“In the course of six weeks, we had raised over $150,000,” Dan Grentz says. It was a miracle. “Every time you would go to the mailbox at the school there was just more envelopes,” he says.
For years, BCA's roof had been causing serious issues, says Dan Grentz, BCA school board chair. “We had been patching it for years,” he said, “but it was not sustainable anymore.”
The school board began looking for solutions, but contractors quoted above $830,000. After the pandemic and the supply chain issues that followed, the price skyrocketed to $1.2 million. The funds they had raised through grants and several benevolent individuals were nowhere near enough, “about $80,000 of $1.2 million,” says Grentz. “We knew nothing was too big for God, but it was daunting.”
By spring, the situation was worsening. “There were buckets all over the place,” Grentz says. “Rooms were flooding, computers were damaged—it was ridiculous.” The school board was discouraged. “We’d looked into every possibility we could think of,” says Grentz.
In March, after accepting an invitation to do a concert for the Azure Hills SDA church in California, Grentz was connected with Arthur Blinci, who works in Adventist Risk Management, and, interestingly enough, was in charge of Azure Hills roof restoration. Blinci shared that their roof was being fixed at an affordable price. Grentz did more research and presented what he had learned to the school board.
In Grand Rapids, there was a company that repaired roofs using foam, sprayed over the roof to make a white, reflective, waterproof layer, called a polyurethane roof. The board voted to approve the company, provided the price was fair.
When the company, True Colors Industrial, sent the bid, it was $250,000, which was approved. BCA signed the contact and paid the down payment. That was one answer to prayer, but “we still needed about $190,000,” says Grentz, “on faith we went ahead.”
Over Memorial Day weekend, Grentz wrote a letter to “everyone in our database.” He placed his faith in the Lord and mailed out over a thousand hand-addressed envelopes to alumni.
“In the course of six weeks, we had raised over $150,000,” Grentz says. It was a miracle. “Every time you would go to the mailbox at the school there was just more envelopes,” he says.
There was one reply that impacted Grentz personally. An old woman’s shaky handwriting detailed that she had attended BCA in the building that had burned in 1945. “She could barely write,” Grentz says, “but she wanted to make sure that her school would stay open.” The woman had enclosed five dollars. “It was her widow’s mite,” Grentz says, with tears in his eyes.
“I get emotional,” Grentz says, “despite all the roadblocks, the Lord brought everything in the nick of time. We had people telling us that we would have to close the school—we thought we had exhausted everything, but this, this was a gift from God.”
Originally, the BCA school board thought God was going to work by raising $1.2 million. “God didn’t raise the million dollars for us—he found a $900,000 discount,” Grentz says. Their faithfulness was rewarded.
The polyurethane roof has a warranty of 12 years, and after that time, the company will redo the roof for one-third of the original cost. If the roof is resprayed every 12 years, it will be 72 years before the cost reaches $1.2 million.
When Jeremy Hall, superintendent of education for the Michigan Conference, reflects on this miracle, he sees a “direct correlation to the care that the Lord has for Adventist education and our young people.” With the new roof installation, the Lord will continue to use BCA to lead young people to Christ, just as He did over a century ago.
Judy Ringstaff is the Michigan Conference communication administrative assistant.
