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The Prairie Bible Institute has fallen on hard times since the death of its charismatic
founder, L.E. Maxwell. Now Maxwell’s grandson—a money man, not a man of the
cloth—is trying to lead the institute out of the darkness. by Jeremy Klaszus
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The Prairie Bible Institute has fallen on hard times since the death of its
charismatic founder, L.E. Maxwell. Enrolment is down, money is tight
and the place is showing its age. Now Maxwell’s grandson—a money man,
not a man of the cloth—is trying to lead the institute out of the darkness.
by Jeremy Klaszus photographed by George Webber
+
L. E. MAXWELL
visible. Bible college enrolment has dwindled from
500 to fewer than 300 students, and PBI is recovering from bitter infighting that prompted an exodus
of staff in recent years. In May, the school revealed
that its savings accounts were empty, and it might
not make its July payroll. This place has dirty laundry, says Mark Maxwell, Prairie’s president and
L.E. Maxwell’s grandson. “Do we want to hang it
out?” he wonders aloud. “Well, maybe that’s the
only way to get it cleaned up.”
Mark, a 53-­year-­old financial analyst, uprooted
his family and left behind a successful career to
come here last year. In Toronto, he ran management companies with billions of dollars in assets.
In many ways he’s an odd fit for PBI. “For me to
imagine that I would have good answers for a Bible
school is a fool’s paradise,” he says. “I don’t have
the schooling, I don’t have the training, I don’t have
the experience.” But God led him to Three Hills, he
says, and so he followed.
He grabs a walking stick leaning against the
bookcase in his office to illustrate his circumstance.
In the Old Testament story, God, speaking through
a burning bush, told Moses to throw down his staff.
Moses did so, and it turned into a snake, a sign of
God’s power. After Moses picked up the snake by
the tail, it became a rod again. Moses then carried
that staff into the courts of Pharaoh, through the
Red Sea, across the desert. Some speculate that he
passed it to his brother Aaron, whose staff budded
inside the Ark of the Covenant. “God gave it life,”
says Mark. “It wasn’t anything to do with Moses.
Which, of course, was the point.” He likens PBI’s
recent struggles to that rod. “We have an amazing stick, and we’re still wrecking it. Why? Because
we’re trying too hard. Our duty is not to wield the
stick really well. Our duty is to give it to God.”
58&/5:/*/&
L
eslie Earl Maxwell had no designs for a Bible
college when he arrived in Three Hills by
train in September 1922. A 27-year-old Kansan with coal-black hair, L.E. had been invited by
J. Fergus Kirk, a Presbyterian homesteader. When
he came to meet L.E. at the Three Hills train station, Kirk was dressed in greasy overalls (he’d been
threshing a poor crop to little avail) and apologetic
about his circumstance. Kirk had little to offer the
American newcomer, just a class of eight farm kids
and an abandoned farmhouse north of town.
As a boy in Kansas, L.E. had gone to a Sunday
school class in which a hellfire preacher repeatedly
threw herself on her face to illustrate sinners descending into eternal flame. The disturbing theatrics made a deep impression on L.E., but a devout
aunt had a greater influence on his decision to
commit his life to God. After serving in France toward the end of the First World War, L.E. enrolled
at a tiny Kansas City school called the Midland
Bible Institute.
Meanwhile, up in Three Hills, Kirk worried over
the souls of local kids. He’d heard of the Midland
Bible Institute’s founder, W.C. Stevens, and wrote
asking for help. Liberal teaching is entering the
church, Kirk warned in his letter. Can you send a
Bible teacher our way? L.E. agreed to go join Kirk
in the middle of nowhere.
89FM<G?FKF1POSTMEDIA ARCHIVE
I
n his powerful tenor, the man at the pulpit speaks in clipped, staccato sentences,
stretching the odd word to make his point.
“All his loooong life, Moses was a man of
faith.” As always, the preacher has command of the room. He tells of how Moses abandoned comfort and freedom to suffer with God’s
people, leading them out of Egypt. By faith, Moses
endured. “Never faded. Never faltered. Never
failed. Never flinched. My oh my! God, give us a
faith like that, that laughs at the impossibilities and
cries, ‘It shall be done.’”
At times, the preacher almost sings his words.
“Only faith can carry us through, only faith can
carry us through.”
I press stop on the tape deck. I am at the Prairie Bible Institute (PBI) in Three Hills, a farm town
(population 3,322) about 90 minutes northeast of
Calgary. The preacher on the tape is L. E. Maxwell,
PBI’s charismatic co-founder. At one time, Prairie
was one of the biggest Bible schools in the world, a
thriving outpost of American Christian fundamentalism that churned out thousands upon thousands
of missionaries and pastors in its heyday.
Though I’d never heard L.E.’s voice before,
I know this place well. For three years I lived on
this campus, graduating in 2001 from Prairie High
School, at the time part of PBI (the grade school
is now separate). Much has changed in the decade
since. The tabernacle, a dreary church that sat 4,000plus and had straw for insulation against the biting
winter winds, has been demolished. The dormitory
where I lived, also stuffed with flammable insulation, is gone. In the middle of the campus stands
a gleaming new $5-million building, plopped atop
what I remember as open, green space.
There are more changes here, most of them in-
MARK MAX WELL
L.E. quickly set the Prairies alight with his
teaching and preaching. When he spoke, people
listened, whether he was in a classroom or on the
radio (in the 1930s, building on the success of
William Aberhart’s Back to the Bible Hour, Calgary
stations started broadcasting PBI services). “The
Spirit of God was so evidently present in what he
was saying that you just said, ‘Wow. Yeah,’” says
L.E.’s son, Paul. “God was in him.” Alberta got
swept up in Social Credit populism, which didn’t
hurt either. From 1935 to 1971, Alberta was governed by three fundamentalist Christian premiers:
Aberhart, Ernest Manning and Harry Strom,
whose brother Clarence was a pastor at the Prairie
tabernacle. In Western Canada, L.E. had found
fertile soil for his gospel message.
In summers, L.E. travelled throughout North
America, preaching and promoting the school. The
first time Ruth Dearing heard L.E. preach, he was
acting out the Genesis story of Jacob and Esau at a
Bible camp in Washington State, speaking from one
side of the pulpit for Jacob’s lines and jumping to the
other side for Esau’s. Back and forth he hopped. “It
was quite strange,” Dearing recalled in an interview
she gave to PBI alumnus Don Richardson before her
death. She came to Prairie and became one of the
institute’s best teachers, preachers and administrators. Many more came because of L.E.’s passion, and
enrolment shot up exponentially year after year. By
1940, PBI had 500 students. Fiercely isolationist, PBI
refused to affiliate itself with any one denomination.
Prairie was always a shoestring operation, a
world away from the moneyed mega-churches of
today. In winter of the school’s first year, the families could barely afford a box of apples. But after
a bumper crop the following summer, they gave
$3,000 to missionaries. L.E. took to heart words
from the gospel of Luke: “But love ye your enemies,
and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again…”
It became a motto for L.E.: hoping for nothing. “I
was to commit myself to planned poverty from that
day forward,” he later said.
Austerity was the norm at Prairie, a fact reflected to this day in the campus’s Spartan (and
now deteriorating) architecture. After the Prairie
families bought two lots at the edge of Three Hills
in the mid-’20s, they gave time and supplies to
erect a crude two-storey building covered in shiplap siding. Self-­sacrifice was an expectation, and
people at Prairie still reminisce about seeing L.E.
shovel snow as if he was part of the maintenance
crew. He got paid the same as a labourer, as staff
weren’t paid salaries but stipends, an arrangement
that lasted until the ’90s. “Economically, Prairie in
its early days was pure socialism at its best,” says
Tim Callaway, a pastor at Faith Community Baptist
Church in Airdrie. Callaway grew up at Prairie and
recently completed his doctoral thesis on the influence of American fundamentalism in PBI’s early
years. “Everything went into a general pot and was
divided up equally according to need,” he says.
Prairie was largely self-­sufficient, hauling its own
water, raising its food and heating its buildings via
a labyrinth of steam tunnels that is still in use. The
school followed a strict no-debt policy.
While American religious fundamentalism is
5)*35:
today associated with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the religious right, the young L.E. had no
use for politics. Winning souls for Christ was of
utmost importance. In 1929, when the governing
United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) asked to use the
Prairie tabernacle for a speech on economics by
Aberhart (whose Social Credit movement would
supplant the UFA), the school said no. The tabernacle was for the gospel, not politics. L.E. disliked
how Aberhart let politics creep into his radio sermons. “Worldly,” he called it.
Not that L.E. was silent on the issues of the day.
Starting in the late 1920s, PBI published a monthly, the Prairie Pastor, in which L.E. railed against
modernism (“utterly destructive of faith in God’s
Word”), higher education (“the devil’s wisdom”)
and Bolshevism (“a direct working of the devil”).
He regularly employed the language of war: “We
need militancy in our faith before we shall get anywhere fighting the forces arrayed against us in these
days.” In many ways L.E.’s movement was like a
military institution, with dorms that resembled
barracks and draconian social regulations separating men and women, forbidding them from even
speaking to each other. “Let no intending student
expect a ‘flowery bed of ease’ upon coming to this
Institute,” he warned in the Prairie Pastor. “We are
looking only for those students who will embrace a
rugged-cross life and follow Christ fully in the face
of a soft, godless, pleasure-loving generation.”
Today, it seems incomprehensible that more
than a handful of teenagers would sign up for such
a program. But the post-war boom of the 1940s
TIM SHEARLAW
V ERONICA LEWIS
shot the Bible-college population to 900, its alltime peak. Maclean’s writer James H. Grey mused in
1947 that in certain parts of India, Africa or China,
Three Hills might be the best-known place in Canada thanks to its missionary output. He observed:
“PBI is a sensationally uncollegiate college whose
campus knows no dating, whose boarders know
no jukeboxes, soda bars or movies, whose teachers
draw no salary, and whose students go to bed at 10
o’clock and believe that the fish did swallow Jonah,
just as it says in the Book.”
P
aul Maxwell, the sixth of L.E.’s seven children, lives in a small white house a few
blocks west of the only stoplight in Three
Hills. When I ring his doorbell unannounced, he
answers the door impeccably dressed: black shirt,
dress pants, thin grey hair neatly combed back.
He invites me into his kitchen and takes a seat between his Whirlpool stove and a desk piled with
books and CDs.
When L.E. stepped down from the presidency
in 1977, the PBI board was split on who should take
over. L.E. backed Ted Rendall, a brilliant Scot who
arrived at Prairie in the ’50s, studied at the Bible
college and became PBI’s vice-president at age 27.
Then there was Paul, who served as a missionary
in South America before returning to PBI to teach.
“I had one more vote than [Rendall],” Paul says.
“They wanted his brains and experience, and they
wanted my personality and name.”
L.E. had been all Prairie, all the time. He disliked administrative duties and had no head for fi-
This place has dirty laundry, says Mark Maxwell, Prairie’s
president. “Do we want to hang it out?” he wonders aloud.
“Well, maybe that’s the only way to get it cleaned up.”
nances, so he left that to others (he didn’t become
PBI’s president until 1965), focusing on teaching
and preaching. By the time Paul took over from his
dad, the administration had shifted from a committee model to more of a chain of command, making the president more like a CEO. “Daddy said to
me—not disparagingly—he said, ‘Paul, I’m afraid
it may kill you,’” Paul recalls. “And he was right.”
Paul’s health deteriorated from the demands of the
job. Leaving the presidency in 1986, Paul spent a
few years in Arizona and California to recover, and
Rendall took over. Under Rendall, PBI launched a
graduate school (it lasted 15 years before closing in
2003) and an aviation school to train pilots for mission work, but enrolment continued to dwindle. “In
other words, Ted is brilliant, but none of us are my
dad,” says Paul.
Prairie’s next president, Paul Ferris, a Hebrew
scholar from South Carolina, steered PBI toward
the liberal arts in the ’90s, a shift that riled Prairie lifers who remembered L.E. denouncing philosophy as “foolosophy.” The old guard was also
upset when, after L.E.’s death in 1984, leaders in
the ’80s and ’90s made cuts to parts of PBI that
originally helped keep costs low (a staff grocery
store, campus bakery, the Prairie farm) but were
5)*35:0/&
no longer economical. “No tree likes a pruner,”
says Rosalie Garwood, who was on staff at Prairie
for almost 20 years and is now retired in Red Deer.
“It hurts.” But the cuts made good sense, she says.
“Prairie needed to change.”
Opinionated alumni and donors have long
scolded PBI leaders for deviating even slightly from
the status quo. Even L.E. got flak. After spending
19 years as a missionary in Japan, a Prairie grad
named Marvin L. Fieldhouse returned to PBI,
disliked what he saw and wrote a fiery undated
pamphlet titled “Whither Bound” (described on its
stark black cover as “a shocking analysis of current
trends at Prairie Bible Institute”). Inside, he recalled
seeing Ernest Manning, then Alberta’s premier, on
the platform at PBI’s 40th anniversary in 1962, a
scene that would have been incomprehensible in
the institute’s early days. L.E. had warmed to politics over the years and especially liked Manning,
admiring that he kept his radio broadcasts free
from politics (“a wiser man than Aberhart,” he
once wrote). Fieldhouse was nevertheless incensed.
“I honestly wanted to vomit right where I sat in the
tabernacle,” he wrote.
L.E. got sheaves of letters from similarly disgruntled American fundamentalists. A Minneapolis
The room is full of fresh young faces.
Chapel opens with a video of Bible verses accompanied
by a U2 song. Prairie Bible Institute’s 89th school
year has begun with 290 students, up from 250 last year.
woman who’d heard that her niece was using hair
rollers at Prairie wrote in 1966, “No wonder that in
the picture which she sent home that she looked so
worldly—much more so than when she left home.
What is happening to your standards up there anyway??” Other letters carried a more menacing tone.
After a PBI quartet visited his church in 1977, Pastor George C. Bergland of Le Roy, Minnesota wrote
saying he was distressed by the singers’ appearance.
“For example, last night, some of the young fellows
badly needed a haircut. One of them had a moustache.” Bergland was further offended by “pictures
of girls in slacks playing tennis” in a PBI publication.
Then came his threat: “I am writing to say that if the
trend towards worldly dress and haircuts continues I
am sure that it won’t be long before our support will
be discontinued. I am sure that the same will be true
of many fundamental churches.”
L.E. responded generously even to the kooks. To
Bergland, he wrote, “we appreciate folk who hold
standards in this day—when the whole world has
pretty well gone down the drain.” Yet he reminded
his correspondent that “there are greater things
that unite us” than moustaches and hairstyles. Still,
change came slowly at PBI. L.E. himself resisted
faculty efforts to relax rules forbidding male-female
interaction, and TVs were forbidden in staff homes
until the mid-’80s, after L.E. had died.
Always the question lingered: what would happen in the post-L.E. era? In his raging treatise, Fieldhouse weighed in on that as well: “Eternity will surely
reveal that a good percentage of Brother Maxwell’s
reputed Divine power was actually nothing but towering human magnetism—sparkling personality.”
Fieldhouse may have been over the top, but sure
enough, PBI struggled to pin down its identity. Was
5)*35:580
Prairie a Bible college for would-be missionaries?
A liberal arts college for academics? An aviation
school? A grade school? A graduate school? All of
the above? As L.E.’s successors wrestled with these
questions while struggling to balance a changing
culture with PBI’s infamous rigidity, they had no
shortage of critics. “I’ve said to people that Maxwell’s personality and presence were such that I’m
not sure that even Jesus himself, if he had been appointed, would have been received well by all,” says
Callaway, the Airdrie pastor.
I
meet Callaway at a Denny’s in northeast Calgary where we spend four hours reminiscing
about PBI over toast and coffee. By the time I
arrived at Prairie in 1998, the campus tabernacle,
once packed to the rafters at annual missionary
conferences, was never full and felt dead as a stump.
But when Callaway was a kid, L.E. was still preaching. He remembers L.E. railing against communism
and relaying a rumour about Pierre Trudeau, at the
time about to become prime minister, rowing from
Miami to Cuba to visit Fidel Castro. “The only
thing I knew about communism was that they put
Christians in jail, in work camps,” says Callaway.
“Consequently, I’m sitting there in that big ol’ Prairie tabernacle as an 11-year-old kid, scared mmmless”—that’s what he says, mmm-less—“listening to
this. Good night, we’re all going to be in concentration camps by next Friday!” Callaway chuckles at
the memory and adds, “It was no secret that you
could not vote for Pierre Elliot Trudeau and be a
good staff member at Prairie Bible Institute. And
consequently, as a kid, I drank the Kool-Aid.”
Callaway and I share a lot of laughs, but not
everyone who came out of PBI can do the same.
“There were some bizarre things that were part
and parcel of that world that have scarred people
for life, just as is true of Catholicism or any kind
of entity that impacts behaviour,” Callaway says.
L.E. was obsessed with renouncing the self, what
he called “the crucified life,” and some at Prairie
felt beaten down by L.E.’s thundering proclamations against “soft” Christians who didn’t measure
up. Some staff and parents took L.E.’s hardline
approach too far, harshly enforcing rules and
mercilessly berating wayward students. Life at PBI
inflicted other wounds, too. One male staffer was
fired after some kind of “sexual indiscretion” involving a female student. (The incident is cited in
a master’s thesis by James Enns, a history professor
at PBI who wrote on Prairie’s early years. “The
exact nature of the offence was not indicated” in
personnel files, he wrote.)
Callaway remembers being at school in Winnipeg in late 1978 when he heard about the Jonestown
Massacre. As he reflected on his upbringing, he
thought, “I can see how that happens. When a
leader is never questioned and can essentially do
no wrong? I understand that.” On campus, L.E.
was almost a papal figure, speaking for God. Few
dared question him publicly. Those who did often
didn’t last long. Callaway describes in his thesis how
some faculty in the ’50s wanted PBI to get academic
accreditation so its programs could be recognized
at other schools. “Those were the visionary types
just saying, ‘We need to get with the times,’” Callaway says. “To make a long story short, it wasn’t
long before they were sent down the road not necessarily rejoicing, if you know what I mean.” L.E.
had no desire to accommodate worldly academic
demands. “With the benefit of hindsight,” says Cal5)*35:5)3&&
laway, “there’s reason to say, ‘Was that wise? Was
that good for the school?’”
When Jon Ohlhauser became PBI’s president
in 2002, Prairie was still struggling to define its
identity. Gone was the missionary era of yesteryear
when students would flock to Bible colleges. In PBI’s
post-war heyday (1946), 67 percent of Canadians
attended a weekly religious service, according to
Statistics Canada. That figure had plummeted to
20 percent by the time Ohlhauser arrived.
As one former Prairie staffer told me, Ohlhauser
was basically given a pile of sand and told, “Here.
Hold this.”
H
ighway 583, the dividing line between Prairie and the bulk of the town, cuts east-west
through Three Hills, with a Super 8 at one
end and a Kal Tire at the other. For many years,
the road was a dividing line between “peebs” and
“townies,” an invisible wall some in town refused to
cross. “Prairie was Prairie, the town was the town,
and never the twain shall meet, so to speak,” says
Tim Shearlaw, the town’s mayor and owner of the
local newspaper, the Three Hills Capital.
In the Ohlhauser era, that all changed.
Ohlhauser had been a vice-president at a Christian college in Ontario before arriving at PBI to replace Rick Down, whose life and presidency were
cut short by cancer (he died in 2002 after three years
on the job). “I had inherited an institution that was
85 years old, and it was more or less operating with
the same mindset that it did when it was started in
the 1920s,” says Ohlhauser. The faculty, however,
had been drifting further toward the liberal arts, a
direction many Christian post-secondary schools in
Canada were taking.
Ohlhauser was wary of following the pack. He
had a different idea. “No Bible college had said,
‘Let’s attempt to intersect faith with a technical education,’” says Ohlhauser. The board endorsed the
plan, PBI partnered with Bow Valley College and
SAIT, and, in 2006, the Prairie College of Applied
Arts and Technology began offering programs such
as nursing and early-childhood education.
For some, the new school represented an exciting
opportunity. But others, especially longtime faculty,
were wary of the new direction, feeling the Bible
college was being neglected. A rift grew between
faculty and administration. “It got very messy,” says
Veronica Lewis, who arrived at PBI from Oregon
as a college student in the mid-’80s and now runs
the college library. The administration quashed
the liberal-arts direction in the Bible college, alienating faculty who felt like they finally had a good
thing going. “The messy part was that when people
disagreed—yeah, they were fired,” says Lewis, recalling it as a “very painful time.”
Myron Penner was among those faced with an
ultimatum. A Prairie kid who got his PhD at the
University of Edinburgh, he joined the Bible college faculty shortly before Ohlhauser arrived. “[Students] were really engaging philosophical theology
at a level I was impressed with,” says Penner, now
an Anglican priest in Edmonton. Then came the
“curveball” of Ohlhauser’s reforms. “I was given a
package to teach which was not what I was hired to
teach and I wasn’t qualified to teach, or I could take
a severance package.” Penner was disappointed but
not surprised by how it ended, saying the conflict
affected his wife more deeply. “The whole thing
was very emotionally traumatic for her. We had to
just basically get out of town.”
Ohlhauser says he was carrying out the board’s
instructions by asking staff to shift direction. The
board hadn’t approved the liberal-arts drift, but had
given the green light to the technical school. “Are
you able to turn? If you are, let’s try it,” says Ohlhauser. “If you aren’t, this is where we’ve got to part
company because the vision and the direction from
the board is this way.”
The conflict didn’t end there. It got worse. One
of Ohlhauser’s biggest challenges was Prairie’s
sprawling footprint. The aging campus, built on
the cheap, had fallen into disrepair over the years,
and Ohlhauser had less and less tuition revenue to
work with. (PBI had just under 500 college students
when he started; that number would be cut in half
by the end of his tenure in 2009.) “I was paying…
in excess of $600,000 a year to operate the campus,
because it was old, it was antiquated, it was energy
inefficient,” Ohlhauser says. So when he caught
wind of a few properties available in Drumheller,
including a vacant Catholic school and an empty
hospital building, he took the idea to the board,
which asked him to do a cost-­benefit analysis on a
possible relocation.
When the news leaked out it ripped through
town like a prairie fire on a windy day. “The next
day I had horns and a tail,” says Ohlhauser. Many
in Three Hills, including most PBI staff, were outraged. Uproot L.E.’s storied school and move it to
a spot many locals call Helldrummer? No way. “It
was an incredibly stupid idea,” says David Nadeau,
a Prairie professor who also sits on town council,
runs the local food bank, and writes for the Capital.
The discontent spilled onto the newspaper’s editorial pages. “It would be unconscionable to move
Prairie Bible Institute from Three Hills—like ripping part of the heart out of the community,” wrote
Mary Roadhouse of Mission, B.C., who had family
move to Three Hills in 1964 to “serve God at PBI.”
She ended her letter with a loaded postscript: “Evil
prevails when good men do nothing.”
Shearlaw, who isn’t a churchgoer but considers PBI an invaluable business to the town, spearheaded a Friends of Prairie movement. “Stand up
for what’s right,” he wrote in his weekly column.
“Keep Prairie at home, in Three Hills.” Religion
aside, losing PBI would deal a hard blow to housing
prices and local businesses.
The tension culminated in an emotional meeting
in the PBI dining hall on Sept. 23, 2009. Between
For some, the new school represented an exciting opportunity.
But others, especially longtime faculty, were wary of the new
direction, feeling the Bible college was being neglected.
5)*35:'063
600 and 800 people showed up (it depends who
you ask), including some who had never wanted
anything to do with PBI. “There were many walls
broken and bridges built,” says Nadeau, who later
wrote in the Capital that attendees arrived with “history and hearts in hand, not calculators or viability studies prepared by consultants.” Tears flowed
as people described what Prairie meant to them.
Shearlaw (who hadn’t yet become mayor) handed
members of the PBI board a petition of 1,200 signatures from locals who wanted Prairie to stay. “I
got a standing ovation,” he recalls.
A few weeks later, the board quashed the Drumheller possibility and pushed Ohlhauser out the
door. Ohlhauser says he doesn’t have any regrets
about his time at PBI, but points out that he had
the board’s backing to investigate the relocation.
“I guess I would have appreciated it had the board
stood up and said, ‘Look, folks of the community
of Three Hills, Jon was doing what we told him to
do. If you’re going to get upset with anybody, get
upset with us.’” Ohlhauser is now leading an effort
to start a new college in Drumheller.
I
t’s a chilly, overcast August morning. Mark
Maxwell, recovering from knee surgery (skiing
injury), hobbles to 8:30 chapel. The room is full
of fresh young faces. Chapel opens with a video of
Bible verses accompanied by a U2 song. “Take these
hands, teach them what to carry,” Bono croons. In
the back row, a couple of guys play Tetris on laptops. Prairie Bible Institute’s 89th school year has
begun with 290 students, up from 250 last year.
The mood here is upbeat; the poisonous atmosphere that once hung over the campus has dissipated. Mark arrived in Three Hills last year to an “unhappy house,” as he puts it. He’d been chair of the
PBI board during the recent tumult, and while some
in Three Hills pin all of Prairie’s recent troubles on
Ohlhauser, Mark believes the board didn’t provide
good governance. “You can blame other people,”
he says. “I think we’d rather just own it and say
we messed up.” Prairie strayed, he says, by getting
away from Bible-focused curriculum, and trying to
do too much. “We believed too much in our own
hubris, our own abilities, and suddenly we started
offering things that were not on mission.”
Like his predecessors, Mark has made changes
of his own. When he arrived, PBI had 125 fulltime equivalent staff for about 250 students. Donations were being spent to cover payroll. “That’s
just really, irritatingly bad business,” he says. Mark
cut down to 75 staff and doubled up jobs. When it
looked like Prairie might not survive last summer,
he asked staff to sacrifice a month’s worth of pay,
a request he believes infused people with a sense of
urgency and ownership. Mark and his wife Elaine,
who works in finance at PBI, took the hit like everybody else. For some staff who couldn’t afford to skip
a paycheque, the Maxwells opened their wallet to
help them through. But in the end, Prairie didn’t
need the whole month’s worth of staff pay to survive. Enrolment for the fall looked promising and
donations had tripled, from $1.1 million last year to
$3.4 million. Staff call it a miracle.
On campus, people speak highly of Mark. He is
5)*35:'*7&
by all accounts a demanding leader, but he’s made
a point of being accessible. Visitors to his office
step over a welcome mat and pass beneath screw
holes where a “president’s office” sign once hung.
“There’s no sense of fear,” says Lewis. “I’m not
afraid of him, but I know that if he didn’t think
I was doing something right, he would come over
and tell me and make me fix it. But I don’t find
myself intimidated by that. I find myself encouraged by that.”
People here keep saying PBI is going back to
its roots. That’s the campus buzzword. L.E. always
stressed the primacy of Bible study, and the school
has introduced more Bible content, integrating it
with the technical programs. PBI’s current motto
is also a throwback to the past: “To Know Christ
and Make Him Known.” When Mark’s administration was trying to clarify its vision for the school,
somebody found the phrase in a 1923 document
L.E. had written. “That’s what we’re about, so we
adopted it,” says Mark. “Why reinvent the wheel
that works?”
It worked in the 1920s. But will it work nine decades later? Staff here seem to think so. “We’re getting people from small-town, evangelical, conservative homes and they want the values that Prairie
has, because it’s a reflection of what they grew up
with,” says Nadeau.
Mark points to the walking stick in his office, the
analogy of Moses’ staff. Prairie’s future, he believes,
is in God’s hands. “Let’s see what he wants to do
with it. If he wants to give it life, good. If he wants
to burn the stick, good. No worries.” 3