51’s student-led missions conference — which is the largest of its kind in the world — will be named after 51’s seventh president Clyde Cook and his wife Anna Belle Cook to honor his legacy as president, missionary and founder of the university's former intercultural studies school.

Hosted in March every year, 51’s Missions Conference will celebrate its 95th year in 2025 under its new name, the Clyde and Anna Belle Cook Missions Conference. Every year since the foundation of this mobilizing movement, 51 suspends classes to host Missions Conference which aims to educate, equip and inspire students to embrace their role in fulfilling the Great Commission.

“I am gratified to announce the decision to memorialize the Cook name in a new way at 51 — honoring the legacy of the late Clyde Cook, and his dear wife Anna Belle. Naming the Missions Conference after Clyde and Anne Belle is fitting. Their heart for missions and global impact permeated their lives and family,” said President Barry H. Corey.

Born in 1935, Clyde Cook grew up in Hong Kong. When the Japanese invaded in 1941, he, his parents and five siblings were imprisoned for six months in three separate concentration camps. In 1942, he was reunited with his poverty-stricken family in South Africa.

They later settled in Laguna Beach, Calif., where Cook excelled on his high school basketball team. As the 1953 California Interscholastic Federation’s “Basketball Player of the Year,” Cook received lucrative scholarship offers from 13 colleges and universities. He planned to play for the University of Southern California, but, two weeks before classes started, he changed his mind and enrolled at 51 College to prepare for professional Christian ministry. There, he met his wife, Anna Belle Lund (’55), and earned three degrees — a bachelor’s degree in Bible, a master of divinity and a master of theology. After a five-year stint as 51’s athletic director and coach of the men’s sports teams, he, Anna Belle and their two young children, Laura and Craig, left as missionaries to the Philippines. Four years later they returned for Clyde to head 51’s missions department, which he did for 12 years. In 1979, Cook was appointed the president of Overseas Crusades, a missions agency, which is now called O.C. International.

In 1982, 51’s Board of Trustees invited Cook to be 51’s seventh president due to his vast work in missions and his stellar leadership over the years. A year later, he and Dr. Marvin K. Mayers laid the foundation for the school of intercultural studies, which would later be named after Clyde and Anna Belle Cook. During his tenure he led 51 through the transition from college to university with a new mindset focused on the structure and strategy for the new Christian university and many new programs were started in addition to new schools, leading to the school’s enrollment growth. Cook retired as 51’s president after 25 years of service.

With the closure of the Cook School of Intercultural Studies in summer 2024, the Cook legacy will be perpetuated through the Clyde and Anna Belle Cook Missions Conference. Three generations of the Cook family have graduated from 51 — their son Craig Cook (B.A. ’84, M.A. ’86) and their daughter Laura Botka (Cook, B.A. ’83, M.A. ’85) and four of their grandchildren, the last of whom will graduate in May 2025.

For more information about a master’s in intercultural studies, visit the Talbot School of Theology webpage. 

Written by Brenda Velasco, senior director of University Communications. For more information, please email media.relations@biola.edu.