History
BSF grew out of a program of structured Bible study that A. Wetherell Johnson, a missionary with China Inland Mission, agreed to run for a group of friends in California in 1952. "In 1958, Ms. Johnson accepted an invitation to go to San Francisco to conduct Bible classes for the revival converts of Billy Graham's neo-evangelical crusades." BSF began in 1959.
Upon Johnson's retirement, Rosemary Jensen became Executive Director (ED) and served for nearly twenty years. In 2000, she began serving as the head of the Rafiki Foundation International which has since moved from San Antonio, TX to Eustis, FL and Mrs. Jean Nystrand assumed the position of ED. In 2009, Susie Rowan took over as Executive Director.
In Australia, BSF spawned a popular and less intense program of Bible study called Know Your Bible or KYB. The first teaching leader in Australia, Jean Raddon, recognized a need in Australia for a structured Bible study that could be run over a shorter time and with smaller groups than the BSF program. The KYB study is run under the auspices of Christian Women Communicating International.
Read more about this topic: Bible Study Fellowship
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)