Education doesn’t come cheap. Without the support of various charitable trusts, it would be virtually impossible for us at Pathways to fulfil our mission of providing biblical and practical ministry training. Generosity is shown to us by a number of trusts—at least one of which is not particularly well known and yet is important to our long-term viability: the Kelston Trust.
Some educational institutions receive ongoing support from an endowment, a pool of invested funds whose investment returns contribute to the organisation’s operating costs. This model is usually associated with universities—think Harvard or Oxford— not modest Bible colleges. Yet Pathways is fortunate to have an endowment of our own. That’s the Kelston Trust, and it traces back to our roots in residential, campus-based education.
How did the trust begin? The clue is in the name. Before Pathways existed, the Open Brethren movement in Aotearoa was served by two Bible colleges, each with its own campus: GLO Bible Training College in Te Awamutu and NZ Assembly Bible School (NZABS) in Kelston, Auckland. Pathways was established through the amalgamation of GLO and NZABS. When the Kelston property owned by NZABS was sold, the sale proceeds were placed into a dedicated trust, with the capital invested to generate income that would continue to support the same mission—now carried forward under the Pathways banner.
Today, the fund is overseen by a board of prudent financial stewards, women and men from our assemblies who use their expertise in investment governance and financial oversight to support the work of biblical education in this country. Their work, built on the generosity of donors, educators, and servants in the past, helps sustain what Pathways is able to do today.
These days, Pathways’ offices are in Tauranga, not Kelston (and our students are all over the country!). Yet in a very real sense, the work once conducted on that Kelston campus continues to bless us through the Kelston Trust. You can take the Bible college out of Kelston, but you can’t take Kelston out of the Bible college.
