Trinity Western Magazine

And he should know. Before becoming the founding president of then-Trinity Junior College in 1962, Hanson and his wife, Muriel, were the first Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) missionaries to Japan.

“[Starting the school] was scarier than anything I started in Japan,” Hanson says. Perhaps this is because, from the outset, the mission was to incorporate the spiritual with the academic—a new idea in Canada at the time, but one rooted in a centuries-old tradition.

In the early days, Hanson’s words, “If Jesus Christ is Lord, nothing is secular,” became somewhat of a motto. It’s an idea the school still stands for.

“From the very beginning, the authority and inerrancy of Scripture has been the solid rock upon which the University is built,” Hanson explains. “That is the foundation of any Christian liberal arts college.”

But the University can’t be defined with a single statement. There’s a journey that had to be taken—and there was resistance along the way. No one knows that better than Hanson, who played a large role in the story of TWU.

Calvin Hanson participates in Trinity Junior College's first sod turning, CA. 1961.  (TWU Archives, Item No. 1998-01-5080)

A Kind of Revolution

The idea for a Christian college in Canada first came about in 1958. The EFCA wanted to start a school that would develop godly Christian leaders and educate its students to be influential in all the marketplaces of life—revolutionary ideas at a time when other Bible schools in Canada focused primarily on teaching the Bible and educating missionaries and pastors. People weren’t familiar with the terms “liberal arts school” or “junior college.”

The aim was to offer the first two years of general university training as guidance for students while they tried to decide what to do with their lives, as well as training for missionary specialists (doctors, teachers, technicians, geologists, etc.). Above all, the school was to offer an education thoroughly flavoured with biblical teaching.

That same year, the EFCA published a blurb about the school in their newsletter—the Evangelical Beacon. When Hanson read it, he’d been living with his family as a missionary in Kyoto, Japan, for almost 10 years.

Hanson and his wife were planning to spend their lives on the mission field—a plan that changed drastically when Muriel and their three children suffered near-fatal carbon monoxide poisoning from the gas-fired bathtub in their Japanese home. “I came within a whisper of losing my entire family that day,” Hanson remembers.

The damage to Muriel’s health was so severe that the family returned to the US, where doctors told them it would be 10 years before she would be healthy enough to return to Japan. “They felt that going back to Japan would be too stressful for her,” Hanson explains. And thus, the door was opened for “mission” work in another foreign country: Canada.

Calvin Hanson (right) squares off against science professor John Woodland, while faculty members Jake Braun and Frank Mansfield look on.  (TWU Archives, Item No. 1998-01-3209)

A new mission field

The little blurb from the Beacon completely forgotten, Hanson began work as interim pastor at a church in Minneapolis, MN, and embarked on a Ph.D. program in Greek Classics at the University of Minnesota. So when Arnold T. Olson, Ph.D., President of the efca, called him into headquarters to fill him in on the plans for the school in Canada, Hanson was surprised. He suspected he might be asked to be a faculty member. “I could have fallen off my chair when he said I was being approached for the position of President,” he writes in his memoir.

But he said yes and was later voted in as the new president of Trinity Junior College during the denomination’s annual conference.

The road that led the school from a fledgling college to its standing today wasn’t an easy one. Surprisingly, the school’s earliest opposition came from local churches.

A year before TJC’s opening, Hanson visited the area for two weeks. He went to each sponsoring church in the Lower Mainland to give a presentation about the College and to allow residents to ask questions. At the first presentation, only the pastor and his wife showed up. “It kind of went that way the whole two weeks,” Hanson says. “And whenever I asked for questions, virtually every question was hostile.”

Toward the end of his visit, Hanson remembers shaking hands at the door of a Langley church after the Sunday morning service and meeting a man who told him what he was thinking. “‘Brother Hanson,’ he said, ‘I want you to know I have nothing against you personally, but I just don’t think you’re going to make it.’ And to tell you the truth, I agreed with him.”

It took a lot of prayer and courage to continue on with the vision to start the school. “We could see the potential future the Lord had for us,” Hanson says. “We were educating people that would carry on laying the seeds.”

Taking root

“We just took it a day at a time,” he continues, listing the early conditions on a former dairy farm as “primitive” and “raw.” But supporters worked hard with good spirits, and by the time September 1962 came, 17 students arrived to attend lectures in the farmhouse and play sports in the “barnasium.”

Funds were never plentiful, but everyone pitched in, including the initial seven full-time faculty members who worked for at least 50 per cent less salary than they could have earned in the public sector. “Every month was a challenge to make the payroll,” Hanson says, “but the faculty cheques were never late.”

Faculty members were often called upon to help with campus renovations too, as the property was gradually converted from a farm to a functional school. “Our faculty had to be do-it-yourself people,” he laughs, remembering one instance in particular where a young student drove by with a group of friends and was dismayed to see the College’s president working in a ditch with the rest of the faculty.

But it wasn’t only the faculty and community who got their hands dirty in the early days of the school. The Women’s Missionary Society of the Evangelical Free Church was also instrumental in the College’s first new building, the chapel. They supplied draperies and seat cushions, sewed together carpet scraps for the floor coverings of the chapel, and eventually organized the purchase of the College’s largest volume of books.

Hanson’s wife, Muriel, was also involved in the school’s development, rounding up financial and prayer support. She took on the role of unofficial, unpaid secretary to the President, working at home and signing communications to churches and friends with the tongue-in-cheek “MD” after her name, short for “make do.” Even the children helped, folding newsletters around the dining table. “We were all involved at the time,” Muriel says. “You go through it and it’s normal, and then you look back and realize, ‘Wow.’”

People gave what they could to support the school. Some donated time; others donated land to sell for profit, building materials, or even science lab equipment.

Many buildings on campus were named after people who greatly contributed to the school’s coffers; among them was Vernon Strombeck. “Trinity Western University would have never made it were it not for that man,” Hanson says. “He bailed us out so many times.”

Strombeck was behind numerous projects and buildings on campus. The most significant was the original library building, named after him, that now houses the School of Education and Department of Communications offices. The library collection became his heart’s project after he read a column written by Hanson for the Evangelical Beacon. It spoke of the death of a man who had committed to providing books for the new college’s library and the need for someone else to take on this task.

At that moment, Strombeck reportedly bolted upright in his chair and said, “Holy smoke, that’s me!” He then called and asked for a list of books they needed. Hanson sent it over and was amazed to receive all of the books on the list.

Early alumni also supported the school with donations, usually sent with letters asking that the funds be used to allow other students to have the same experience they had. One student who had been working in a hospital to save money for a trip to Europe decided instead to give the money to the school.

“That’s the kind of mindset we had,” Hanson says, going on to explain that people were generous with their resources and time because they wanted students to experience this revolutionary mingling of academics and faith.

Like any good story, TWU’s history includes moments of uncertainty. Hanson often reminded the students in chapel “not to doubt in the dark what God told them in the light.”

When he looks back, Hanson remembers times when things looked bleak. But he says the situation never felt out of control, thanks to his relationship with God. “It was stress more than distress,” he says.

Today, at 86 years old, Hanson has earned a break from the pressure. He and Muriel are in the process of retiring from a church they planted over two years ago near their home in Sudden Valley, wa, and his duties as President Emeritus of TWU are a lot more relaxing. “I just have to behave myself,” Hanson chuckles. “After all, there will never be another founding president.”

You can read more about the school's early days in Calvin Hanson's 1977 memoir, On the Raw Edge of Faith.

Historical photos courtesy of the TWU Archives.