As more and more churches and organizations began taking their own Pilgrimage wilderness trips, group leaders (mostly pastors) began asking Dennis Wilhite to run their trips for them. Still committed to building the youth ministry at Calvary Baptist Church, he volunteered to bring them along and pass along the knowledge he had acquired to enable them to be effective in their own ministries. Soon the need for a more formal and focused training institute was evident.

The Wilderness Institute for Leadership Development (WILD), originally called Wilderness Leadership Training Institute (WLTI), was formed in 1984 to meet demand for training from churches that wanted to experience the same success that was so obvious at Calvary Baptist Church. Dennis Wilhite and Ken Bott were the original architects of the WLTI curriculum and methodology as well as the initial instructors. Ken's deep experience in wilderness ministry programming coupled with Dennis' experience in using the environment for local church leadership development spun together a truly unique and valuable foundation for the insitute. The orignial goal of the program was to equip ministry leaders to run effective ministry trips in the wilderness.

In the over 20 years since its inception, WILD has grown from an institute focused on training leaders to use the wilderness environment into an institute focused on training leaders in a multi-level discipleship and leadership model that is transferable to any personal or organizational environment. WILD alumni are pastors, educators, missionaries, business leaders, students and firemen, among other things. They are fathers, mothers, adult children and grandparents. They come to WILD to learn and practice integrated personal spiritual growth and how to become active in reproducing that process in the lives of people around them through their roles. Every WILD alumnus is a building block in the collective knowledge base of WILD and in our pursuit of understanding God's calling for us as individuals and as an organization. It's about people. It's about relationships. It's about spiritual formation in individuals and in the local church as a Body.

In the early 1990s, more and more WILD participants began asking whether they could obtain college and graduate credit through Pilgrimage for their learning in WILD. Several colleges were granting independent study credit on a case-by-case basis, but there was a need for a more formal and direct relationship with a degree-granting institution to make credit available more broadly.