Bess: An open letter to my alma mater

I love Wheaton College, my alma mater. I was a transfer from Illinois State. What a difference. My three years at Wheaton were some of the best years of my life. I have never been around so many true ladies and gentlemen. Faculty and students made up the brightest collection of people with whom I have ever associated. I learned to do critical thinking at Wheaton College. When I moved on to graduate school, I was well prepared.

I was a football player. The team experience at Wheaton was extraordinary. Harvey Chrouser was a great football coach and one of the finest gentlemen I have ever known. We had few rules. It was a disciplined group that won lots of games. We were taught that football was a “collision” sport, and we played the game very well.

Wheaton College is an independent Evangelical college. The students that I knew were academically serious. They took their Christian faith seriously. There were strong egos all around. I believed that this was healthy as long as egos were disciplined by kindness and love.

AND there was “the pledge.” Each semester with registration every student signed the pledge. We promised that as long as we were students at Wheaton, we would not (l) smoke, (2) drink alcoholic beverages, (3) do social dancing, (4) attend movie theatres or (5) belong to a secret society. As a teenager I was a good dancer and regularly attended movie theatres. I faithfully kept the pledge at Wheaton for three years. Upon graduation I returned to the joys of dancing and movie attendance. Wheaton has since abandoned the archaic pledge.

In the sixty years since my graduation many things have changed at Wheaton. The pledge is long gone. Hard-edge Evangelical theology has been modified or abandoned. Modern science has forced new understandings of the Bible and theological perspectives.

Some things have not changed. Wheaton College still attracts very serious and academically gifted students. Faculty is superb. Moral and ethical behavior is extremely important. Wheaton still plays very high quality football. (Obviously this is a personal thing.) To my discomfort, Wheaton still hosts an elite ROTC unit.

Wheaton College is a place of excellence. It plays a special role in modern Evangelicalism. It is a place of integrity. I am not a person of wealth; nevertheless, it is important to me that Wheaton will receive a portion of my estate when I die. I love my alma mater.

There is one huge stumbling block in my relationship with my college. Many people in the Wheaton College family are hanging tenaciously onto the unbiblical, antichristian, unscientific, immoral, and unethical denial of gay persons from full participation in our churches, colleges, and mission agencies and services. In the process my college has been a full participant in emotional and spiritual terrorism. Resulting suicides of gay people are as barbaric as any ethnic or race based genocide.

It has now been nearly 45 years since as a young pastor I faced the issues of same-sex relationships. I had discovered a significant presence of gay persons in my congregation. Exclusion was never an alternative. Paul and the New Testament has given me the ministry of reconciliation, not exclusion. Hospitality and inclusion are the ways of Christian ministry in all its expressions. I know I have done my homework on the Bible’s insistence on hospitality. I have challenged churches and my fellow clergypersons. It is time to challenge my college.

I have followed the challenges to Wheaton College to embrace some level of gay acceptance. Resistance by the college to change has been strong. In the college’s response to challenges, the college has maintained that gay relationships are an expression of the brokenness of the human family and their separation from God. Wheaton College has gotten their response wrong. They need a significant mind change. Wheaton College needs to plead God’s grace. The college has been making a theological response that does not do justice to Bible teaching and is no longer an acceptable response to the pleas of gay people for full acceptance in the Christian family.

Over the past five years a new organization has appeared. OneWheaton has become especially vocal at on-campus events including the 2015 Wheaton College Homecoming. OneWheaton is an organization of hundreds of gay graduates of Wheaton and their supporters and friends. Wheaton College has always had gay students and I suspect gay faculty.

My beloved Wheaton College is a great Christian institution and has a vital role to play for Christ and His Kingdom. Christians, Christian churches, and Christian institutions sometimes get things wrong. The simplest and best way to set things right is to admit the blunder.

Wheaton College, it is your turn to say “we got it wrong.” In Christ, there is always a new day.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.