A legacy of faith
A story still unfolding

Our story begins with Leonard and Esther Coote. Leonard arrived in Japan as a young British businessman in 1913 and gave his life to Christian ministry. After an earthquake destroyed their work in Yokohama, the Cootes began again. In 1929 they established Ikoma Bible College, where men and women were trained to carry the Gospel far beyond one local congregation.

When World War II interrupted their life in Japan, the calling did not end. It crossed the Pacific with them. In San Antonio, Leonard began building another school around the same simple conviction: prepare people who are willing to go wherever God sends them.

The first chapter of the school did not begin with a polished campus. At an early property on West Mistletoe, a garage was converted into a classroom. Space was limited, money was often tight, and ordinary rooms had to serve more than one purpose.

Leonard later told of these years as a testimony of God’s provision. When wages or meals seemed beyond reach, help arrived. The school grew because teachers, students, friends, and supporters kept giving what they had. That pattern—prayer followed by practical work—became part of IBC’s character.

As enrollment grew, the school needed room to breathe. A 10-acre hilltop property became the new home of International Bible College. Students helped with the financing, and the campus was assembled piece by piece rather than appearing all at once.

Some of its most familiar buildings began as former military barracks. They were dismantled, transported to the property, and rebuilt for teaching and housing. The men’s dormitory was one of those repurposed structures. What had served one purpose elsewhere was given a new life here, becoming a place where students slept, studied, prayed, and formed friendships that lasted for decades.

Classrooms, dormitories, offices, worship spaces and homes were added as they were needed. By the mid-1960s, the college had 14 buildings and a library of roughly 3,000 volumes. The campus continued growing in the decades that followed, eventually filling the hill with more than two dozen structures.

Every building represented more than lumber and concrete. It represented another place for a student to learn, another bed for someone who had come from far away, another room where Scripture could be taught, and another answer to prayer. That is why generations came to know the campus simply as “Hallelujah Hill.”

IBC was never only a collection of classrooms. Students and faculty prayed together, gathered for chapel, shared meals, worked around the grounds, welcomed missionaries and learned ministry by doing it. People came from different nations and backgrounds, then left carrying what they had learned into churches and mission fields around the world.

Those who lived here remember a campus with its own rhythm: study and worship, work and fellowship, serious preparation and plenty of everyday life in between. The old buildings mattered because of what happened inside them—and because of the people whose lives were shaped here.

Leonard and Esther’s son, David Bramwell Coote, grew up in Japan and later joined the work in San Antonio. With his wife, Hope, he devoted nearly fifty years to IBC as an instructor and president. The original vision became a family legacy, but it also became much larger than one family.

Teachers invested in students who became pastors, missionaries, evangelists, and teachers themselves. Among those students were David and Jeannie Cook, who graduated in 1969 and would later return to teach. Their journey eventually connected the college’s story to the church family we know today.