A House on Tanduay Street

The story of Grace begins with a woman and a vision. In 1949 a Chinese educator in Manila, Julia L. Tan, began meeting with others in her small house on Tanduay Street. She longed for a school that would give young people a first-rate education and the Word of God, side by side.

Two American missionaries carried the same burden. Rev. Edwin Spahr and his wife, Helen, had been sent out in 1945 by the First Baptist Church of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In Manila they ministered to American servicemen and pastored the Filipino congregation of First Baptist Church of Manila.

The two visions became one plan: a Christian school for the city.

One Hundred Eighty-Six Students

Friends opened the way. Don Alfonso Sycip and his sons, John and Paul, let the school build on their lots on Nagtahan Street. George Dee Sekiat, president of China Banking Corporation, approved a ₱90,000 building loan with no collateral but Mrs. Tan's signature.

Work began on 29 May 1950. Five weeks later, on 5 July 1950, 186 students walked into a new three-storey building: Grace Christian High School. Thirty Christian teachers taught classes in English and Chinese, and twelve American missionaries worked beside Filipino and Chinese believers.

Four more buildings went up within seven years. By 1961 about 1,400 students filled the classrooms, and the school was turning families away.

Gym Class at Grace

Ken Engle reached Manila on Saturday 17 March 1951 and moved in with Cyril and Anna Brooks in San Juan. The school on Nagtahan Street was not yet a year old.

By July he was teaching gym to the boys at Grace Christian High School. Kevin remembers his father leading them in calisthenics, and Ken's 1951 diary fills in the rest: exercises, games, and stories of Christian athletes and missionaries, told between the drills.

It was a natural fit. Ken was a Kansas farm boy who had come through Army Air Forces training and flown sixteen combat missions as a B-24 tail gunner. Now he stood before a field of schoolboys in the Manila heat, counting out the exercises and telling them about Jesus.

Step by Step

What Ken began with the boys at Grace grew into something more. That fall he started talking about a club of his own.

Talked to Steve about Brigade. Later talked to Noel. I'm very encouraged, step by step as He leads.

Ken, Sunday 30 September 1951

The club became the Christian Service Brigade in the Philippines, with its motto, Bright and Keen for Christ. It grew to some forty chapters across the country. Its first Herald of Christ was a San Juan boy named Rudy Ponce de Leon, whose story is told in the companion book Herald of Christ.

The calisthenics on the field at Grace came first.

Paul

Mrs. Tan had a son, Paul Lee Tan, born in the late 1930s. He was a boy in Manila while his mother was building Grace.

Paul went to America to study. He earned his master's degree at Dallas Theological Seminary and his doctorate at Grace Seminary in Indiana. In 1967 he came home to Manila to serve as the first minister of Grace Christian Church, which had been meeting inside the school. When the church was inaugurated on 27 October 1968, Paul was installed as its first senior pastor. He served until he became pastor emeritus in 2008.

He taught Bible prophecy for more than fifty years and led many tours to Israel. Pastors around the world know his Encyclopedia of 7,700 Illustrations. In 2017 he received the John F. Walvoord Prophecy Award.

Letters from Dallas

Paul and his wife, Helen, made their home in Dallas, where his ministry, Paul Lee Tan Prophetic Ministries, kept its American office. For years his letters came to Kevin and Cheryl: Sunday reflections, Grace Notes, Easter and Christmas greetings, each one opening the Bible.

In August 2019 he wrote to say he had finished the story of his life, Experiencing God's Grace: An 80-Year Journey, six hundred pages long, and that a copy was on its way to them. He began that letter the way he began so many:

I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.

Philippians 1:3, in Paul Tan's letter of 11 August 2019

Paul Lee Tan went home to be with the Lord at the age of eighty-six.

Grace Village

By the early 1960s the school had outgrown Nagtahan Street. Mrs. Tan found a rice field in the north of Quezon City and bargained for it. Then she invited five businessmen to form a company to sell homes around it. She pictured a Christian school town: a school at the center, a church beside it, and Christian families all around. It became Grace Village.

The new campus was inaugurated on 10 September 1966. The Nagtahan building went to Grace Bible Church for its Christian Academy of Manila. Over the years the school gave birth to three churches: Grace Bible Church, Grace Gospel Church, and Grace Christian Church.

Mrs. Tan put it simply. The church would be the school's spiritual home, and the school would be the church's mission field.

What Paul Passed Down

Paul and Helen Tan had three children, Christine, Stephen and Samuel, and all three serve the Lord.

Dr. Christine Joy Tan, the eldest, has been president of Grace Christian College since May 2020, leading the school her grandmother founded. She studied at Southern Methodist University and Dallas Theological Seminary, and holds doctorates in Bible exposition and in higher education.

Dr. Stephen G. Tan was installed on 26 October 2008 as the second senior pastor of Grace Christian Church of the Philippines, the church his father served first. More than two thousand adults and children gather there each week.

Samuel Tan lives in Dallas and studied at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Today Grace Christian College teaches more than 2,600 students, from pre-nursery through college.

Back to Grace

Seventy-five years after Ken first led the boys at Grace through their exercises, his son Kevin plans to visit Grace Christian College in Quezon City and sit down with Dr. Christine Joy Tan.

Ken's part in the Grace story was small: a young missionary's first months, some calisthenics, and stories told between the drills. But the school is still standing, and it still opens the Bible to every class that comes through its doors.

Still to come in this volume: Ken's own words from his 1951 letters, Paul Tan's memories from Experiencing God's Grace, and photographs and stories from Kevin's visit.

Sources

This volume draws on Ken's 1951 diary (as used in Herald of Christ), Kevin's recollections (13 October 2026), Paul Lee Tan's letters to Kevin and Cheryl (2015–2019), the histories published by Grace Christian College and Grace Christian Church of the Philippines, the college's president's page, and the Pre-Trib Study Group's 2024 tribute to Paul Lee Tan. Photographs will be added.