“Bob, you can either become a missionary to China or help me train 500 missionaries.” That was the choice John MacArthur put to Bob Provost during a 1985 phone call.

Provost — then the executive pastor of The Chapel in Akron, Ohio — had been considering a move to China for missionary work. After talking to MacArthur, however, he decided to move to California and serve as executive vice president at The Master’s College.

Provost played a vital role in the early years of TMC, laboring to build a campus culture where each student understood their calling to be an ambassador of Christ, whether at home or abroad. He did this, in part, by starting what became TMU’s Global Outreach program.

“Bob Provost played a strategic role in embedding in TMU’s DNA a vision to graduate ‘churchmen and women with a world vision,’” said Dr. Mark Tatlock, a TMU alumnus (’87) and president of The Master’s Academy International.

Provost served at TMC until 1990, when the elders at Grace Community Church sent him to serve the newly liberated persecuted church of the crumbling Soviet Union. Fluent in Russian, he was uniquely prepared to seize the extraordinary opportunities that opened when the Iron Curtain fell.

Over the next nearly three decades, he made more than 200 trips to those lands as president of the Slavic Gospel Association and continued to serve on the boards of TMUS and Grace to You. Meanwhile, his impact through what has become TMU’s Global Outreach program, and the numerous TMU graduates he spurred on to missions work, remains incalculable.

During that 1985 phone call, MacArthur offered Provost a choice: become one missionary to China, or help train 500. Provost chose the greater vision — and God multiplied it beyond anything either man could have imagined.

To learn more about TMU’s history, visit our Centennial website here.