Veritas College International (VCI) has been training people in many countries over the past 25 years, equipping church leaders and believers and enabling them to teach and train others.
VCI was founded in 1992 in the United Kingdom under the leadership of Dr. Bennie Wolvaardt, who has since then been its CEO. He was supported by his wife Moira and Martin Etter who played a major role in helping to lay the foundation of the college.
UK Office, Harpenden, 1995-2003
Prior to the founding of the college, Bennie spent a great deal of time studying different models of theological training. During that time he was leading a residential Bible training programme in England, which he had developed. Students came from various parts of the world to attend. However, he realized the short comings of this training in the following ways:
- After finishing their training, most students did not use it to train others in their own or other congregations;
- The residential training was expensive, especially because of traveling costs for students from abroad, as well as the accommodation costs and overheads for running the training in the UK;
- Five lecturers were needed to teach about 10-15 students per course, making it not very cost-effective;
- Eastern Europe was opening up, and the demand for the training of church leaders wasn’t being met by traditional forms of training;
- Numerous church leaders from Africa could have benefited from the training if the costs were not so prohibitive. In most cases scholarships had to be provided for students from Eastern Europe and the developing world.
As a result, a new extensive approach and curriculum was developed with the ministry needs of local churches in mind, and on 17 Feb 1992 Veritas College was officially established as a charity in the UK.
In 1993 Bennie started to teach this curriculum in the Filadelfia Church in Timisoara, Romania. The new model for training proved a success. It is still running there today under local leadership and has spread further to other parts of Romania and Moldova.
Veritas College has continued to grow and spread since that time and today operates in more than 30 countries with over 13 000 enrollments.
Foundations
Veritas College is clearly and explicitly committed to the centrality and supremacy of God’s revelation in Christ, and the authority of the Bible. It is an Associate member of the World Evangelical Alliance.
Veritas is an organization whose mission is to serve the church in its various expressions on grass roots levels around the world, based on its philosophy of Integrated Leadership Development (ILD™). This mission is fulfilled by training church leaders and believers who will be able to train others, using a VCI licensed curriculum which contains approaches and methodologies to facilitate the following processes:
- Interpret the Bible in a practical and responsible way
- Apply the obtained absolutes of the Bible in a specific context
- Communicate the absolutes in the specific context
Training and Educational Philosophy
Our training is based on the Integrated Leadership Development (ILD) model. This approach has the following benefits:
• Training is done in the context of the local church
• It equips the whole body for ministry
• It is effective in all parts of the world
• Training is in the context of all areas of life and equips the whole person