Roots

Youth Group - 2007 - Photo by D Wolfe

The gear was wrong.  The food was wrong.  Nobody really knew what they were getting into.  A young youth pastor struggling to find real access to real spiritual relationships with a bunch of uninterested kids in a small church in upstate New York read an article about some Boy Scouts from town that had taken a canoe trip to Algonquin.  So he decided to try it.  It was worth a shot.  Everything went wrong... except the important part.

Something was different.  There were relationships.  The young pastor was not exactly sure why, but they were there and they were real.  He had access, and it wasn't just temporary.  A youth group was transformed, not by a week in the woods, but by the relationships that walked out of that week into the rest of their lives.  Many of them still come.  Most of them point to that week as one of the key transforming moments in their spiritual formation.  There were more trips... and more relationships.  God was working.

That was over 30 years ago.  The young youth pastor was Dennis Wilhite.  In 1981, he accepted the call to Calvary Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, MI.  Within a few years, the wilderness program at Calvary Baptist grew to over 100 participants per year.  It was too big to stay wrapped under the auspices of the youth ministry.  In 1984 Pilgrimage was born... officially.

Wilderness Institute

As more and more churches and organizations began taking their own Pilgrimage wilderness trips, group leaders (mostly pastors) began asking Dennis Wilhite to run their trips for them.  Still committed to building the youth ministry at Calvary Baptist Church, he volunteered to bring them along and pass along the knowledge he had acquired to enable them to be effective in their own ministries.  Soon the need for a more formal and focused training institute was evident.

WILD - Algonquin - 2007

In the over 20 years since its inception, WILD has grown from an institute focused on training leaders to use the wilderness environment into an institute focused on training leaders in a multi-level discipleship and leadership model that is transferable to any personal or organizational environment.  WILD alumni are pastors, educators, missionaries, business leaders, students and firemen, among other things.  They are fathers, mothers, adult children and grandparents.  They come to WILD to learn and practice integrated personal spiritual growth and how to become active in reproducing that process in the lives of people around them through their roles.  Every WILD alumnus is a building block in the collective knowledge base of WILD and in our pursuit of understanding God's calling for us as individuals and as an organization.  It's about people.  It's about relationships.  It's about spiritual formation in individuals and in the local church as a Body.

In the early 1990s, more and more WILD participants began asking whether they could obtain college and graduate credit through Pilgrimage for their learning in WILD.  Several colleges were granting independent study credit on a case-by-case basis, but there was a need for a more formal and direct relationship with a degree-granting institution to make credit available more broadly. 

The Leap to Education

In 1991, hearing God's call to transition from Calvary Baptist Church into a Christian college environment, Dennis Wilhite accepted a part-time professor role at Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit, PA.  Pilgrimage moved with him and formalized a relationship with BBC with the inception of its first for-credit course, a 3-credit undergraduate course called Wilderness Leadership.  The undergraduate course was followed quickly by an equivalent seminary course.

Pilgrimage Educational Resources became a legal dba in the late 1990s to subset the educational programming component of Pilgrimage from the wilderness-specific component.  In 2003, PER developed and implemented the undergraduate Camp & Recreation Ministry degree program for BBC, partnering with several key residential camp ministries as immersed learning sites where students pursue up to 33 credit hours of degree-specific courses.  In 2004, Dennis Wilhite earned his EdD in Educational Design from Nova Southeastern University, creating PER's graduate Organizational Leadership degree program as his thesis.  This program was implemented in the Fall 2004 semester as a specialization in Baptist Bible Seminary's MMin program and then at Baptist Bible Graduate School as a MSCSE specialization in Experience-Based Education.

PER continues to grow with BBC&S and with its five other partner schools, over 10 partner learning sites and 15+ approved faculty.  Each year over 100 students enroll in PER courses, including the wilderness courses, three physical education courses and the respective degree programs.  Each year we add more learning sites and develop more programs that apply our experience-based learning and leadership methodolgy across disciplines, training tomorrow's leaders in the same core of multi-level learning and leadership developed and honed in WILD.