About
Who we are, and why we do it this way.
Straight Up Truth Ministry exists to make the prophetic books of the Bible readable for ordinary people — without hype, and without asking anyone to take a chart on faith.
The problem we started with
Ask a room full of committed Christians about Daniel or Revelation and you'll usually get one of two answers: a shrug, or a theory someone heard on the radio. Both come from the same place — these books are almost never taught straight through.
So people meet them in pieces. A verse pulled for a headline. Forty minutes on one number. A chart that arrives already assembled, with no way to check the work. Fragments don't add up to a book, and they don't build confidence. They build either anxiety or indifference.
Read in order, these books are far less strange than advertised. The visions interpret each other. The structure does most of the explaining. That's the whole method here: open the Bible, start at verse one, keep going, and don't skip the hard parts.
Straight Up Truth Ministry was founded in 2021, during COVID — a year when a great many people were asking end-times questions out loud and most of the rooms where those questions normally get answered were shut. Bernard had already been teaching these books for thirty years by then.
What we believe about teaching
Show the work
If a conclusion can't be traced back to the text in front of you, it doesn't belong in the lesson. You should leave able to explain it yourself.
Plain words
Seminary vocabulary is a tool, not a badge. If a sentence needs a glossary, it gets rewritten.
No date-setting
We teach what the text says and we stop where the text stops. Prophecy is not a news feed.
Everyone's invited
Studies are free. Resources for kids and teens are free. Nobody has to buy anything to learn here.
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The teacher
Bernard Bourque
In 1991 Bernard was thirty-three years old, lying on the floor of an empty house. He had no job and roughly eighty thousand dollars of debt. He had been in church his whole life. What he heard that night, as he tells it, was God asking one question: “Can you hear me now?”
He enrolled at Dallas Theological Seminary. A professor named Gordon handed him Revelation — the book nobody wanted to teach — and Bernard's response was not gratitude. “You're crazy,” he said. “I'll set the faith back 500 years.” So he did the only thing he could think of: he stayed ten or twenty verses ahead of the people he was teaching, week after week, and kept going. Four years later he had a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies. He has never stopped reading ahead.
He married Dorothy in 1999. They have two sons, Caleb and Seth. Over thirty-five years he has planted five churches across Texas and Missouri, trained leaders, and taught these two books in every room that would have him — chiropractic offices, real estate offices, restaurants, and the waiting rooms of doctors' practices. Not one of those rooms was a sanctuary. That has always been the point.
Why the books exist
For thirty years the teaching lived in rooms. If you weren't in the room, you didn't get it. Writing it down was always the plan and never the priority.
In February 2024 Bernard had open-heart bypass surgery. Two weeks in, a graft began to leak. Seth called 911. There was an emergency operation, and about thirty people praying who had no assurance of how it would end. He came through it, and the books stopped being something to get to eventually.
“You might say I had to die twice to give you this book once.” Bernard Bourque, in the introduction to The Simplification of Revelation
Thirty-plus years, briefly
- Ordained
- Yes
- Degree
- M.A., Biblical Studies — Dallas Theological Seminary, 1996
- Teaching since
- 1991
- Churches planted
- Five
- Ministry founded
- 2021
Church planting
Legacy Bible Church, Sherman TX (1997) · Metro Bible Church, Southlake TX (2002) · Telos Bible Church, Branson MO (2007) · Grace Bible Church, Branson MO (2010) · Genesis Bible Church, Dallas TX (2018).
Russia
Teaching and church work in Russia, 1994–1997.
Bible studies
1991 to the present — in offices, restaurants, homes and waiting rooms as often as in churches.
Training leaders
Young Guns (1994–2003) · BTCP (1996–2003) · Kanakuk (1997–2010).
Counseling
Marriage, family and crisis counseling alongside the teaching work.
Writing
The Simplification series and chartbooks, plus Biblification.
“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear.” Revelation 1:3
This ministry runs on prayer and partners.
Books earn a few dollars a copy. The studies are free and are staying free. What actually keeps the teaching going — the travel, the printing, the hours — is a small group of people giving monthly.
Pray for the work either way. That request is not a softener — it is the older half of the ask.