reflections on a Christian life

Much like Gooley in Joe Bayly’s “I saw Gooley Fly”, I escaped to Christian college and except for a few letter exchanges with my high school crush who felt sorry for me, thinking that I was off to an all male college, I disappeared from the radar of my high school class until our 10^th reunion.

Wheaton was one of those places that I wished was better than it was but I had to admit, it beat the alternatives.  There were some quirky rules but the staff would actually try to explain the rationale to you.  I remember sitting in a cabin up in snowy northern Wisconsin over spring break, listening to the athletic director, who was an institution at the school, explain the prohibition against using Playing Cards.  As he described it, “When you get those old familiar faces in front of you, you will not be able to stop from reaching for your wallet.”  Since my family only played something called “Rook”, the “Christian alternative” to Playing Cards- they weren’t all that familiar to me, and the only game I ever played using Face Cards was War- so I figured this guy had some demons that I couldn’t relate to.  The school dropped the prohibition by my senior year.

One of the great experiences was mingling with students and professors who were from all sorts of denominations.  For the first time, I heard a Biblical basis for infant baptism during a casual debate with a friend.  This was foreign- I mean- we wouldn’t even let those people take communion at my church back home.  So on the Sunday’s that I didn’t sleep in or wasn’t off in Wisconsin with the climbing club, I went to the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church and a few different independent churches, but mostly to the Plymouth Brethren Church where they had a full service just around communion every week.  They had some pretty strict ideas about women in worship (silent).  I guess the women there were pretty patient or were just biting down hard on their tongues.

For me, the environment had a generous mix of challenges to my paradigms as well as support from others who either worked through the conflicts or were in the process.  The reconstruction of my worldview required realizing that within the Body of Christ, there was a lot more diversity of opinion and belief than I may have liked, and I would have to accept that while there may not be agreement, we remained together in the Church.  There were pacifists and ROTC cadets, theistic evolutionists and six-day creationists, Calvinists and Charismatics, socialists and libertarians, all of whom were seeking to pursue a Christian ethic.  This was all fine except that when I felt the freedom to challenge convention outside of the academic environment, I was quickly labeled a troublemaker- if I didn’t buy into flood geology, I was an evolutionist, if I invited discussion of Adam as an archetype, I was tearing at the authority of scripture.  Of course, I was hopeless when it came to church polity.  How could I ever be convinced that there was one “Biblical” model after being exposed to every variety of governance, each claiming to be scriptural?

At one point during each year there was usually a Black emphasis week or African American awareness week- I can’t remember what the pc term was at the time.  We’d get the staff person in charge leading the chapel service and be made aware that as whites we weren’t doing what we should be to be inclusive or understanding or actively changing the campus to help these folks.  There would usually be an inner city gospel choir doing a concert on the weekend- which had some fantastic music enjoyed by a huddle of the black student group in the first few rows and me along with six or seven others spread about the cavernous auditorium.  I invited the leader of the student group to dinner at the dining hall once to try to understand what I was missing regarding my responsibilities.  I was trying to understand what I was neglecting and he was insisting that the overwhelming presence of me and my peers was oppressive- so the conversation wasn’t very helpful.  One of the learnings I keep coming back to is that it is always more comfortable to deal with stereotypes and labels than it is with individuals.   Individuals demonstrate a complexity that we wish others appreciated in us and invoke a degree of empathy and pity that we don’t want to invite in.

Somewhere about half way through my four years, I started appreciating the fact that we had an incredible stream of speakers coming through the school for chapel and various special lectures.  I would need to travel to conferences all over the country to hear these people otherwise.  Some were “out there” (Anne Kiemel), some were booming (EV Hill) some were inspiring (Corrie Ten Boom).   I could blame it on the sermon survival skills I developed as a child, but it remains a shame that I wasn’t more attentive.  Now that I’m writing tuition checks for my third child I keep prodding her to go take in everything available.