At the core of our Family and Friends trip to Israel are the parents and relatives who have children attending The Master’s University IBEX campus. However, we also open the trip to those who may have no direct connection to IBEX or TMU. We invite you to join field instructor Dr. Greg Behle for a ten-day trip to Israel in March. The Family & Friends Program is arranged for you to visit Israel, explore the historical and biblical sites, and be introduced to our IBEX program. Opportunities for several meals and fun times together with the students have been arranged. Some sites of significance on the itinerary include the Sea of Galilee and the Galilee region, the Shephelah, the Dead Sea, the Jordan River, and of course, Jerusalem.
Our trip is not a slow-moving tourist trip but a fun and engaging study trip, emphasizing how the land of Israel connects with the Bible. We desire to help each participant better understand the land of the Bible through our time together. We will provide a pre-trip orientation packet and field notes to help you follow the instruction. We will do a fair bit of walking to several sites and ride the bus to other stops.
To learn more about the fall trip to Israel, click here.
The IBEX Friends and Family Spring Program locations visited typically include:
1. Please complete the application form legibly. This will help ensure that we have accurate information and don’t incorrectly read someone’s handwriting. When we submit your personal information (full name, passport number, and expiration date) to the airline, the information we submit must EXACTLY MATCH what appears on your passport. Otherwise, you will face challenges when you check-in at the US and Israeli airports and likely have to pay some surcharge.
Be sure to sign and initial the marked places and give the date you completed the form. You can scan the form and email it to
or .
2. Along with your registration, send a very clear and readable color scan of your passport face page (email a scan or mail the printed page). This helps your trip leader start to connect faces with names before the trip begins. It also is a kind of insurance. If anyone loses their passport (perish the thought!), the face page is a great starting point for getting that fixed ASAP in Israel. If you don’t have your passport when you submit your registration form, make sure to email or mail it to the IBEX office by January 11.
3. To pay by credit card, please use our secure payment portal. Put “2024 Family and Friends Trip” in the notes area.
4. To pay by check, please make the check payable to The Master’s University and mail or deliver it to the IBEX Office.
Jessy Heinzen IBEX Secretary—Box #16 The Master’s University 21726 Placerita Canyon Road Santa Clarita, CA 91321
5. In addition to important trip information, the trip application from The Master’s University includes a health information section. By providing us your health insurance information and key aspects of your health, you enable us to work with medical professionals in Israel in the event that you had some health issue while in Israel. This information is not shared with anyone outside of your trip leader. It gives your leader some basic information to have on hand in case a person has an accident and a doctor needs to understand the bigger health picture as well as insurance coverage information.
The last pages of the trip application involve a section entitled “Informed consent, acknowledgment or risk, & assumption of liability.” It covers the expected legal concerns to protect TMU as the sponsor of a trip like this. Every Israel trip has something like this in the material they provide to their participants. Rest assured, we are not expecting something bad to happen. After the end of those points, there is a place for you to sign the document. You need to submit this trip application along with your trip deposit.
6. For any questions regarding logistical and payment details, please contact Jessy Heinzen in the IBEX Office, 661-362-2616 or .
Dr. J. Gregory Behle’s professional experience centers on higher education. He has demonstrated expertise as an administrator, professor, grant-writer, researcher, and author. He is a five-time recipient of The Master’s University “Professor-of-the-Year” Award. He has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California and at Biola University. He has also served and consulted on doctoral committees at several major universities. He maintains an aggressive research agenda that focuses on the foundations of higher education (historical, philosophical, & social); historical aspects of student life and collegiate culture; and the role of religion & spirituality in higher education. He is particularly noted for his work on the early history of the University of Illinois and the historiography of the land-grant college movement. He is the former Director of the IBEX program and continues to serve as a field instructor. Dr. Behle has also taught Reformation history at the AMBEX campus in Regensburg, Germany.
$3,950 per person (credit card and check payments) – Secure Payment Portal
$2,950 per person (credit card and check payments) – Secure Payment Portal for credit card payments. Mail checks to the address for the IBEX office given below.
Put “2024 Family and Friends Israel trip” in the comments section.
*Refer to the trip application for more information about the land-only price.
Without exceptions, a current passport is required and must not expire until six months after our return date. If you don’t already have a valid passport or have one that will expire less than six months after our return date. Please apply immediately, as it may take several weeks to process. Don’t delay in applying for your passport. A visa, however, is not required.
As of now, there are no required vaccines and not pre-trip COVID testing for this trip.
After the trip roster is settled, your trip leader will email a file that provides guidance on what to bring and what to expect for the weather.
You can contact our travel agent (his contact info is found above and on the trip application) if you wish to make other arrangements. You are also free to use your agent or book your flight. We generally discourage travel to Israel apart from the group due to potential scheduling conflicts**. If you travel on your own to Israel, the land-only cost of the trip is $2,950 per person (credit card and check payments).
However, we cannot arrange ground transportation or hotels for alternative travel arrangements if your flight schedule does not closely match that of the Family and Friends group or your flight’s arrival in Tel Aviv is delayed for some reason. You will need to BE SURE you arrive before the group and depart after the group departs if you want to ride on the bus from or to the airport. You can also arrive a day(s) before or depart after the trip if preferred. If so, you can meet us at the Ben Gurion airport at the time of our arrival or arrange your transportation to the hotel of our first night. If you arrive before or depart after the Family and Friends trip, of course, you must cover your housing and transportation costs.
Itinerary details are provided on this website, so you can make accurate flight plans if you choose to make your flight arrangements.
Rest assured that the IBEX Office does not want to put you in harm’s way. We won’t let the IBEX students go to Israel if we are convinced it is not safe, and we won’t pull the trigger on the Family and Friends trip (mid-January) if we have any significant concerns. We don’t go near Gaza during our trip, we don’t hang around border crossings, and we don’t match the profile that terrorists pursue (people in uniform).
In every part of the world, we cannot avoid random events over which we have no control. Nevertheless, Israel is an amazingly safe place to be. In the end, we trust God’s providence, and we are in continuous communication with people who know the status of travel in Israel.
Once you submit your application and deposit, your trip leader will send to your home address, by postal mail, a set of Regional Study Maps with map marking instructions as a pre-trip resource.
This has only happened once (2021 because Israel did not open her borders). Nevertheless, if we decide to cancel the F&F trip before the final payment is due in early January, we will fully refund the deposit or all or most of what a person has paid. Because we committed to a certain number of airline seats, those who are part of our group reservation my not receive back $200.00 of what they paid if the airline requires that of us.
However, after the full payment is made and that money goes to the airline and the land vendors, the money is out of our hands. If things get so bad at that point that we make the painful decision to cancel the trip (which I don’t at all expect), we have no access to that money**. That is where the travel insurance kicks in. That is why we are encouraging concerned people to buy travel insurance–making sure they understand the parameters of the policy they choose.
There have been times that a spring snowstorm on the east coast has complicated flight connections. In March 2018, a few people arrived a day or two late because of being stuck somewhere in the US due to canceled flights. In that situation, if a person decides to call off the trip for themselves because bad weather will delay their arrival by a couple of days, that is their choice. However, in that instance, keep in mind that TMU will have no money to refund (already sent to air and land vendors), and most travel insurances will not refund trip costs because choosing not to travel does not serve as one of the conditions for refunding trip expenses. That rarely happens, but we need to emphasize that point in light of our 2018 experience.
Since travel insurance does not represent health insurance, you need to contact your health insurance provider to see if they will cover medical expenses during your trip to Israel. Several insurance policies cover “out of network” expenses and reimburse you for them (or a certain percentage of that expense) after you return home and submit your receipts.
