One-Year Bible Program Spring Trip: Walking in the Footsteps of Paul

This spring, Compass Bible Institute students traded the classroom for the sites of the New Testament, tracing the missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul across Greece and Italy. Led by Dr. John Goodrich, the twelve-day study trip carried students through Philippi, Thessaloniki, Berea, Athens, and Corinth before continuing on to Rome.

Scripture came alive on location. Students stood in Philippi, where Paul planted the first church on European soil and where Lydia became the first recorded European convert (Acts 16). They climbed the Areopagus in Athens, where Paul reasoned with the philosophers and proclaimed the God they had labeled unknown (Acts 17). They stood before the bema at Corinth, the very judgment seat where Paul was brought before the proconsul Gallio (Acts 18), and they saw the Erastus inscription that ties the biblical text to the stones still in the ground. Beyond the sites tied directly to Paul, the trip moved through Berea and Vergina, the monasteries of Meteora, the oracle at Delphi, and finally Rome, where students visited the Mamertine Prison and walked the city that Paul and Peter helped reach with the gospel.

Trips like this are a form of study. Reading Acts is one thing; standing where it happened, measuring the distances Paul walked, and seeing the scale of the cities he evangelized reshapes how a student reads the text for the rest of his life. This is the heart of CBI's approach: biblical training that is hands-on, rooted in the local church, and connected to the real places where God worked through his people.