About Wheaton College, Revival, and the Dark Unspoken
August 24, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Grace, Maturity, Revival, Spiritual Warfare Feedback : 12 comments
Diane over at Crossroads has a fascinating look at the 1950 revival that swept through Wheaton College. It began with a series of confessions:
A spare young faculty member rose to confess: ‘I’ve led a double life. I’ve lived a life of defeat…As you know, I was once a missionary in China. After the war started, I came back. I told people it was because of the war. But it wasn’t…It was because I didn’t want to go on being a missionary…I want you to pray for me so my life will really tell for God.’
There was little audible response to the confessions. Here & there, listeners sat with their heads in their hands. Patiently through all most all of it, waited the Rev. Edwin Johnson of Seattle’s First Mission Covenent Church, who, as leader of the Evangelistic Week, had been scheduled to address the group the night it all began. At last, President Edman gave him his chance at the microphone. ‘We’ve seen a probing of the heart today such as we’ve never seen before,’ said Johnson.
But when other confession-hungry heart probers began flocking to Wheaton—followed by the simply curious—President Edman discretely ended the public testimonies. After a few hours more of confessions, it was all over. 47 hours and 40 minutes after it started. ‘These kids are tired out,’ explained weary President Edman. ‘The testimonies have mostly to do with private matters. After all, the principle confessions are to Almighty God, not a public audience.’
And so it ended.
I can’t speak for Wheaton of 1950, but I can speak for Wheaton of 1992, the year I graduated. Everything that follows here is not meant to be sensational, but to show that the secrets of the heart go much deeper than is often spoken. Add to this the burden to look like perfect Evangelical youth, and you have a cross that no one should have to bear.
I found my two years at Wheaton odd. Many of the young people (and Wheaton was younger than most other colleges—there was a serious lack of undergrads over 25) had come to the school seemingly sheathed in bubble wrap. This had two effects: kids were either unable to try anything outside what they’d known all their lives because they mistakenly thought it could potentially lead down a dark path OR they eventually went nuts with the new freedom of being away from home and threw off mom and dad’s shackles with abandon. Add lots and lots of parental money to that equation and it was just bizarre. Still, the weird group-think legalism that resulted had odd outcomes. Even when I was paying, I couldn’t get other students to eat out at an ethnic restaurant; they acted like a bowl of Thai tom yum gai soup was the lethal contents of the atmosphere of Uranus.
Anyway, the gravest problem I noted at the school was that the entire student body wore a mask of perfection. Every single student had a weight of expectation on them like I’ve never seen anywhere else in my life. Each one had a family and a church back home that rode on their backs in absentia. The pressure was crushing.
The result? Well, I used to pray in a minuscule chapel near the student news room. There were several more elegant places to pray and this tiny respite tucked into a third floor room had low traffic as a result. There was an altar there, and on that altar was a book set aside for prayer request. After I finished my prayers early one day, I decided to check out the prayer request book. What I found in it was shocking.
There were hundreds of requests from young women in that book for help dealing with eating disorders. 
Hundreds. And since some were dated and the book was chronological, it was easy to see that they’d been written just that year. Dozens of stories of young women who had been sexually molested by family members filled those pages, all crinkly from the number of tears spilled on them. Countless confessions of both young men and women who said they’d had sex with another student that year were interspersed. That prayer journal was a litany of personal failure and hidden secrets, and there it lay for all to see.
I was flabbergasted. Honestly. Did anyone apart from me know about this? Why was so much pain relegated to a measly composition book? My mission became to pray through hundreds of those requests in that journal—and I did. But I could never look at my fellow students the same way again. And when face-to-face confessional times did arise, as they are wont to do when students talk in their rooms late into the night, I never heard anyone speak anything that resembled what I’d read in that anonymous prayer request journal. I firmly believe it would have brought the school down if all those confessions came out in public, I really do.
A couple years after I graduated, there was a revival on campus. I heard about it and wondered if any of the really awful things came out in that time. I want to believe that they did. But when I read this account of the 1950 revival and hear people confessing that they had looked down on the Gospel Choir or had skipped one too many chapel services, that was the same kind of thing I heard from 1990-1992 when I personally witnessed students confessing their failures during those late night dorm room chats. Were there dark secrets in 1950, or had sin only been invented in the 1980s?
I wonder how many of my class and those others that followed me are still carrying around baggage they could never bring themselves to confess to someone else. I wonder about the perpetual damage that goes in those people’s lives and the lives of people around them as a result.
That look into the invisible underbelly of today’s Evangelical young people made me a different person. I can only pray that those broken people found the healing they so desperately sought by finding the courage to tell the truth to someone willing to listen, someone who would keep any accusations or judgment to himself. Knowing what I know of Evangelicalism both in 1992 and today, it pains me to say that I’m not encouraged that they did.
And it’s not just Wheaton. Almost anywhere we hear talk of Christian “excellence,” you’ll find this—at a thousand Christian colleges, high schools, businesses, churches, and such. The “perfect” Christian people around us are far more devastated by life than anyone can understand.
Can you hear the dark, unspoken secrets?
No tag for this post.
Posts
Comments
