My late husband Gary and I attended Machias Community Church for around 6 years before moving to Montana. I attended and graduated from Pastor Ron Sallee’s first Contenders Bible School beginning in 1995 and ending in 1996. It was a very interesting and meaningful class. To this day, almost 19 years later, I still keep all the printouts and notes for quick access. It was a true joy to learn how to study the Word of God through definition, exegesis, hermeneutics, bibliology, typology, and Bible culture. We learned, with assurance, the authenticity of the Old Testament and the New Testament, through internal and external proofs, the canon, the history of transmission and translations….and SO much more!

Today, living in Montana, my ministry is to write weekly Bible studies for a large group of women from around the world. The group is SWORDS (Strong Women Of Rightly Divided Studies). It was while reading and studying about 9 years ago, once again reading the “Twelve Questions to Answer” (Who is speaking, Who is being spoken to…), that I began to understand fully that while the whole Bible is FOR us, not all the Bible is TO us. 2 Timothy 2:15c made sense to me, and I understood how we are to rightly divide the truth!

I believe that [Contenders] is a powerful study to move one’s life forward in the Lord and to help equip the saints to do the work of the ministry (1 Corinthians 15:1-4 and Ephesians 3:9).