Nazarene Bible College

Nazarene Bible College is the college for older students who have families and get the call to be a minister a little later in life. The average age of their students is around 36. Families move up to Colorado Springs just so either the mom or dad, mostly the dad, can go to school to become a pastor.

That is what we did. We had a good life in El Paso. Then my husband decided that he wanted to uproot us so he could become a minister in the Church of the Nazarene so he moved up to Colorado Springs. I stayed in El Paso, trying to sell our manufactured home, unsuccessfully, I might add. David moved up shortly before school started so he could find a job. I kept our 2 little boys, a newborn and a 3 year old and continued to work at my place of employment.

David found a job and then another and started school. He came home every three or four weeks for the weekend and I continued to try and sell our home. Finally, we took out a loan and had the manufactured home moved up. My boys were four and one and I was four months pregnant with our daughter in January of 1992 when we joined my husband in Colorado Springs. We immediately loved it.

My husband enjoyed going to Nazarene Bible College. Back then, they did not offer a Bachelors degree, only an Associates degree. My husband earned his Associates degree in four years. He worked very hard and then we got our first church assignment, making $125 a week. What a joke! In five years, they moved us all over the country for very little pay, mostly living in dumps, being put in small churches with senior citizens who did not want us there so we never lasted long.

We should have gone with the Baptists who pay their pastors very well, not with a denomination who does not give a damn about their pastors and their families. We met a lot of other pastors and families who were going through the same terrible things we went through.

So the school experience was great, but they did not prepare us for how it would be in the real world in their church. Funny thing is I had been Nazarene my entire life, but I never realized how much pastors were abused. No wonder our pastors never stayed long when I was a child. Every one to four years, we would get a new pastor and we never knew why.

Anyway, getting back to the Bible college, for a year, I was enrolled as a student also. I loved going to school there and was an A student. I took some great classes and planned to get my degree in Christian education. But my husband wanted to finish and get an assignment as a pastor so we left sooner than we should have. I never got to finish. My husband finished his fourth year and earned his Bachelors degree later when Nazarene Bible College offered it, after we were already out of ministry and living in San Antonio, about 6 years ago.