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Challenge and Equip Your Thinking for Life and Ministry
Grace in Action

Challenge and Equip Your Thinking for Life and Ministry

Bryan Conard worked for many years at the Ethnos360 Bible Institute. While working there, he had the opportunity to meet and spend time with Dr. Charlie Bing. As Dr. Bing taught adjunctly at the institute, Bryan was able to hear about Grace School of Theology and its credible faculty.

Grace in Action

Challenge and Equip Your Thinking for Life and Ministry

Bryan Conard worked for many years at the Ethnos360 Bible Institute. While working there, he had the opportunity to meet and spend time with Dr. Charlie Bing. As Dr. Bing taught adjunctly at the institute, Bryan was able to hear about Grace School of Theology and its credible faculty.

Challenge and Equip Your Thinking for Life and Ministry
Challenge and Equip Your Thinking for Life and Ministry
It seems appropriate to conclude that I really do enjoy and appreciate what God has put together at Grace. I feel God has been using this school to continue to equip, shape, and challenge my thinking as I engage in full-time ministry.
Although he was not adamant to continue his theological education at a school that was exclusively free grace or dispensational, Bryan shared that the fact that he would be able to study under other free grace professors was intriguing to him. The clarity of Grace holding, teaching, and promoting the free grace gospel motivated him to enroll.
Bryan knew from the moment that he enrolled that he would soon be deployed to serve in Senegal, West Africa as a cross-cultural missionary; however, he still had the confidence to pursue his seminary education with Grace. He believes that Grace “has a well-established, and now through experience of [his] own, well-functioning online [set-up].”
Bryan shares how his motivations then versus now were quite different. When he first started studying at Grace, he had just completed an Associate’s Degree in Biblical Studies from Ethnos360 alongside other classes taken randomly elsewhere. He had also been preaching and teaching formally for many years before taking his first class at Grace. Bryan admits that his initial goal upon entering Grace was to for it to serve as a “hoop to jump through to give [him] the degrees to teach to a broader audience without any limitations.”
“God humbled my silly beginnings and reminded me often throughout many different classes, even [similar] classes that I had been teaching at Ethnos360 for many years, that my heart and mind must stay open and ready to learn. It is in the place of trusting God for a learner’s heart that Grace became no longer a step in the ladder to climb, but a place of growth, encouragement, and development of endurance.”
The Grace Difference is definitely felt by Bryan as he expresses how accessible, attainable, and affordable the degree programs are at Grace.
“I like the accessibility to the online classes that have made it possible for me to continue to study while in ministry in Senegal, West Africa. I was able to study at Grace online even before moving overseas. Another important distinctive at Grace is that the classes are very affordable. As a missionary living overseas with a lot of expenses, having an affordable program is a make or break reality.”
With Bryan’s responsibilities as a full-time missionary, husband, and dad of three, studying can be challenging and even overwhelming at times. Bryan shares that he often asks himself if it is really the time to still be studying considering everything else that is going on in his life. But he pressed on and he has not regretted it since.
“Those around me and my advisors at Grace really encouraged me to keep moving, and I am glad they did. Often when I was tired, and wrestling with taking an indefinite pause, I kept running back to 1 Corinthians 9:27, ‘I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should.’ When I wanted to stop I kept running back to the fact that as I abide in Him, He is more than competent to enable me through the fatigue.”

​​During his time at Grace, Bryan has had several classes he both enjoyed and learned from. One of the latest courses he took was the Discovering Your Transcendent There class that was facilitated by Dr. Steve Norris and taught through pre-recordings by Dr. Dave Anderson and Dr. Mark Haywood. He confessed that when he first heard of this class, he really did not like the name of it as it came off as narcissistic. But as the class began, he realized he clearly misunderstood the point of the course.

“I was reminded of essential positional truths that must be intact for my “here”, my condition, to progress toward my “there”, my position, or that the truth that is technically unattainable in this life but necessary to aim for so that my condition continues to reflect this truth. This “there” also gives clarity and purpose in life and ministry.”

Bryan also appreciated his Doctrinal Summary classes taught by Dr. Mark Cancel. These were not lecture classes. Rather, these courses were designed to push him in summarizing all that he had already studied at Grace and concisely defend and explain what he believed about certain biblical doctrines. They were key in helping him refine and finalize to some degree what he believe the Word is clear on revealing.

With much guidance from his Grace advisors and the Holy Spirit, Bryan was able to complete his Associate of Arts in Biblical Studies (AABS) degree in 2017 and Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Studies (BABS) in 2022. He continues to grow at Grace as he is currently pursuing his Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree while serving alongside local Senegalese churches with the desire to mobilize, equip, and send out local West Africans to reach the unreached.

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