Southwest Christian Tours
Southwest Christian Tours was developed to provide private, small-group travel through the American Southwest from a distinctly Christian perspective. The project drew on the region’s extraordinary landscapes, geology, natural history, archaeology, and cultural history, using the places themselves as a setting for biblical teaching and discussion.
The tours were intentionally more specialized than standard sightseeing. They included locations that many commercial tour companies did not visit and allowed the itinerary to be shaped around the interests of the group. That made it possible to spend more time in the field, ask questions, examine features firsthand, and connect the physical landscape with creation, Flood geology, regional history, and the biblical worldview.
One of the project’s lasting accomplishments was helping establish the guiding and field-teaching model that later became a larger part of GCSI’s travel work. The experience gained through Southwest Christian Tours—custom itineraries, small-group logistics, location-based instruction, and personalized guiding—carried forward into later Christian tour programs and the broader development of Global Christian Tours.
A Classroom Without Walls
Southwest Christian Tours treated the desert, canyon country, plateaus, fossils, rock layers, historic routes, and archaeological landscapes of the Southwest as more than scenery. They were opportunities for participants to observe, discuss, and learn in context. Instead of separating teaching from travel, the project was built around bringing the two together.
That field-centered approach became one of the most durable ideas to come out of GCSI’s travel projects and helped shape later tour ministries that continue to use museums, archaeological sites, historic places, and landscapes as part of the educational experience.