Born and raised in a small Wisconsin town, Harley went to church every week with his family. But he drifted away from his faith as a teenager. After high school, he worked as a welder and then was drafted into the Navy toward the end of World War II.

The Navy sent him to the island of Saipan. Out of sheer boredom, he began reading the only thing available – the New Testament, which the soldiers received from the American Bible Society. 

As he read the Bible each day, he realized that his teenage rebellion was not against the Christ of the Scriptures, but against the way Scriptures had been distorted. He saw the need for a better understanding of the Bible and believed that people’s lives could drastically change once they were confronted with the true living Christ. 

After the war, Harley graduated from a Christian college and seminary. He was then called as an Associate Pastor at Bethel Lutheran Church in Madison, WI. It was in this role that he was inspired to develop an adult Christian education program for his church. 

Harley trained a core group of people using a disciplined, high-commitment approach, and then used their gifts to teach the rest of the congregation. An experiment that started with 28 trainees quickly mushroomed into training hundreds of people at his church. Based on this remarkable success, the Adult Christian Education Foundation was established to offer the Bethel Bible Series to other pastors and congregations.

Today, more than 2 million people have participated in congregations around the world. This Bible study has been translated into more than 12 languages and extended far beyond the U.S. to connect with Christians in Canada, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, China, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, Australia, Indonesia – and more.