Bill and Connie Jenkins have been an ongoing source of encouragement and support to Midwestern Seminary. Through their extraordinary generosity, Bill and Connie made the Spurgeon Library possible in 2015, and they led the effort to fund its acquisition of the Heritage Collection in 2023. Bill and Connie live in Paoli, Indiana, where they attend First Baptist Church and are blessed with four grown sons and five grandchildren.
Growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, Bill Jenkins dreamed of owning a farm.
Upon graduating high school in 1963, he took a career aptitude test and received farmer as his top score. His second highest score was businessman.
“You’re going to be a businessman,” his mother told him in response to his scores, “so you can afford to be a farmer.”
Following her advice, Bill received a scholarship to New York University where he earned his Master of Business Administration in 1968. From New York City, he moved into a 46-year investment career that eventually landed him in a high-rise office in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. With his view taken up by concrete and steel, the rural life Bill dreamed of could not have appeared farther from reach.
Yet through his career, God was leading him—not simply to a farm, but to fields He was planting to the ends of the earth.
Treasures on Earth
Bill grew up knowing Christ, but he did not always connect his faith to his aspirations. “I was always a believer. I always went to church,” he remembers. “But when I started out in my business career, I was not focused on God.” With a keen interest in the stock market and a proven aptitude for his work, he sought, in the early decades of his career, to distinguish himself in business and accumulate wealth.
Bill met his wife, Connie, while working in Louisville—he in common stocks, she in bond trading. She was a mother of three from Kentucky. In the early years of their marriage, as they led a blended family with four sons, Bill and Connie determined that what their family needed most to thrive was, as Connie put it, “Wide open spaces to roam.” They needed a place where their youngest boys could have fun and their family could bond through sharing everyday work together.
So, they moved to a farm.
They made their home on 1,000 acres in the small town of Paoli, Indiana, nestled among the cornfields and cow pastures of Orange County, an hour north of Bill’s job in Louisville. Here, the farm’s hilly landscape afforded the Jenkins family plenty of room to explore—along with hay to bale, wood to chop, and basketball to play in the barn. Bill’s childhood dream had come true.
But he and Connie soon came to realize that the dream was not the destination.
Buying the Field
It began with Connie. “When my last son left home, I was looking for something,” she remembers. For her, the farm had not been a lifelong dream. “We were only supposed to stay until our youngest son was 18.”
When that day passed and found Bill and Connie still on the farm, Connie began to consider what else God might be leading her to do. “I thought about going back to school,” she recalls. “I attended church regularly, and I felt the Lord calling me to something. I just wasn’t sure what it was.”
She called Southern Seminary, just an hour down the road in Louisville. They told her about a women’s ministry institute soon to be launched, and she enrolled.
Around that time, Bill began to feel a similar longing. Though he had his farm and the successful business career that afforded it, he felt a growing sense that God had equipped him with financial success for something more.
It was the late summer of 2001. Bill’s career was flourishing. Their children were grown and out of the house, the eldest son in the military. Bill and Connie attended church faithfully. Their congregation needed a new sanctuary. Situated in a county with a poverty line beneath the national average, the church struggled to raise the funds.
Then, on a Tuesday morning in September, Bill and Connie woke to the news of a terrorist attack in New York City.
Along with millions of other Americans, they thought the world was coming to an end.
In the cloud of devastation left by 9/11, the calling for which God had been preparing Bill and Connie came into focus.
“We really don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring,” Connie thought. “If the world does end, we want our money to have had a Kingdom impact.”
She approached Bill with an idea: They could pay for the church’s new sanctuary.
“The moment she mentioned it,” Bill recalls, “my whole focus changed. Before I was trying to accumulate wealth, but at that moment I started thinking about what I was going to do with it.”
Immediately he agreed with Connie’s idea. “That’s what we want to do,” he said. “That meets our purpose in life, praising God and helping others.”
The sanctuary building project for Paoli Christian Church became the first major initiative Bill and Connie funded. The calling they realized that day in 2001 grew to involve additional projects in which they invested, all of which would yield a harvest both for the Kingdom and for Bill and Connie themselves.
Investing in the Kingdom
Connie graduated from Southern Seminary’s Women’s Ministry Institute in 2003 and 2007 with two certificates in women’s biblical studies. Her academic experience planted in the Jenkins family a vision for investing in biblically rooted, flourishing institutions.
In 2010, Bill and Connie contributed to a new Christian studies center at Bill’s undergraduate alma mater, Grove City College. The building, Rathburn Hall, would offer a location to serve the spiritual needs of students on campus, including a venue to host conferences and retreats.
Next, the Jenkins family returned to Southern Seminary, giving to its initiative to provide expanded equipping for Christians ministering among Muslim peoples. Named in their honor, the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam launched in 2014. The Center provides evangelism training, scholarly resources, and mission opportunities for students, missionaries, and pastors.
Through their work with Southern Seminary, Bill and Connie became acquainted with Jason Allen, who served there at the time as vice president for institutional advancement and executive director of the Southern Seminary Foundation. “Jason understood our values and what we believed our purpose was,” Connie shared.
When Allen assumed the presidency of Midwestern Seminary, the seminary was in possession of Charles Spurgeon’s personal library, boxed up in a basement with no place to be displayed nor any funding to construct one. Allen brought to Midwestern Seminary a vision to bring the massive collection into its own library, where it could be properly preserved, displayed, and mined by scholars for the Church’s benefit for years to come.
When he shared this vision with Bill and Connie, they were immediately on board. “It wasn’t difficult for us to understand the magnitude of Spurgeon’s collection,” Connie remembers. “It needed a home.”
In 2015, Midwestern Seminary officially dedicated the Spurgeon Library, singlehandedly funded by Bill and Connie Jenkins. In 2023, Bill and Connie furthered their support of Charles Spurgeon’s legacy through the Spurgeon Library by contributing to Midwestern Seminary’s acquisition of the Heritage Collection from Spurgeon’s College UK.
Since then, Bill and Connie have given funds to support the construction of the Scharnberg Business and Communication Center at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio, where Connie also gives her time as a trustee. The Center houses the Robert W. Plaster School of Business and was officially dedicated in August 2024.
Receiving a Hundredfold
Bill and Connie see their calling as giving away what God has given them to support His Kingdom purposes.
“What we have is really not ours,” Connie says. “What we have is to share and to serve others in order to glorify God.”
Though Bill once sought to distinguish himself by the yield of his investments, he now seeks to distinguish himself by his willingness to give those yields away. He follows God’s call to be rich in good works, seeking to live by the words of 1 Timothy 6:17–19.
In a similar way, when Connie sought to discern what God was calling her into, she pursued training for women’s ministry. Through her training, she discovered that God had gifted her to help extend the ministry of others.
As they have followed God’s call on their lives, Bill and Connie recognize many blessings He has multiplied to them on the journey. Through the initiatives they have given to, they have gained friendships, have seen God supply more blessings for them to give away, and have received much joy as a result.
On top of that, they have gained a deep appreciation for God’s grace in appointing everyday people to be part of the Kingdom He is building and the family He is redeeming over all the earth.
Treasures in Heaven
Today, Connie and Bill enjoy life on their farm. Connie gardens and cans green beans, and Bill, who retired from business in 2013, tends to the farm equipment and loves to hunt deer on their land. Three of their sons live on the property. Their eldest son returned from military service and now serves as Bill and Connie’s pastor. Their grandchildren, like their boys before, enjoy roaming Bill and Connie’s 1,000 acres, stopping in from time to time to enjoy ice cream with their Grammy.
Recently, Connie found herself saying to Bill, “One thing I look forward to in heaven is to sit at the Lord’s table and meet all of those who will have been impacted by the Spurgeon Library. I want them to tell me their stories—what they did with what they gained, and how they impacted others’ lives.”
As Bill and Connie look forward to seeing God’s Kingdom purposes come to full fruition in glory, they marvel at the grace of being called to participate.
“Of all the people in the world and of all the wealth across the globe, God chose to connect the Spurgeon Library to a northeastern Yankee and a girl from Kentucky. We’re just out here in the country picking tomatoes,” Connie laughs. “We were used by God, and we are so thankful we’ve been called for such a time as this.”
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By Michaela Classen
Associate Editor, For the Church
Editorial and Email Marketing Manager, Midwestern Seminary
