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Kroll rehearses a couple of lines from the opening of his message, enough to provide a sound check. Downing makes a few adjustments and signals that he's ready. Kroll clears his throat one last time. "Okay, this would be program 6146," he says. "It's 16 minutes long because it's a Monday program. Here's the iq." In the parlance of Back to the Bible, iq is "interactive question."

Kroll wants his daily broadcast to sound informal, so he opens his 25-minute program with a question from his interlocutor, Don Hawkins. Kroll then talks for 16 minutes and Hawkins asks several questions afterward in a gentle and easygoing conversational style that allows Kroll to highlight some of the points from the day's meditation.

The only problem is that Hawkins, who does a late-night call-in program, is seldom in the building when Kroll records the message, so it is Kroll himself who reads the question that he has scripted for Hawkins: "I like your topic this week, Wood, 'becoming a caring Christian.' There always seems to be a shortage of those kinds of people." Kroll responds to himself, "Yeah, Don, that's true, and it's not a shortage of care among those who simply call themselves 'Christian' as opposed to being a Buddhist or a Muslim or something else. There's a shortage of people who know the Bible. People go to church. People can quote John 3:16. They just don't seem to be as caring as they need to be as Christians today."

With that introduction behind him, Kroll segues into his radio message for the morning, a meditation on how "caring Christians walk differently." Over the ensuing 16 minutes, Kroll alternates seamlessly between his outline and his Bible with the practiced ease of a veteran preacher and Bible-conference speaker, which he is. His speech occasionally betrays the hard, flat, Pittsburgh twang he picked up during a childhood in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, before he set off for Bible school, seminary, and a career of teaching and preaching the Bible. Kroll had three stints at Practical Bible College near Binghamton, New York, for in stance—first as a student, then as professor in the early 1970s and finally as president from 1981 to 1990. It was then that he succeeded Warren W. Wiersbe as the third president and senior Bible teacher at Back to the Bible.

Kroll's 16-minute allotment is rapidly drawing to a close. His eyes dart to the digital clock mounted on the far wall, and he glides into his conclusion. "Think of some of the ways that you can communicate through your lifestyle," he says, "that you belong to Christ and that you care about others." His cadence slows now. "Caring Christians walk differently. People know when you're a caring Christian."

It's now time for Hawkins to interact with Kroll about his message, but Hawkins is still nowhere to be found; it's not that he's late to work, it's only that his voice won't be needed on this broadcast for several weeks. As Kroll delivered his radio message, Downing simultaneously recorded it digitally on a computer hard drive, made a backup copy onto a compact disk, and recorded another copy onto a cassette tape. "We want to make sure the message is clear and understandable," he explains. "No technical distractions."

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February 19 2001, Vol. 45, No. 3