Overflowmag to cover Soulforce at Wheaton

WheatonOverflowmag.com is a website/publication I helped start my senior year at Wheaton College. It has since been fairly vacant and has not received much attention. Recently though I have noticed a need by some Wheaton Alumni to make their voices heard at Wheaton. Soulforce’s Equality Ride is coming to Wheaton College on April 20-21. It looks to be a very engaging event for the current students there. Overflowmag will hopefully play a role in making that happen.

For the next few weeks the pages of Overflow Mag will be dedicated to sharing the stories of Wheaton Alumni. There is and has been much debate and disagreement over theological stances as it relates to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. This site is not going to attempt to sway you in either direction as it relates to your Biblical and Theological stance. You might hear some points from both sides of the issue.

The stories that will be shared are here so that you can hear from people who have been hurt and mistreated by the Wheaton community and by the Church. As a Christian you are called to love. As a community the issues surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people is far more complicated then whether the Community Covenant* says that it is a sin or not.

I will try and post a reference on here when stories begin to be posted, but I would appreciate you taking the time to subscribe to the overflowmag blog so that you’ll know about any updates that are happening there.

*Also to current students and recent Alum. If any of you who read this have strong feelings about the issues being discussed, or better yet, personal experience, particularly related to the Wheaton community, then I would love to be able to share it. Send your stories by email to me, or if your interested we could set up an interview that I could record the audio of and place on the website for download.

3 thoughts on “Overflowmag to cover Soulforce at Wheaton”

  1. My first two years of college were spent as a student at Wheaton College [1968-70]. It embarrasses me today that Wheaton College has used its website to “protect” Wheaton students from the visit this week of the Equality Ride bus. Wheaton should welcome the Equality Riders and not be defensive. William Sloane Coffin said these words of wisdom: “If, withoiut defensiveness, we can face and discuss rather than avoid and deny controversial issues, good results are all but inevitable.”

    Rev. Coffin was one of the first white Northerners in 1961 to join the Freedom Riders, who traveled the South on buses, monitoring enforcement of civil rights laws. He was arrested in Alabama during a protest against segregated bus stations and again in Mayland and Florida. Later in his life he added gay rights to his concerns. “For Christians, the problem is not how to reconcile homosexuality with scriptural passages that condemn it,” he said, “but to reconcile the rejection and punishment of homosexuals with the love of Christ.”

    I will commend to Wheaton students Coffin’s small collection of essays titled “The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality.” Coffin clearly points out that there is no such thing as a Biblical literalist. Those claiming the title of literalists are really “selective” literalists.

    Coffin goes on to argue in another essay that, in America, homophobia is the last “respectable prejudice.” Wheaton has joined in ths respectable prejudice by placing papers on its website under the guise of applied ethics that are poor examples of theology and science in their attack on gay individuals and their sexual orientation. I encourage Wheaton students to read Walter Wink’s “Homosexuality and Christian Faith” and the more recent book by Evan Wolfson “Why Marriage Matters.”

    Wheaton clings to past evangelical Protestant tradition and its own form of creed. I observed Wheaton’s behavior as it recently sent a valued professor packing because of his conversion to Catholicsim. Wheaton’s president wrote about how the Bible alone is the final authority at Wheaton and not some combination of the Bible and papal pronouncements. This is obviously not true; otherwise, Wheaton would only require faculty to promise to follow the bible. Instead, Wheaton has created its own mandatory interpretation of the Bible that it requires faculty to assent to–a human creed under the name of “covenant.”

    There is not unanimity among Christians about full equality for gay persons. There is not unanimity among evangelical Protestants about gay equality. You would not know that from the powers-that-be at Wheaton. I commend to Wheaton students the 2005 book by David Myers [Hope College] and Letha Scanzoni titled: “What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage.”

    Quaker Parker Palmer has written a small, valuable book titled “Let Your Life Speak.” Palmer writes: “One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not.” Much of the information at Wheaton’s website and in its traditions dealing with gay issues evidences pre-1970’s language of “choice, lifestyle and beavior.” Wheaton ought to come up to speed and enter the modern world–and learn about sexual orientation. I reviewed footnotes to a lengthy paper placed on Wheaton’s website by one of the college provosts. The paper and footnotes evidence a fondness for small circle dialogue between evangelical authors and their Midwestern publishing houses, such as InterVarsity Press, Eerdmans, Baker Books and so on. Wheaton still evidences a surprising attraction in its thinking and administration toward male gender supremacy–so it is not surprising that gay equality would be perceived as a threat.

    I am a non-gay ally of the move toward equality for gay persons. I am active in the marriage equality movement in my home state of Connecticut. I know that change takes time–but I also know that it can happen. When I arrived at Wheaton in 1968 there was a compulsory 2 year ROTC participation obligation. I led a threatened boycott during the spoirng of 1969 regarding mandatory ROTC participation. I was told that this was a time honored part of Wheaton and that I should not have come to Wheaton if I did not want to particiate in ROTC. Our resistance continued and the mandatory participation was modified to only include first year students.

    Another long-standing Wheaton tradition changed after I left campus. The mascot name for Wheaton sports had long been “Crusaders.” Wheaton eventually realized the inappropriateness of this name in a pluralistic society and changed to Wheaton “Thunder.”

    The motto of Wheaton College is “For Christ and His Kingdom.” As to its students, Wheaton is acting to “constrict” the Kingdom of God. It is time for Wheaton to grow up and take a new, positive step forward. Wheaton should be leading Protestant evangelical schools to an understanding of our gay brothers and sisters as our important equals. I hope that my visit will help to hasten that process.

    If Wheaton wishes to focus on the idea of “sin,” it would do well to repent of Wheaton’s profound silence during my student years regarding the civil rights movements in general, and the rights of women and African Americans in particular.

    John K. Currie
    West Hartford, CT

    1. How about we stop calling them 'gay'. Let's just be upfront and say 'sodomites' or 'homosexuals'? Why the subterfuge?

      And why the long, drawn-out conflict over the preference for genitalia? Why not say "not my concern, not my focus, not that about which I care to spend my time being obsessed?" Why given them or anyone like them the freedom to commandeer any agenda or conversation or political platform or party or church, or curriculum or whatever? If someone is a homosexual, then why should we be anymore concerned or even interested in what they think about sex than someone who is not homosexual? Whether someone is overly concerned with genitalia — their own, like their own or not like their own — is private, immature and really very boring.

  2. John: I wish you had stayed so i might have known you. I entered fall of 1970, participated in mandatory ROTC, was gay and closeted, but had a generally positive experience at Wheaton. By the way, I was completely terrified of guns, but got the best shooting score for M-1 rifles in the attic of Blanchard during freshman year. Thank God they didn’t draft anyone from my year. Believe it or not, things got progressively more conservative during my tenure at Wheaton, so I participated in the San Francisco program of Westmont College, which started me thinking about what it might mean to be gay. It was not a smooth progression, but I eventually came out and have been in a relationship for 24 years now. Finally, it came down to the fact I believed I was not a sinner for feeling such a strong attraction to men. It took many more years to understand how closed the circle of people is that Wheaton counts as “biblical scholars” when Stan Jones says they all agree homosexuality is evil. Thanks for your comments.
    Peter
    Class of ’74

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