get a glimpse of what others are doing on the platform or learning or posting about, as well as our monthly giveaways that we've started this year. They can check in on those as well.

Like I said, we have 22 courses, and they are starting to be a fairly broad basis of teaching. David Brousseau's content alone covers almost every little doctrine that you can think of, not completely, but things like baptism and entertainment and dress and salvation and the Trinity. And there's a huge array of topics. We've also added a course recently called The Holy Spirit by Brother Chuck Pike that has been an incredible resource as well. Brother Finney has a very comprehensive course on Calvinism. And so I really encourage you to go check out the course list and see if there's anything there that's of interest to you. One of the features and feedback that our staff gave us at Sattler that we're hoping to add soon is a tag-based search.

So right now, excuse me, you kind of have to sort through the courses and kind of find something that might have content that you're looking for. We're hoping to be able to make it so here soon so you can come here and pick a topic, say, baptism, and then get all the courses that have content related to baptism or salvation or maybe atonement or nonviolence and pick individual topics and then get courses that contain those types of topics. So you can kind of search from two different ways to find what you're looking for as our library grows.

There's an example of a course page. I won't spend much time there. Our forums, I'm not going to spend much time on any of these pages. We're running short on time here. We've recently launched a blog. So even if you don't want to sign up for courses, you can go subscribe to our blog and get updates there.

Engage the Faith has been a key part of this. It's gone through some iterations, and we've settled pretty much just on live Q&As, kind of like what we're doing here today. And for the next few months, at least, we're not going to pick topics. It's just going to be ask David anything.

So it'll be an opportunity. If you've ever wanted to ask David a question, now is a good time to sign up, and we'll have those for the next few months. And it can be anything from his testimony or from what he's learned over the years. So it's hopefully a helpful resource for our listeners.

Reviews, this has been encouraging to me that people have been able to hear a lot of these very difficult teachings of Jesus and come away feeling like it gave them life and encouragement. And so it's something that I'm excited to see.

Quickly, I'll go through our plans here. Our basic supporter plan is $10 a month. And we have this marked as suggested as a sponsor. And what this basically allows us to do is our gratis program, our free program. And so for every one sponsored program, it covers the cost of a free user. And we're pretty close to one-to-one. We have a few more free users than we have sponsors to cover them and sustainers to cover them. But it's close enough that we feel comfortable continuing where we are. I just like to encourage people to check that out if it's something that they can afford. One of our most popular plans is a family plan. And this allows you to add four sub-accounts so that you can add your children.

And maybe you have high schoolers that you want a Bible curriculum for or a supplementary Bible curriculum. This can be a helpful resource for that as well. So the outcome, this is what I'm most excited about. So far, checking this third box has been a difficult one of providing an income source to support the college mission. But the ones that I care about the most are going well. And I will say that the platform is sustainable at this point. It's covering its own cost. It's not necessarily supporting anything at the college at this point. But where it matters is that it's covering itself.

And then what's most important is the impact it seems to be having. We have members in over 33 countries. And you'll notice some of these is just a huge variety of countries here.

These are ordered in order of most customers, least customers. But the Western countries are obvious. The English-speaking, predominantly English-speaking Western countries are our most popular places. But places like Uganda, there's a church plant there that has a lot of its people learning in this platform. And it's been very popular there.

And we've seen some growth in some of these Middle Africa countries there. And that's been exciting to see. But what I'm excited when I see this list grow and even getting one customer in one of these countries is just a really exciting thing to me because we can effectively do a form of church planning without having to put anybody on a plane, without having to fly anybody anywhere. If we can get people excited to learn themselves and start taking some of these ideas and putting them into community, we might be able to see some pretty awesome things over the coming years through the work that's being done here and taking content that's already been available for so many years and making it more available to more people that maybe never could have had a CD shipped to them or afforded a $5 MP3.

This opens some doors to some new ideas and new places that I'm pretty excited about. We're also able to provide work-study income for about five students right now through this program, so it's a partial success as far as being able to support some of the mission at the college as well.

So I'm probably going to just wrap up here. I had a few more slides.

I might do one more slide after this at 6:26. So I want to close here because I'd love to get your feedback or your questions just to kind of see what people are thinking. I want to read two of these. These are some testimonies. And this is also something that I'm just really excited about. This course was fascinating in that I have up until discovering this material, heard so little about the early Christians. And it makes sense to me that they ought to be a resource by which we can better understand the teachings of Jesus and his apostles in the New Testament. We get a lot of feedback like this. And it's really exciting to see that these new doorways to the early testimony of the saints is becoming available to people, and people are eating it up and excited about it.

And this one right here is also really encouraging to me as well. I'm a 31-year-old, born and raised conservative Mennonite. And for the first time, I truly understand why I wear a head covering. And that is a beautiful thing. Thank you so much for this course. I'm excited to share a lot of this in my ladies' Sunday school classes. So this is also really encouraging to me is that many of us that have grown up, we actually practice and believe a lot of what the early church taught, but maybe don't know a lot of the things behind it. And so this is just a really encouraging thing to see when people live out their beliefs based on principles of it rather than just the practice of it.

And so I love to see things like that as well.

The future, I won't spend too much time here. More video courses, so we can look forward to that. A native mobile app coming this summer. And then we're going to be doubling down on word of mouth. I'll jump to the challenges here. And the reason we're doubling down on word of mouth is advertising does not seem to work. We've spent quite a bit of money on advertising. And I don't know if we're just not getting our messaging right, but to a broader audience, we've had a challenge making those dollars make sense, whereas word of mouth has directly been beneficial. Another challenge is that it's a side project right now. Once we get to a tipping point financially with the project, I would love to hire a full-time historic faith director.

I think right now we're maybe getting 25% of what this whole project could potentially be if it could become a main project versus a side project. The team is seasonal. No fault of their own. Our students come and go. And finals and midterms and all that, that might be if you've been a part of the platform and you've seen kind of fluctuation and waves of content coming out, it's because we do as much as we can while we can, and then it kind of dries up for a while.

And we've seen decent linear growth and no signs of exponential growth at this point. But we are happy with linear growth and just to see it grow over time slowly and slog through that. We're happy to do that as we see that there is still interest and we're excited about that. So how you can help, pray for us. One of a regular prayer at Sattler is that if what we're doing doesn't bring glory to God, that he would remove it from the face of the earth. But we do hope that what we're doing is bringing glory to God and strengthening the kingdom. So we pray that you would ask for God's blessing for us in that.

Tell others. Like I said, word of mouth is huge. Even if it's something that maybe doesn't fit what you're interested in, how you like to learn, maybe it can be a tool for others around you. Consider becoming a member.

Whether or not you can actively use it every day, becoming a member does support the mission overall, both at Sattler but also as our gratis program, our free program for people around the world that can't afford it. Personal growth, sermon prep, there's just a lot of valuable resources there. And then finally, right now, I would love feedback, ideas. Maybe you already are a member and you're like, "Hey, I wish it did this. Why doesn't it do that?" I'd love to hear that and see how people are experiencing the platform. So all in there. Any questions, suggestions? I've been talking for a while.

Well, thank you so much, Clark, for sharing that. That was really interesting. And I got to say, just my personal interaction with this, in the past, I have listened to a lot of David Brousseau's stuff that he has out on his that he had out on school publishing.

And so when Historic Faith first started up, I know I was getting notifications about it and things. And so the reason I didn't subscribe to it is because it seemed like it's a lot of material I had already listened to. And so I'm excited to hear new stuff coming on. And I think that your Ask David Anything session sounds really interesting. So yeah.

That's been a lot of fun. Yeah. So do you have any sneak peeks of new courses that will be coming out or? Yeah. Actually, so we have two new courses coming out from Brother Chuck Pike. One is expository teaching. This is a little bit different type of course. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of interest it has, but specifically a course on how to do expository teaching well. I personally am very excited about that course.

And then we also have one more prophecy course in the pipes from Brother Chuck Pike. And then as far as David's content goes, we've partially released a new type of course from him on his commentary on the Gospel according to Matthew. So it's kind of a team course between his book and then him kind of answering some of the behind-the-scenes thought process that went into that commentary, and then also just clarifying maybe some of the teaching that is there. So you get assigned a reading, you read a section of the book, and then he talks about that section. And then you have a discussion with other people in that that have been learning along with it.

So right now, we have, I think, six videos up of that. And that's going to be something that releases over time. So then next month, we'll have another three or four hours of content coming up for that. And then I'm trying to think if there's anything else immediate. Those are the two in the next few months here. We have some other stuff for later this year, but that's not quite in a position yet to say for sure.

Well, great. That's actually really exciting. That's enough for me to say I'm going to sign up, so. Sounds great. Hopefully, it's for something else. Okay. Anyone else? You have questions. Bring them on. Yeah. One comment. Excellent work with marketing and design. Excellent work there. And also content platform. There's just a lot of good stuff. Recently, I've had a couple of friends who were going through the Anabaptist History by Dean Taylor. And there's just a lot of good stuff there. I want to listen to it. I haven't got to it yet. Definitely want to get there. But a question for you, Clark. Which is your most popular course? Do you mind sharing that?

The most popular course ends up being the Introduction to the Historic Faith, mainly because we recommend it, I believe. So that ends up being one of our most popular courses. Another one that actually is pretty popular is Brother Finney's Calvinism course.

And then most recently, I think due to the elections, by far our most watched course, at least for a while, was Dean's little mini course on Christians in politics. Excellent course. That was obviously highly popular for we'll probably resurface that during elections. That's great. That was an excellent I think you kind of did that last minute from what I understood. And wow, powerful.

Yeah. That was one of my top resources for engaging people around that subject. So great work. Keep it up. Thank you.

What are your thoughts on reframing the family plan to also include a high school plan, maybe for church high school, with maybe some module or method of reporting for teachers? That's a really good idea. I'll actually write that down. It's something we've explored a little bit before, but it's gotten pushed on the back burner.

Front burner. Front burner. Come on. Is it something that is that something that you see as a we've had one high school reach out to us, but they didn't really pursue it past that. Do you see that as a market available that would be interested? For us, yes.

Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. I would love if you would send me a chat with your contact information, I'd love to follow up and just kind of brainstorm that idea and see what the actual requirements are. Absolutely. And shoot it in the dark. Yeah. Yep.

Great. Thanks, Dan.

Well, thanks for those comments. Any others? Last call here.

Okay. If not, thank you so much for sharing, Clark. Thank you, Mendel. Thanks, everybody.

And I believe we're ready for you, Brother Zach, sharing about Sattler College. So give us a little introduction and yourself maybe, and take it from here. And then, of course, we'll be doing a Q&A as well.

Great. Well, my name is Zach Johnson here. Did my screen share here the slides? Great. Just checking in on that. And the newest joke that I've given, I got married. This is my wife, Crystal, in the bottom corner, and my son, Leif, L-E-I-F. It's a Swedish name. My grandpa spoke straight Swedish. And then I'm going to be sharing on my strife. So my wife, my life, my strife has now become Sattler College and this journey that I've been on. So my story with Sattler goes way back in the day. Up in the top right corner is the founder of Sattler College. Clark mentioned him. His name is Dr. Caravilla. And I actually use the founding documents of Sattler as an appendix in my application to become a conscientious objector, showing that in the future, I couldn't be in the military and work at a college like Sattler, so a place where my faith was integral to even the place that I was working.

And so I've been there, and I've heard Brother Finney talking about it since like 2016. It's now 2021. It's kind of amazing to see how time has flown there. And as I sort of frame the discussion here, there's so many things that we could talk about at the college. But the one that I'm going to sort of zone in on a little bit is the discipleship component of the college. I think there's a lot of other products that we offer, and I'll briefly talk about them. But I do want to just sort of zoom in on the discipleship component. If you go to Sattler College's main website, there's a tagline at the top, and it says something like, "Equipping Jesus' peaceful revolution, light the world through academic excellence and relational discipleship."

So we'll talk about this a little bit today. And when you look at Sattler, the first year that I worked at Sattler, it was merely an idea. And recruiting students to an idea is much harder than many people imagine in my mind. There was no campus, no teachers, no anything. It was like, "Come to this idea." And so over the course of time, we started off with 22 students back in the fall of 2018, and we've grown to our current baseline of 75 students. They come from 17 different US states and now people call home Canada, Egypt, and Tibet. And so when you look at what we've done this last year, we finally got approved by the US government to be able to accept international students, which has been a huge goal for us to be able to actually bring students from abroad on a student visa.

So we're really, really excited about the future of being able to pull in people all over the world and have sort of a holding tank here in Boston. On the breakdown of the male-to-female ratio, we have about 29 female students and 46 male, and 9 of those are married students. So kind of a diverse class. I can talk a little bit more about the breakdown of our student body, but if you have questions about them, we can sort of go in at the end.

We offer five majors. We sort of have these two programs running where we recruit to a four-year program, which grants the bachelor's degree. But this year, we piloted a program called the Biblical Certificate, which takes about a year to complete. And we had 15 students come and go through that. And we had a majority of them actually switch over to the four-year program, which was our we're not manipulative, but that was our hope all along, is that people would come and kind of get a taste and be like, "You know, I really want to stay and turn this into a four-year program." And if you're interested in more of the majors, they're really easy to find.

Just go to sattlercollege.org to sort of look at the different offerings there. And I do want to zone in on some of the results from our last year. This is last year's results. We haven't pulled our students at the close of this year yet. But there's a video of Brother Finney. He shares a quote from Frederick Douglass that kind of says something like, "It's easier to build strong children than fix broken men." And all over the place, Sattler College was started because there's an idea, at least across the United States, that college becomes a time to sow your wild oats, so to speak. And across a lot of the state schools, there's a huge party scene.

And you see people's characters sort of being attacked throughout their college years. And it's not only and it sort of decreases. And the idea is that this should be a time of your life where you're growing and not decreasing in character. So we just asked our students some simple questions here. This is the most simple way to report what we found. This is last year's students, again, not the year ahead. And so we asked them, "My fervency, consistency, and prayer has improved, no change, or worsened." So we see a lot of students coming and improving their prayer life there. "My fervency and consistency and time spent in God's word has improved, no change, worsened." You see the majority there with the improved.

All of our students take a course with Brother Finney where they have to actually turn in a journal with their daily devotionals. And it's actually funny. There's a little bit of a reaction to, "Should I be graded on my spiritual life with God?" And our answer has been, "It's okay if the outcome is something like what you're seeing here." "My fervency and consistency in fasting has improved, no change, worsened." So we see an improvement there, a lot of looking at fasting. "The quality and consistency in my personal devotional life has improved." "My fervency and consistency and Bible memory." This is an area that we don't zoom in on a lot because the students tend to have a lot on their plate, but actually improved, we see. "My walk in purity."

This is an area that is I don't want to underestimate the fear I have of purity and the danger. I think the enemy is just circling in on the availability of a lot of online material. And a lot of particularly our young men are I haven't met a single person who hasn't encountered pornography in their life yet up to this point. And even in the female realm, we've actually tried to start to deconstruct the notion that only males struggle with it. It's not necessarily the case. "But purity has increased. And all things considered, quality time spent with important relationships in my life has also improved." And then sharing, "My fervency and consistency with sharing my faith and the gospel has improved."

So those are sort of the metrics we're looking at when we're thinking about how do we actually measure a discipleship program and look at some of the results there. And the heart of our discipleship program comes from something called journey groups. It's a really, really simple idea that as brothers and sisters, on a weekly basis, we meet together for about an hour and a half. And we go over some of the spiritual goals that we have and try to set a trajectory of growth in our own lives. A lot of us have these ambitions, and sometimes it's just really good to sit down with a group of trusted people to check in on you. And these also become accountability groups for things like purity and other things like that.

And we also have some different curriculum we go through about the spiritual disciplines and areas that we can grow in. So other than that, we have these journey groups. There's sort of a mentor for each group. We have campus activities. Each day, we meet for something called tea time where we sing. And somebody shares a pearl of wisdom, is what it's called, where you just get a short story about somebody's life. A lot of our academic courses, particularly in the biblical and religious studies world, really focus in on some of these things that people want to grow in. And then recently, we've added an RA program. An RA is just a resident advisor at a dorm where someone kind of has a spiritual mentor.

And then some of the local churches out here have also started a host family program where, before showing up in Boston, students are they choose to be paired with an existing church family. So those are sort of the components that make this tick. But I did want to spend a little bit of time just talking about something called leading indicators versus lagging indicators. So this is actually a business concept or a business metric. So a lot of times, when we look at how to design a program, people in the back of their mind, they have ambitions for lagging indicators, but they fail to people start to figure out over the course of time that the only thing we can measure are leading indicators.

So I'll give you a quick example in the world of construction. My dad was heavily involved in engineering and construction. And in construction, the lagging indicator that most construction companies end up really obsessing over, these big ones, is safety.

How do we have zero incidents of safety where somebody is injured on the job? And so the lagging indicator is, "Let's be safe. Let's have zero accidents." But then some of the leading indicators behind that become, "Hey, did you wear your hard hat? Did you harness up?" It's the smaller moments that lead up to the larger outcomes. So we've sort of broken down our discipleship program into these six different leading indicator areas where every week we say, "Hey," it's a simple accountability method where we say, "Have you been fervent in the word? Have you been fervent in prayer? Have you met your fasting goals? Have you met your purity goals?" Those are sort of personal.

And then on the missional side of things, we say, "Hey, have you shared your faith with an unbeliever this week?" Or some people, when they're still learning to share faith, they might not be comfortable with it. We say, "Were you on mission for the gospel this week?" And then on top of that, we have this other missional goal, quality time. "Have I spent quality time with my family and the church?" And if any of you are small group leaders or accountability group leaders, I think this is actually a really excellent skeleton structure to sort of lead an accountability group that meets on a regular basis.

And we structure this through students. Students who actually have gone through the program become journey group leaders, and they learn how to walk the new students through this. And we also have these modules called the Beatitude modules, where we actually work our way through Jesus' Beatitudes, a sort of more character-based growth on top of the habit-based growth. So we talk about, "Hey, what does it mean to be a pouring spirit? What does it mean to mourn?" And we're sort of just iterating this right now, so I'm not going to get into this a ton. But we do have sort of all of our journey groups sit in a course with me called Management Leadership and Decision Making, where we sort of figure out, "Hey, how do we develop people into what they want to become?"