DTC was founded and established under the leadership of David Adeney in 1968, in cooperation with Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF), to train potential tertiary educated Asians called of God to serve the churches in Asia and the rest of the world. David Adeney insisted on a distinctive ethos of training within a community in which staff and students would live together. It is a model very similar to what Jesus used in training the Twelve. This model had greatly benefited David prior to his China missionary stint, and brought great benefits to the training of Chinese leaders in pre-Communist China. This ethos has been unchanged for 40 years and remains our distinctive contribution to the training of Christian leaders.