“The Christian college and university as an industry — as an organization — is compromised. There are very few Christian schools that I would recommend people consider attending these days because a wolf in sheep’s clothing is dangerous but a wolf in shepherd’s clothing is deadly. In many ways today I’d rather send my kids to a state university where at least you know that wolves are wolves and prepare the kid accordingly than send them off to a ‘Christian’ institution that is nothing but a wolf in shepherd’s clothing.”
Dr. Everett Piper
Former 17 year President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University
I began as a Wesleyan. It was in the Wesleyan Church I was baptized. It was in the Wesleyan Church I first learned that God was big and man was small. In the Wesleyan Church, I had my first friends. In the Wesleyan Church every summer I attended one week of youth camp revival where we all got religion all over again every year. After high school, which was finished while living with a generous family who was members with me of the Wesleyan Church, I attended a Wesleyan college where I earned my undergraduate degree.
Because of the above, I will always have a sense of gratitude for the Wesleyan church even if now I look back and see that in many respects, doctrinally speaking, Wesleyan-Arminian theology was a very weak and immature expression of Christianity. I will always thank God that the Wesleyan church was a stable place for a very unstable kid like me to find safety. Indeed, it is not too much to say that I am who I am, in part because of how God used the Wesleyan church in the early years.
It is the fact that I am so grateful that will make the rest of this post more difficult.
When I was connected to the Wesleyan church it was thought of as a conservative institution. It remembered its old paths and sought to find a connection between where they were in the present to their storied past. They were thick with a conservative pietism that embraced strict sabbath observance, a forbidding of playing cards, dancing with girls, and drinking alcohol.
All that now is in the rearview mirror and if it had been replaced by a genuine biblical and conservative piety you wouldn’t find me complaining. However, the piety that is driving the Wesleyan car these days is anchored in WOKENESS, with its political correctness, critical race theory, intersectionality and cultural Marxism in general.
This breaks my heart.
My first hint of this came several years ago when I engaged Professor Ken Schenck here on Iron Ink in a series of discussions that revealed that Dr. Schenck had been drinking from a fountain with some relation to neo-orthodoxy. I found Dr. Schenck to be a delightful sparring partner as he was just as flippant, condescending, and arrogant as myself. Be that as it may, he clearly was not orthodox in any sense as related to historic Christianity. There was more Barth, Brunner, Schleimarcher, and Kierkegaard about Schenck than there was Wesley, Asbury, Coke, or Cartwright.
However, I let that go until years later it came to my attention via a couple of recent Indiana Wesleyan graduates whom I had made an acquaintance with that the progressive leftism at Indiana Wesleyan had gone from a mere skin rash to a case of cultural Marxism boils covering the whole Institutional body. It is not just Ken Schenck now, but the Cultural Marxist push comes also from full-on WOKE gate-keepers like Dr. Rusty Hawkins (Professor of History/Humanities at Indiana Wesleyan), Wayne Schmidt and JoAnn Lyon (each formerly holding the title of General Secretary of the Wesleyan Church) and Dr. Katie Karnehm-Esh (Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana Wesleyan).
Dr. Rusty Hawkins has co-edited a book WOKE book on “Racism” and has another book in the chute taking up the Cultural Marxist cudgel of “White Privilege.” Schmidt and Lyon have both pressed for ever-expanding numbers of immigrants and refugees in their positions at the Wesleyan Church. Dr. Karnehm-Esh prides herself in her status as social justice warrior.
Hawkins is especially ironic given that just a little over a decade ago Dr. Glenn E. Martin was the head of the History Department at Indiana Wesleyan University. Martin was as opposite of Hawkins as one can imagine, being a Biblical Christian who was sympathetic to the South in his teaching. This is the very opposite of Hawkins whose new book is titled; “The Bible Told Them So: Southern White Christians’ Fight against Racial Equality,“ which argues that white Christians’ theology informed and shaped their resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. (As an aside, I quite agree with Hawkins that white Christians’ theology informed and shaped their resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. I would only disagree with Hawkins that fighting the Communism that was the foundation of the Civil Rights movement was a bad thing.)
The WOKENESS of Hawkins was again on display when he said;
“Racism, my friends, is our country’s original sin. And with the exception of a few rare instances, the white church in the United States has been complicit in supporting this sin. When you take into consideration the racial history of the United States, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that the American church is deeply divided along racial lines. It’s difficult to build bridges between the races inside the church when, for so long, the white church helped to support the structures that kept the races apart.”
Further evidence of WOKENESS has popped up from time to time in recent years. In 2014 one of the Indiana Wesleyan Professors confessed that he was both pro-choice and pro-life. In 2017 political correctness, as pursued by the John Wesley Honors program faculty and administrators, showed its ugly claws by bouncing a student (Micah Sample) because he refused to wear a politically correct Halloween costume and further had the temerity to say such a policy was stupid.
However, the word is beginning to spread about Indiana Wesleyan University and the Wesleyan Church at large. This is in part due to a new documentary film released titled, “Enemies Within The Church.” This new documentary considers the failures of the Wesleyan Church, as well as other Evangelical Institutions, and warns parents that they are doing their children a disservice to Christ by sending their children to “Christian” Institutions like Indiana Wesleyan Church. Indeed, the danger is so great that Sample, as interviewed in the documentary suggests that ministerial graduates of Indiana Wesleyan University will be spreading the Gospel of Cultural Marxism in the Churches they will be charged to lead and not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Having written the above it should be clear that this malaise in the Institutional Church is not limited to the Wesleyan Church. It is an infection that is pandemic among the Institutional churches in the West. In the Presbyterian Church of America for every Rusty Hawkins, there is a Sean Michael Lucas. For every Wayne Schmidt, there is a J. Ligon Duncan. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for every Wesleyan Katie Karnehm-Esh there is an Amy Byrd.
Simply put the institutional visible church in the West is sick beyond repair and those who are serious about their undoubted Catholic Christian faith have to think creatively to avoid the infection that the visible Church in the West is spreading.
